Family and Money Pt 2

Last week, we covered the question of standard of living. What is a standard of living? This week, we're gonna be looking at how money affects your family, okay? But before we jump into this week, can we recap what was said about a standard of living? What is a standard of living and what goes into it? Ian, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So Ian said, your income. your home, your family size or season of life, the types of things you buy, absolutely all of that goes into it. Were you going to say something else? No? Okay. Did you add anything else? Any other things that we talked about? Yes, yes, yes, that's helpful. We looked at Scripture and found not the bullseye, like what we should be aiming for, but we did find what the minimum threshold is, which is with food and covering you shall be content.

And even then, we saw that Paul, there were exceptions. The man who wrote, with food and covering, you shall be content, also had times where he was without one or both of those things. So, what else? Nathan. Yeah. Yep, absolutely. Yeah. One of the other things that we mentioned, I don't know that I got enough time, as much time as I wanted to tease it out, was the reality that different people, different families, will have different standards of living. That it's not a... uniform thing, where if you go here, or if you have this job, or if you're this old, you will attain to a certain standard. It will actually be different. And actually, your ability to increase your standard of living is not the only thing that affects that. Actually, what you're content with. Different people, based on where they came from, will be content with different standards of living.

That was what we talked about last week. This week we're going to be looking at how money, what the interplay is between money and your family. Money is often seen in families as a source of a lot of conflict. It can cause a lot of tension in a marriage, in a home. It can cause conflict not just between the spouse, you and your spouse, but your kids when your kids want something. Or you want something for them, and you can't, or provide it, or you could, but you don't want to provide. It can be the source of a lot of friction. And so what I don't want you hearing from the very beginning is me saying, as long as you're agreed about your standard of living, you've avoided all the dangers. You haven't avoided all the dangers. You've made good progress in being able to interact with those dangers, but you haven't avoided them. We have to interact with...

The issue of money in our homes, it will affect us. It will be something you have to talk about, something you have to interact with as you live your life. And so this week, excuse me, I want to start by talking generally about money, and then I want to look at some things that we should be working toward in our families regarding money. So the first thing about money, I said last week, and I think it's worth just pulling it back to the front of our minds. The love of money can take a lot of different forms, okay? You don't have to have money to love money. You could have very little money, and you could have very little money because you don't work, or a person could have very little money because they spend all their money, and they can love money. You can also love money if you have a lot of money. You can love money if you make a lot of money. You can love money if you save a lot of money. There's all kinds of ways.

to love money. And because there's so many dangers regarding money, or it's the sort of thing that if you really get into it, you just go, this is work. In the end, that's what you end up saying is, this is work. And all I'm here to do is to tell you, you're right. It is, and you have to work through it. You can't avoid it. If you say, if your vision is, I want to have enough money so that I don't have to worry about money, That is, like, if I could open up the cookbook of, like, how to have a problem about money, that's the recipe. Right there. Do that. It just constantly causes, but you have to interact with it. Money is something that God's given to us. We shouldn't look on it as something that, on the one hand, is bad. Wealth and money are not bad. We said last week, like, if the bullseye in the center of the target is food and covering and that's it.

then we're going to have to deal with a lot of people, even just in the Bible, who didn't live that way and were not shunned or set aside as though what they were doing was sin. They weren't. They had money. They were wealthy. Money is something that God's given to us in this world as a tool. You can see this sort of aversion to dealing with money in subsistence farming type people. They want to get out of the system. They want to get off the grid. And when we think of off the grid, we think they want to get out of what? What were you going to say, Carrington? Yeah, so there's a work component. They want to get out of the man, the job. What else do they want to do? Yeah, big picture, like the foundation is like they want to remove all dependence on everyone else. So every area of their life, their answer is going to be, We're going to do that for ourselves. Well, money is a part of that. Money is a big part of that. People who are inclined that way tend to have a very dim view of things like taxes. And so there's a financial component where they say, I don't want any of that. We want to get out of that. I don't want to deal with money. I want to get back to where we live off the land, we provide for ourselves, and we're not dependent on anyone else, and no one else is dependent on us, unless they're in the compound.

