Episode 74 - Christian Financial Stewardship - Part Two

We pick up where we left off. We start with our story; How Taryn and I implemented these principles into managing our finances. This is like a mini crash course in why we handle our finances with our faith lens, and how to do it. Thank you for joining me.

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

Paul, Welcome to Catholic money talk, where we talk about all things money and finance, and we try to do it through a lens of being Catholic, where our ultimate goal is to one day be in Heaven with the Lord. I am your host. Paul Scarfone, thank you for being here today. Welcome back to Catholic money talk. Today we will finish up Christian financial stewardship. We'll call this part two. But before we do that, let's say a prayer in the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit. Amen, Heavenly Father. We thank you for this day. We thank you for all the ways that you love and bless us, Lord, we trust that you have a great plan for us and that you love us fill us with your Holy Spirit. Let us understand the plan that you have so that we can pursue you in everything we do. We ask this all in Jesus name, amen, and name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. So here we go part two of Christian financial stewardship. It starts with our story. So I'm going to just share Taryn and my story, and I've done this before. I'll try to kind of get through it pretty quickly here, but I would call this story our response to God's generosity. I've shared this before. I grew up, my family was broke. My dad was always self employed. Never had a really successful business. There were seven kids. We had food stamps, charity care. When I graduated high school, I was able to get a job, a paid job, and I remember my first paycheck. Maybe it was like 200 bucks after two weeks of work. I thought it was loaded. My parents didn't teach me about tithing or handling money. Then I met Taryn at the start of my third year. We met at the Catholic Center at Rutgers University, and when we got married, I was 22 and she was 21 I was in sales, making about $25,000 a year, and she was teaching in a small Catholic school making a little less than that. Our combined income that first year of marriage was$40,000 and I remember reading and hearing some, maybe a stewardship at a church or something, and they said they talked about giving, you should try to give. And I remember talking to Tara, and we thought, well, let's try to give, like$25 a month, right? And we had heard the concept of tithing, and there was part of us that wanted to do that, but we just thought we didn't have enough money to do that. And we remember thinking, Well, if we ever make $100,000 we'll be able to give, we'll be able to tithe, then that'll be so much easier, right? So then life happens. We have our first son, Josh Taryn, wants to stay home, to be stay at home. Mom, we have another another kid, another kid. I change jobs. Keep doing well at work. I receive pay increases. Meanwhile, we're just a mess with our finances. I'm working in banking. I'm using the wisdom I've learned at the bank to handle finances. I get my MBA. We pay for it with student loans, and then in 2012 six months after I finished my degree, I get the letter from the student loan servicer that I need to start paying back like 700 bucks per month. And we did not have that kind of money in our cash flow at that time. We weren't working together, managing our finances. We weren't prayerfully making financial decisions or seeking wisdom. And I had thought that since I worked at the bank and I was successful in banking, I knew it all, but everything was so tight. So who was I discerning things with? I was discerning things with the guys who sell it. Then I pay a lot. Discerning something with the car dealer. Hey, I'm not sure how much to spend on a car. Hey, here you go. Right. Discerning how much is spent on a home with a realtor. Those aren't the people to talk to. And I remember when this all kind of hit, and I was just feeling very, very overwhelmed. I felt like we were just rats in a wheel. And I spoke to other people in the bank to see, am I the only one? Like, what's everyone else experiencing? And I found that so many of the people I worked with making 200 300 $400,000 a year, were living paycheck to paycheck. And I got really scared. I had to figure something out. So I started seeking Christian wisdom, right, Catholic teaching. And during this time, we're trying to figure out, can we give more? We were paying Catholic school tuition that was getting increasing as the kids were getting older, and I remember thinking that at that time, we were making over $100,000 a year, and we still didn't have extra to give. We might have been giving a little more than$25 a month. Maybe it was 100 bucks a month, but we weren't where we thought we'd be when we're making 100,000 plus, and that's when we decide to do differently. So we learned a lot, and then we sat down and we actually wrote out a budget. We wrote down all the income. We took 10% right off the top for Lord, because I was convinced we were doing this wrong. My. Budget, giving