The two are utterly different. A donation necessarily means you no longer have the money, and will not be getting it back. Even a purchase generally means you w

The two are utterly different. A donation necessarily means you no longer have the money, and will not be getting it back. Even a purchase generally means you wont get it back (that is, under normal conditions, I'm not going to get $100 selling a gadget I bought for $100). This sort of (non-)"risk" is understood by everyone, and there has never been an epidemic of people losing their retirements because they donated to a cause or purchased a gadget, even causes and gadgets that turn out to be outright scams. An investment is not supposed to be a permanent and total loss of capital. On the contrary, the intent is to get more out than you put in. People depend on their investments for their financial futures. And there is a well-documented history of vast numbers of people losing everything to bad investments, especially investments pushed by scam artists from the small to the very large (like Madoff and Stanford).