At its root, it would be fair to say they just don't want to deal with money. They don't want to have an interaction with it. Now, why? Well, because of all the drama and stuff that comes with it. They just don't want to deal with it. That's one way you can avoid it. Another way you can avoid it is just to work all the time and say, I'm just going to work, work, work right now so we have enough. But if that's your approach, we can turn the page in our recipe book, and it's like you'll never make enough money to outspend, to out-earn your spending habits.

You'll just buy nicer, more expensive. It's incredible how expensive the things your tastes can get and how quickly it can happen. You're like, I used to be content with this, but I'm not content with that anymore. You used to be content with the dollar menu. There's no longer a dollar menu. How quickly can you go from being content with the dollar menu where you're like, I bought my lunch for $3.15 to all of a sudden you're spending like $12 because they got the new big fancy picture of the thing with the... It's glistening, and cheese is melting, and bacon's in it. And all of a sudden, you're like, oh, my appetite. And McChickens just aren't what they used to be. It can happen really quickly. And how does it happen? Well, you just get enough money to pay for a $12 cheeseburger. That's the only thing that changes. So you will never out-earn your appetites, your desires. They will just...

crop up in you. You'll be like, oh, I have money, and if you don't have a good way to think about it, as soon as the money comes, you'll be like, oh, now I can go, I never even knew I wanted that thing, but now I need it. There's no end to that. Money, however, is a tool that God's given to us, and the thing we use money for is to acquire or to get the things that we want and need, both now and in the future. It's something we have to interact with, and if we want to pull ourselves out of the system, and avoid it, it will come at great cost to us. Perhaps financially, because I think a lot of guys who think they're going to go be subsistence farmers have romanticized what this is. It's a really stinking hard life. A really hard life for everyone who lives out there. And it's hard when it's good, and it's dangerous when it's bad. Right? Yeah. It's mine. And so we have to deal with money in our families. It's a tool that God's given us. We have to learn what to do with it.

The question is not whether you will deal with money, but simply how. And every one of you deals with money some way. Some of you are afraid to spend it, so you hoard it. Some of you haven't disciplined your appetites, and so you're like, I just got to get what I need to get so I can be what I'm supposed to be or want to be or whatever. And so the first thing we have to know is you're going to have to deal with money. and that money was something that God's given us. Money represents wealth. It represents our ability to acquire the things we need. I don't know if any of us have ever said, you know, I'm going to come work for you today, and the way that I would like, you know, we're going to pay me at the end is you're going to give me 12 loaves of bread, three pounds of ham, and a jug of wine. What's that? You're hired, right? You're like, I'll pay that. But none of us have ever worked, I mean.

The only place we see that sort of thing happening is like on church work days. You come here and like the payment is we will feed you. Or if you're moving houses and we're like, we will feed you. That's a form of payment, right? But that's the only place you ever see money not being directly involved. Obviously, the stuff had to be bought to be given. So money, wealth belongs to God. And that means that we need to understand how to use it as Christians. It's a tool he's given us to glorify and to serve him now. What does money represent to us in our families? I sometimes talk with people and think about myself as something I have to work through, we all have to work through, is what are we about? What am I about? And if you're married and you have kids, it's not just what am I about, it's what are we about? What does it mean to be an Abusara or a Meyer?

or a career, or a, you know, what does it mean to be, like, when people hear that name, what are, what do they say? Those people are, this is what their priorities are. This is what, this is who they are. This is what they value. Well, how we spend our money is a very good indicator, very good indicator. Even if it's not, even if it doesn't indicate what we want it to indicate, it is a very good indicator of what we're about, okay? The things we spend money on, our homes, our clothing. our savings accounts, our health, our vehicles, our vacations, our entertainment, our food, all of those things take money, and they communicate to us and to the people around us where those things fall in our list of priorities. And so if you were to take your bank statement for, say, the last six months, just go print it off and just make real big categories like bills.

which are like necessities. Like I have to pay my mortgage and my electric bill and my insurance bills. They got to be paid. And then you had another big category that was like food. And you had another big category that was like fun. Not like this type of food and that type of food and small group food. But just like how much money do we spend on food? How much money do we spend on clothes or fun or entertainment? You would be able to... Take every purchase you've made and put it into one of those buckets, right? And then you could look at what percentage of your income each month is in those buckets. And that would tell you a lot about what's important to you, a lot. Now, the problem is we all think that the way we do it is the good way to do it and that those percentages are good percentages. But when I've done this in my life, they weren't.

