Actually, most TBMs would say, fire insurance. In other words, it doesn't matter that your hard earned cash disappears into the ether of the Church coffers, because you are literally buying your way to the Celestial Kingdom.
Among other privileges, you can spend Saturdays cleaning toilets and vacuuming the chapel. On Sunday you can listen to someone read a conference talk and then sit in a class giving standard answers to standard questions.
You don't get church-approved underwear. You have to pay for that separately.
You don't get temple clothes and paraphernalia. You have to buy that or rent it.
If you volunteer to serve for 2 or more years on a "mission" or "ministry" for the church, not only do you not get paid for your labor, but you have to pay all of your own living expenses and most if not all of your own transportation expenses.
Food? No.
Medical services? No.
Housing? No.
Janitorial services for your local meeting place? No.
What do you get for 10% of your gross annual income for life?
Median household income in the U.S. for 2019: $61,372.
Taking that as a convenient point of reference, an average Mormon family may be paying around $6,000 per year just in tithing. (Many will be paying more.)
For that, you can spend from 2 to 5 hours per week (depending on your "callings") in an okay building. Not exclusively. You have to be there with several other people, and you can't do whatever you want in the building. You have to mostly be seated uncomfortably. About 20 minutes of that time will be spent listening to a bunch of people attempting to sing really horrible songs called "hymns" and never called "hyers" because "hyers" are to be seen and not heard.
If you pay separately for a church magazine subscription, you can read what some old guys in Salt Lake City said in one of their conferences. Your tithing probably also helped pay the salary of the staff member who wrote stuff for those guys to say in their conferences.
You can hear about the President flying around the world with his wife and her girlfriend on a private jet and take great pride in knowing that part of your $6,000 annual donation helped pay for that. It can be fun to live vicariously through these celebrity leaders.
You can hear about some new temple being built somewhere where you'll never go and you can then feel good knowing that it will be that much more convenient for some people in that area to go dress up in goofy costumes and chant in unison, along with doing strange handshakes.
"Hey, part of my $6,000 dollars helped pay for this amazing thing!"
Sure, they could dress up in goofy costumes and do the handshakes in their own basements or in a city park after midnight. But it's nicer knowing that they can do it in a sparkly white building that has a gold trumpet player hood ornament on top of a spire on the roof.
So, in conclusion, there is very little that you get tangibly.
But if you believe and have faith, it can make you feel very good inside.
Somewhere in Salt Lake City, a relative of a general authority is able to buy a nice vacation home for his family because of that sweet contract with the Church that was made possible in part by your generous tithing donations. You gotta feel good about that.
Somewhere in the world, a peasant is having gold fillings and caps ripped off his teeth and out of his mouth so that he can donate the gold to the church, knowing that some of your tithing money will be used as matching funds to make it possible to build a new handshake-and-goofy-costume facility near where the peasant lives. The satisfaction that peasant will derive from the handshakes and goofy costumes will be more than enough to compensate for his deteriorating dental health. You'll be blessed for helping to make that possible. You gotta feel good about that!
So many blessings! At only 10% of your gross annual income, it's a bargain many times over!
I got unconditional love from my family of origin. That is until I stopped paying.
After putting some thought into it, I decided i'd rather have a new Mercedes than a bunch of useless signs and tokens and some really very conditional love.
In exchange for 10% tithing on my gross income I received justification for responsible financial management in my home.
My wife wanted a life "guided by the Spirit." Strangely, the Spirit never said, "You don't need X - at least until we have saved for it." No, the Spirit always said, "Sister Idleswell, you MUST buy that NOW."
Soon we were at an impasse. Our bills were greater than our remaining funds. My wife asks me, "Did you pay tithing?" Of course I had paid tithing - we would have to cut back elsewhere. My wife's response was, "Thank God, we don't have anything to worry about if we pay tithing."
I learned my lesson. At the next budgetary crisis, I said that we weren't paying tithing until we had sufficient money to write the cheque. My wife took immediate action reducing all expenditures until tithing could be paid.
We drew a family budget with 3 levels of expenses: 1. groceries, home, utilities, car, insurance and investments 2. tithing 3. recreation, vacation, entertainment.
We would pay tithing after all essentials in category 1 were paid. After tithing could be paid, we would have a family meeting over how to allocate the rest.
I could only budget like this because I didn't care if we paid tithing or not. The full responsibility would be my wife's: if she could to live within our family resources to include tithing, then we could pay tithing. Otherwise, Nyet.
Once my wife gave our son an amount greater than our monthly tithing payment to buy drugs (not medicine). She was afraid that our son would steal from other members if she didn't give him money. I said we had to skip tithing that month. I was completely open with the bishop at tithing settlement: No tithing a few months back. I didn't care if my wife died of embarrassment.
What DO you get, or what CAN you get? What I get is the ability to help those individuals and organizations I consider deserving of my generosity instead of having LDS, Inc. make those decisions for me.
Boats aren't usually cheap. However, they can save you a ton of money on therapy. They can bring your family together for a day in a way nothing else does.
If you put your boat in the right place, like Puget Sound, you can see killer whales, seals, dolphins, and various other things you wouldn't see anywhere else. I love having a boat.