at the end, at the bottom, it was upside down. We had to put the Lord first. We had to flip that budget over and give first. We put 10% at the top to tithe. This was hard. We went through all of our expenses and we ran out of money before we got to the bottom of the list. We had to cut expenses. We had to negotiate some things to create enough space to fulfill our needs, we had to remove several of our wants. It was hard. There were tears by Taran and I, but month after month, as we started to tithe and budget, we got a little bit better as as living. We got better at living simply and doing without some things. We had a pile of debt. We tackled the debt. We had debt on student loans, credit card balances, home equity loan. We had two car loans and a personal loan. The minimum monthly payment totaled just over 1800 bucks per month, and I remember thinking that once that debt was gone, we would have 1800 a month to budget with. So that became a priority. Once the debt was gone, we saved that, and then in 10 months, we'd be out once the debt was gone. If we save that 1800 a month, we'd have 18,000 in 10 months. That's a lot of money. So slowly, we kept tithing and paying off the debt. Then about a year into this, something really cool started to happen. Our income started to go up my income at work, and Taryn had started a business, and little by little it grew. And then I was in prayer one day, and I was saying to the Lord, huh? What they say to you is true, if you tie then the Lord will bless you, right? Have you heard that that's called the prosperity gospel, and that's false, right? But I started thinking that moment, oh, my goodness, is this true? And then I felt the Lord say, you're an idiot. I have been blessing you all along, right? I've been throwing seeds on your rocky soil, on your thorny soil all along. I've been blessing you all along. How do you think you went from 40,000 to 100,000 that was me, and then it hit me, because we didn't have our finances in order, because our soil wasn't fertile, we were not in a position to experience those blessings. I am grateful that the Lord is generous. He does provide for all our needs constantly, just sometimes we haven't put ourselves in a position to experience them. Here's the cool thing. This is the framework in which Taron and I, we make our decisions, because we want to keep this size cup that we have so that there's overflow. When we bought this house that we're in now, the bank said you could afford this. Instead, we went with something else, because we knew what we want to be able to do with our money, right? Because we want to put it at the foot of the Lord. Lord, what do you want us to do with these finances? So that's tithing. After tithes, there's other things Christians can do with money, and that is you can give offerings, right? So let's just look at this real quickly, your budget, you tithe, then you do your needs, then you can do wants, and you can give more wants and offerings and ALMS, those can all start happening, right? You tithe and needs, then all these other things can happen. So offerings are over and above the tithe, right? The tithe is a way of fulfilling our Christian obligation to support the kingdom. Offerings are not something we're obligated to, right, but we do out of our Christian generosity and our zeal for discipleship. If you're not giving a tithe. You need to start with the tithe before you do offerings, offerings or donations to support those doing good work. So for us, our tithe is to our church and our faith community. When we give to the school, the Catholic school that my kids go to, for us, that's an offering when we support different religious communities that have had impacts in our lives, that we want to continue to support, those are offerings for us, right? So after offerings, we have ALMS giving, right? Because the Lord also encourages us to give alms and to share our resources with those in needs. Okay, we have a special responsibility to our brothers and sisters in the Lord, and we can see this in the New Testament, and that's where the Christians give their alms. They took responsibility for other Christians. The early church actually was famous, as a fact, famous for providing for its widows and orphans back in an age where there was no social security, but this was based on the spiritual family principle that we have an obligation to those who are spiritual brothers and sisters. We also have an obligation to our natural family when they're in need, right? And this is especially an obligation towards our parents and maybe even our grandparents, those people who provided for us when we couldn't provide for ourselves. Okay? It so tithe, direct generosity. It's tithing offerings and ALMS, right? You can hit my ask Paul a question button in these podcast episodes if you got some questions on this. Okay, the last piece of this is just basic financial order, right? The third element, so, right, trying to keep this generosity, faithfulness and good order together, right? The last piece, this basic financial order, good order, it's going to yield peace, right? Just like you'd have a schedule and a calendar for your time, you