What I thought and what the reality was were not the same thing. All of a sudden you're like, oh, I spend, you know, what is an average, you know, how much does it cost to feed a person for a month? You can look up and figure out like about how much, you know, we do that sort of thing whenever you have a retreat or an event or a conference. Like they literally, the people planning it will figure out it costs, our goal is to spend this much money to feed that person. And it dictates what kind of food you get. You can figure that out in your family. How much should it cost on average? How much does it cost to feed a person for a month? And then you can make an adjustment for a child. And you could come up with, like, what a normal range would be. And then you can look at what you spend, and you can see if you're in the normal range or not, or if you're really low, or if you're really high. You might be surprised at how much you spend on fun. Eating out, yeah.

You may be like, oh, I didn't realize that was so important to me. Because that's what you should, you should go, oh, no, look what I did. You should say, oh, wow, these are my priorities. This is where my money goes because this is what is important to me. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. I remember talking to business owners about this very thing when they were trying to figure out their books. And they're just like, I feel like the company's doing great. I feel like the company's awful. And it's like, forget about how you feel about it, man. Do your books, and it'll tell you how your company, whether you should close your business or whether you should hire more people. It'll tell you that. And so there's a real strong connection between how we spend our money and what our priorities are, what's important to us, what our vision for our life is. Now, how confident are you that you could, if I asked you, what is your vision for your family?

I think we could probably all formulate, or for myself, you're single, you know, you could probably formulate, well, this is what I want to be about. This is what I am about. We could probably all, with a little time to think, we could all answer that question. Good. My question, though, is not that, but to say, how confident are you that your money will support what you just said? And it's like, you 50% confident? 80% confident? 20% confident? You know, an example might be, you have a conversation and somebody says, I want to buy a house. It's a good thing to want to do. As long as you can afford it, right? It's a good thing to want to do. But you realize that the chasm between saying, I want to buy a house, like if someone says that's important to me, we should be able to go look at, you should be able to look at their money and say, and see how we're working financially toward that end. And if they were like, we're saving.

$40 a month to buy a house, you'd be like, I don't think that's as important to you as you think it is. There's a disparity here. Something's not connected. But I just give that as an example to say, we all do that kind of stuff. We tell ourselves that kind of stuff. We tell our families that kind of stuff. We tell other people that kind of stuff. We should be able to. It should be our aim to have our finances. as a family, match the priorities we say we want. That requires a reality check. What do we actually do? And then it requires some sort of work toward reform or toward the goal. If not, we're just lying to ourselves. And we're going to be really disappointed later. Because if you were a young couple and said, we want to buy a house, under normal circumstances, the time that elapses from you saying we want to buy a house and you being able to buy a house,

How long do you think that would take if you were working at it? I think three years is probably on the low end of how long you'll have to work at it. I would guess three to five years, presuming that you don't have a disproportionate income or a mountain of debt, or you didn't decide to have that thought at 35 when you had half a dozen kids. You know, when there was more draws on your finances. Like, if you're just a young couple getting married, we want to buy a house. Great. That's probably going to take years of work. of diligent work to be able to realize that goal. Working hard at it. If you don't work hard at it, you may never buy a house. Or you may get in a really bad financial situation by buying a house. Anyway, these are examples. It's also easy with money. If we take our desires, this is what we want, and then we take the reality from the bank, we look at these things and we go, shucks, problem here. What are we inclined to do at that point?

You're not doing the things you say you're going to do. You're not doing the things you say are important to you. Yeah, you may roll over and just go back to sleep. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. What do you mean? Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you can adjust your, you could adjust your expectations. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Luis? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Martin? Yes. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. I think the one thing we haven't mentioned that's very common is we just make some sort of excuse for ourselves. I think that's our knee-jerk reaction when we look at, like, before we roll over and go back to bed or decide that, you know, the excuse is, well, I just don't make enough money.

I mean, well, okay, well, how much is enough? People who win the lottery don't seem to do well when they get this more money, you know? May not be the problem. We do deceive ourselves. We lie to ourselves. We tell ourselves, it's not my fault. There's some other force at work here causing this problem. And we've talked a lot about money. We're a little bit more talking about money, and then I'm going to talk about family, okay? How do you... fight against this. It's one thing to see a problem. You can go to the doctor and be like, it really hurts. It really, really hurts. I have all the symptoms of problem. But the reason you're at the doctor is because you don't know what to do about the fact that it hurts. Martin mentioned in passing, and this is not a financial class, primarily. But you have to, as a family, as an individual, have a budget. Now, what is a budget? Let me first tell you what a budget is not, because I think this is very easy to slip into and it's wrong. A budget is not a record of what you spent your money on. A budget does not look back. So if you take your last six months of expenses and you put them into the buckets that I just mentioned earlier, you have not made a budget.

You have discovered what you do when you don't have a budget, but a budget doesn't look back and say, this is what I did with my paycheck. That's just a history lesson. It's meant to help you in the future. A budget doesn't look back. A budget looks forward. It's not a record of what you did. A budget is deciding ahead of time, before you spend the money, what your priorities are, what's important to you. And then you allocate your funds according to what's important to you. So it looks forward. It says, this is what we're going to do. And there may be a big change from what you were doing to what you're going to do. There may be some repentance, some turning. There may be some cutting. You may say, you know what? For the next few months, we can't have that eating out. We can't spend even $10 a day because that's what we were doing, and that was killing us. So now we're going to spend $5.

Three times a week, whatever the choice may be. So a budget is also not a, a budget is something that you do to serve yourself. It's meant to be a tool to help you do smart things and serve God with. That's all it is, okay? There is not one, you know, remember I said there's not one standard of living that's like, this is what every Christian's supposed to aim for. The same is true with a budget. You will have different families and they, and you know. Because of their standard of living, because of their income, because of their season of life, their budgets are going to look really, really different. Really, really different. Okay? That's how it should be. Some people will say, you know what? Nice vacations are important to us. And that means thousands of dollars a year are going to be allocated to that because that's what nice vacations cost. You don't go on nice vacations for $700. You can go on a nice vacation for $700, but you can't go on a $10,000 vacation for $700.

You understand? You can go and enjoy yourself on a vacation for a few hundred bucks, but you're not going to rent an Airbnb down on the ocean and eat out every night and rent a cool car and pay to go on these tours. You realize that really adds up. Well, is it wrong for someone to want that? No, if they can afford it, right? So a budget is not a nice idea. A budget is simply a tool to help you. reconcile your desires with your means. That's all a budget is. This is what's important to us. This is what we say is important to us. This is what we want to be about. This is who we are. Great. Now, you take your income and you say, here's the way I'm going to, it's my plan, my strategy for pursuing that goal. That's all it is. And you realize that, you know, I asked earlier, how long does it take to reach that goal if you want to buy a house? And I said,

I think it's going to take you three to five years to save up 20% of a starter home. Because it's a lot of money. Thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of dollars. A lot of money. Especially early on in your life. It's a lot of money. You decide, I need to save up $30,000. That's probably half or more of your annual income. It's going to take a long time to save that much money. You need a budget to help you do that. Right. Yeah, I would tell people, like I said, this is not a budgeting class, but I will tell you the idea that you will never have any fun is a recipe for failure. Remember I said, oh, we're spending too much money on fast food or whatever. Okay, cut it down. But if you cut it out, you presume too much of yourself. You will not just quit. Cold turkey.