need to have some items in place for your money. So we're going to look at first record keeping. We need to keep track of our spending. If we don't, well, we're not going to know how to change our behaviors, right, to get the desired results, and I've got tons of episodes on that, right? You need to know your expenses and how you're tracking them, and you need to keep records. You can use a notebook and hand write it down. You can use Excel. You could you do Google Sheets. You could use a stone tablet, right? And there's tons of apps and software out there as well. That's record keeping. A lot of people do record keeping, but now you also need to budget. So record keeping and budgeting, budgeting is creating a plan for our money. We need to decide what are our financial priorities, tithing needs, wants, offerings and ALMS, right? We need to figure out what our financial priorities are, pray about them and arrange them in a way that we can organize them by category, and then allocate amounts of money that we can spend on them. We should do this in prior, tight priority order. Start with your tithe and then your basic needs as human beings, our basic needs, food shelter, utilities and transportation. Call it the four walls. Those are our basic needs, food shelter, utilities and transportation. Transportation of work, right? Not a not a Sunday afternoon sports car, right? All those other things, Netflix, gym memberships, take out. Those are all wants and those don't need to fit in there right now. Talk to your spouse, talk to your spiritual director, talk to faith filled brothers and sisters that care about you and understand your hearts and want you to grow closer to the Lord. Get their input. Share your budget with them, your budget will look something like this. Income is listed at the top, then your expenses in priority order. You subtract your income from your expenses and there's any money left over, go allocate it somewhere else in your budget, apply it to your goals, or give it away, or put it in savings, but make sure that you you allocate every dollar every month. Okay, you should create your budget monthly. And if you're married, do it with your spouse. Update the budget each week, so you can direct your behavior and change your behavior based on what how much money is left in each category. It's going to take about three months to get into a good rhythm of budgeting. If it's hard, don't give up, right? The fruit of this will be worth it. Push forward a couple other elements to this. Make sure you set money aside for purchases. Don't go into debt. Debt is expensive. Every time you go into debt for some expense or purchase, you're making that item more expensive, right? Debt makes your cup bigger, right? Your cups can overflow, but not if you keep making it bigger, and debt makes it bigger. Do without something now, so you'll have more financial resources in the future. I was speaking with someone about debt and finance, and they said to me, Paul God put us here to do some things, and debt limits our ability to do stuff, all right? We also need to have a long term financial plan, right? Who starts to construct a tower without first checking the plans? Right? I think that's from Proverbs. I should look that up. But who of you constructs a tower without first looking at plans? Otherwise your friends will think you're a fool, right? There's something like that in Proverbs. So look for long term financial plan, right? And you have to work at this consistently. This is all going to take some time. Don't wait to start. If you're doing this, great. If you're not, you need to start now. In a very practical sense, your future self will thank you. If you're married, work with your spouse. If you aren't, find an accountability partner to help you move forward in this area. Create a budget, share it with a friend, not because they're a financial professional, but because they want to help you in this area. They can see if you're tithing and if you're actually creating a budget, managing your finances well, they're going to help you. They're going to give you great feedback so that you can understand are the priorities you think you have? Are they reflective in the work you're doing? Right? Can they see. Your priorities, in your budget and in your plan. Our goal is to live in the light, right? We must do that in the air of personal finances and our finances during the light. We're willing to share them with others, right? Our brothers or sisters, our spouse, someone who loves us. This is how we are good stewards for the Lord, we acknowledge that everything has come from his generosity towards us. We have gratitude, we tithe, we budget, and we work to advance his kingdom here on earth. So this kind of like a crash course in Catholic financial management, right our faithfulness to the Lord through managing our finances with a very strong faith lens. I hope this has been helpful for you today. Thank you for joining me. God bless. Thank you for listening to Catholic money talk. I hope you join us again next time, please click Subscribe on your podcast app to get notified of new episodes. God bless you and have a great day. You.