If you want more detailed instruction about this sort of thing, I recommend to you. In fact, what I'd say is everyone, if you haven't, should take Financial Peace by Dave Ramsey. I don't agree with every word that comes out of the guy's mouth, but he's developed a very good plan that actually works, and don't be too proud to think you can figure it out. Because I can tell you, I've sat in many rooms with people talking about money, it's premarital counseling, or afterwards we're all stressed out, we're having a baby, we want to buy a house, whatever the problem is. And they don't know what a budget is. You say, go home. Okay, we'll go home and make a budget. They don't know how to make a budget. All they do is they say, these are the bills we have to pay. And that's as far as they get. And when I ask them a question like, well, your car is 15 years old. It's got 250,000 miles on it. What's your plan for car placement? Winter's coming. Your tires are bald. What's your plan for new tires? They're not 50 bucks a piece.

And even if they were, that's still $200. And they're just like, we don't know. We don't know. And I'm like, that's okay that you don't know. It's not okay for you to not know and not do anything about it. It is okay for you to say, I don't know. No one ever taught me. You say, okay, well, that's where the benefit of taking a class like financial peace would be really helpful because he'll walk you through how to figure out how to maintain your vehicle, how to buy a new vehicle, how to save for a house, how to get out of debt, what's reasonable generally in terms of a percentage, how much.

Money, should you spend a month on this, that, or the other thing? As a category, all that stuff's there. I don't need to reinvent the wheel. Take the class, like 100 or 150 bucks. Take the class. It'll be very helpful to you. Go there, give yourself to it, learn from it. If you refuse to learn how to do it, then we're back in our recipe book of failures, how to mess up your family, and we've just turned the page to a new one. I lack a skill, and I will not go learn the skill. You can't accomplish the task if you have not been taught how to. So this is a financial class. This is not a financial class, actually. It's a class about Christian family and how families ought to interact with money. So what does all of the things I've mentioned have to do with being a Christian family? Well, you remember at the beginning I said money is something that God's given to us. It's not bad, and it's not God. Some of us have more of it than others.

It's a tool that God's given to each one of us to glorify him with, to serve him with. And there are people watching what you do, okay? I'm not watching what you do. Your banker might watch what you do, but you know who is watching what you do is your children. They watch. They really do see. And they see things like whether you're content with what you have or not. They do see in time whether... you have self-control financially or not. They will learn it from you. They see if you think about the future or if you just do what you want to do right now. I had a friend tell me recently, he says, yeah, my wife came to me, and he works, he's a business owner, I think does pretty well for himself. He's got four or five kids. I don't know how many kids he's got. Not that close of a friend, but we were talking one night. We were talking about vacations.

And I said, yeah, yeah, we did this. And he said, yeah, yeah, they go to Florida like twice a year. They take their like four kids down there. And they eat out, and they drive nice vehicles, and they have fun. I mean, I would not be surprised if they spend $10,000 to $15,000 a year just on their trips to Florida. I don't know if he can afford that or not because, you know, how would I know? I know he's a business owner. But what he said was, yeah, what happened was my, you know, what he said was we probably shouldn't do that. But my wife said, we have to make memories.

We have to spend the money on these things now because the kids are going to grow up. And I was like, I was like, what are you teaching your kids, man? Like, what you just told me is you can't afford to do what you're doing, but you're doing it anyway. The other thing I know about this family is they never have dinner at home together. They're too busy trying to keep up with his lifestyle. And your kids will learn that from you. They'll learn. what should be important to them. And they won't learn what should be important to them because you just said it to them once in a while. They'll learn what should be important to them by how they watch you live, how you spend your money. If you're generally not content with the things you have, would it be such a stretch for you to realize that your kids won't be content with the things you provide for them either? If your kids see you go out and splurge and spend money you don't have, you shouldn't be surprised when they do it.

If they see you go buy new cars every three years and get leased them or finance them, you know what you're going to do when your kid turns 16? You know what they're going to expect you to do? What are they going to expect you to do? Well, yes, but how? They're going to expect you to go and finance a car for them. And I know parents that do it. And I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, what are you teaching the people around you? This is not how Christian families should be handling their money. So you have people watching. And you have a responsibility to teach them how to do these things. And they'll learn it over the course of their upbringing by watching you do it. So it has everything to do with your family because this is not, like, it would be a shame if your kids would come all the way through your house and never having had any light shined on this part of their life to then they get to be into high college or into their early 20s or into their early marriage and they're like, I have no idea how.

to do these things. Or I know how I do it, and I learned it from my parents, but it's apparently not a good way to do it. And so talking with them is necessary, but your actions, the things you do, will speak louder to them. And it shouldn't be that the people that we're responsible for raising and teaching should reach adulthood with no clue about these things because their parents didn't teach them. We shouldn't want them to replicate our failures. There was just a good conversation. This wasn't a failure, but there's so much to be talked about. At the men's retreat, we were all standing around the fire. I don't know what time it was. Late. And there was just a discussion. We were just in conversations, just wandering. And then the question of health insurance came up. Like, it's a question. Every one of us has health insurance. Some of us pay a lot for health insurance. Some of us don't pay anything for health insurance. And we're all trying to sort this stuff out. And there was just a really good conversation with various young, married, single, whatever, old.

talking about, like, here's what we do, here's what you do. Like, because it's hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month that impacts us, right? That's just one example of it. Like, when it comes to investing or it comes to, you know, what to do with your money, like, you should just talk to people and say, hey, I'm an idiot. I don't know anything about it. Like, will you just please help me? Teach me. We should be doing those things even as we're adults, but we shouldn't put our kids into a position where they get to adulthood and have never been taught anything. Like I don't mind if your kid gets to 18 or 20 and doesn't know what type of money and how they should be having, that they don't have an investment strategy yet. It's okay if they get that old and they don't have that figured out yet. That's okay. But it's not okay if they haven't figured out by the time they get to be 18 the relationship between work and income. When you work, you get money. When you don't work, you don't get money. And so if you don't work, you don't get money, then you can't do the things that you need the money for.

That's a lesson you should teach your kids long before they get out of your house. Tim, what were you going to say? Right. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. That's my example earlier of if I was talking with a couple and say, well, go home and make a budget. Like, I know I'm, well, all I'm trying to do is expose what they don't know. And so then I ask, well, what about car replacement? All I'm trying to do is show them the thing that Tim just said, which is there are things you're unaware of that are going to sneak up on you. Like, okay, Christmas is coming. How much are you planning on spending on Christmas? Like smart people would decide that ahead of time. This is how much we can afford to spend. This is how important it is to us, whatever. So this is good work. It's something that needs to be done. It's not something your family is going to talk about every single day or maybe even every week. But it is something that over the course of your children's growing up years that they should get from you, receive from you, learn from you.

through conversations, through actions, through them watching you make choices, saying yes and saying no and saying why. This is how you can work out your family's vision for what it means for us to be a Christian family. This is what our priorities are, and this is how we use the money that God's given to us to get toward those goals. What I will tell you is if you don't do it proactively, you will do it reactively. The problems will come. Like Christmas will show up hearing about... six weeks, seven weeks, and sometime in the next six or seven weeks, you're going to be like, oh man, what are we going to do? That's doing it reactively. The thing is, you could have known that back in like April, that Christmas was coming in December. You could have decided then what to do. You won't avoid it. And if you do try to avoid it, what you're adding is a big helping of stress into the conversation.

Because then when the tire blows out unexpectedly, like, oh, no, what bills am I not going to pay? But you should, like, know about when you need to replace your tires. You should be like, oh, look, there's that much tread left. You can talk to Luis who can tell you about the little ridges in the tread that can tell you, like, when it gets to that point, you'll think there's tread, but there's really no tread. And if you try to do that, drive that car in the winter, we'll be pulling you out of the ditch on 10th Street. And that, surprisingly, costs money. So don't add the stress to this recipe, okay? Teach your children not to add the stress. The last thing I'll say, well, I've got to be done, so I'll just say it quick. If you're not good at this, you can get good at it, okay? I'm not saying you're going to go home, figure it all out in two weeks. You're not. Months? It'll probably take you three to six months to figure out how to make a budget and make one that works. Three to six months. Why am I so stupid? I don't know, but that's how long it takes normal people.

I'm the stupid person that took that long, too. So it's like everything else in life. You work at it, and you learn as you work at it. Let's pray.