Money Matters (part 9)

Our great God, we just come before you this morning thankful for the blessings that we have, that we have in Christ.

We think even of the blessings of the liberty that you've given us to worship you today.

Father, I pray that you would bless our time as we talk about money, about how we should view it, how we should handle it.

Lord, that you would just, that you would give us freedom with regard to the burden that we so often carry in terms of debt and worry and all these things.

Father, clear these things off our plates so that we can just focus on the liberty that we have in Christ. We pray in his name.

Amen. Well, I thought we might, since my wife was kind enough to point out to me last week that we didn't open up the

Bible, that we will. By the way, you know what's dangerous is when I haven't had any sleep.

And boy, am I tired this morning. So let's open our Bibles for just a moment to Matthew chapter 6.

Matthew chapter 6. I want to read something that's familiar to us and kind of make a little different application as we begin here this morning.

Verse 19. Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. So I wanted to talk to you about home alarms.

No, that's not right. See what I mean? It is dangerous. No sleep. This first part of it.

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy. I really have another word for that or two words for it and that would be credit cards.

Most of what we put on our credit cards is what? Do I need to read that again?

All right. It's stuff that we lay up for ourselves that moth and rust and all that stuff are going to destroy.

Last week I mentioned that upwards of 60 % of people do not pay off their credit cards every month.

It's frightening, especially when you look at those interest rates. It's frightening. And you know what's kind of interesting too is when you get those credit card statements and I can only say this because I've seen a few.

When you get those credit card statements and you look at it and you go, well, it's only whatever amount interest, right?

If it's $10, $20, it's not that much interest, but multiply it times 12.

And all of a sudden you start thinking, that's a lot of money. Or if you just look at it this way, if it's $20 a month, how many trips to Starbucks is that?

What? Three, probably at least. Those of you who are laughing, go to Starbucks all too often.

We talk about refinancing your home, how people do it. I think too often and maybe for the wrong reasons, get rid of their credit cards so they can start all over again.

There are people I'm sure that have done that move four, five, six times.

There are good reasons for refinancing, lower interest rate, or you need to do something to the house.

Those are fine. We talked about Social Security is all you need to retire. Now let me just turn your attention,

I'll give you this handout this morning. And let's look at the second page of that.

And if you go down to the part where it says retirement, now I found a couple things here. One was the retirement calculator, which

I thought was pretty cool. It shows, hey, I want to live at this kind of lifestyle.

And this is the percentage of interest I'm going to get. And how much money do I need to save so that I get this amount at the end?

So that's pretty good. But look at this article I found, CNN .com. The writer says, let's say you're 25 and you earn $40 ,000 a year and immediately start stocking away 10 % of your salary into a 401k account.

And just for argument's sake, let's say you keep this up for 40 years, that would mean retiring at 65, right?

And that over that time, you receive annual salary raises of 3 % and earn an 8 % annual return on your savings.

Now, right now, we would say 8 % is pretty good. But in normal times, 8 % is not out of the question at all if you're in some good mutual funds and things like that.

I mean, if you just put it in the bank, you'll never get 8 % unless the interest rate on loans is in the 20s.

But that's either here or there. OK, well, in that case, at age 65, you will have a 401k worth just over $1 .5

million. Let's start that again. At the age of 25, earning $40 ,000.

These are decent numbers these days, but that's not crazy numbers. $40 ,000 a year with a 3 % increase every year.

When I was on the Sheriff's Department, and I'm sure it's this way with most or with a lot of professions and jobs, we not only got our annual raise, but for the first several years that we were on there, we got kind of training bonuses or experience bonuses or whatever, you know, where you kind of moved up the ladder in addition to whatever the annual percentage was.

Maybe that's just civil service, maybe we were living large. But you know, I started the Sheriff's Department, I don't mean to brag, $1 ,900 a month.

You know, you can get shot at for $1 ,900 a month. That was pretty good. Of course, that was better than when

I was in the Army and getting shot at for $400 a month. So I mean,

I thought, wow, 1 ,900. What's that? I like getting shot at.

And that's why I took this position here. I'm telling you. But just think, just look at those numbers for a minute and just kind of let that sink in.

You know, we always think, you know, we are the 99%. I don't really think that. But you know, we have this concept in our heads that there are only a certain number of people who could ever be rich.

This guy's talking about, you make $40 ,000 a year and you save 10 % of that, that's $4 ,000 a year, which is how much a month?

Help me out. $300 and something, $50 ,000, $25 ,000, whatever it is.

It's not absolutely incredible to think you could do this. And that's $1 .5

million at the end of 40 years. How does that happen? How does that happen that $350 a month or whatever it is turns into $1 .5

million at the end of 40 years? You put it in the magic box, you shake it up, accumulated interest.

Yeah, you get interest on interest on interest on interest. I mean, it used to really fascinate me that you could put money in the bank and in, you know, 7, 8, 9, 10 years it would double.

I thought that's pretty cool. And if you take that effect and you just keep adding to it and adding to it, you're going to get a lot of money.

But the problem is, and why I wanted to read that passage of scripture before is, what do we do?

We live now, think later. Spend now, worry later. Enjoy now, suffer later.

That should be the truth. Not to get political, but think about this.

Our country owes $16 trillion. Somebody is going to pay that. Well, we can't, you know, we can't do this and we can't do the other.

And all I say is every single time I'm going, take my money. Because if we don't start doing something about that now, then it's going to be my grandkids and my great grandkids and their great grandkids that are going to be paying insurmountable tax bills.

This is just the way it is. We have to pay interest on our national debt too. So the same principle applies.

It's going to keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And pretty soon the biggest item in the budget is going to be interest on the debt.

And this is what happens to families. I've known people, and I've said this before, that we're paying $300 a month in credit card interest.

Interest. That's crazy. You have to owe a lot of money to do that.

Throw in a couple car payments because everybody has to have two car payments, a house payment, whatever else, and you are broke.

Let's see. Anyway, so there are just a lot of possibilities there. But I just wanted to mention that if you, you know, and no matter what age you are, and he goes through that a little bit too, and this article is much, it's longer than this little snippet

I took out here. But if you, you know, if you think, well, gee, I'd like to have a million dollars.

Look at that. If you're 25 and you make $40 ,000 a year, you can get there. A million and a half dollars.

It's not impossible. You just have to say, I'm going to live. I mean, this is a crazy concept.

I've said it a million times. But if you live on less than what you make, the odds are pretty good you won't go broke.

But as Americans, we don't do that. Okay. We talked about Social Security being all you need to retire.

And I have to tell you, it's going to be rough times because let's just do the math. If the average Social Security recipient is receiving $1 ,230 a month as the, that was at the beginning of this year, multiply that times 12, what do you get?

$14 ,000, whatever it is. Not a whole lot. I don't think that's really good. Probably about $15 ,000 a year.

They take taxes out of Social Security, don't they? So that's not so good.

$15 ,000 taxable, which will mean you don't pay any federal taxes, but you will pay Massachusetts taxes, of course, because you're rich.

$15 ,000. You need to live on less than what you make. And I think

I mentioned last week that you should look for every advantage from your work opportunities. They give you matching funds, investments, stuff like that.

You should analyze all those and look at them and see if they make sense to you. The Sheriff's Department had something that I never took advantage of because I was too stupid, too busy living for my immediate glory.

But they had a matching fund program where if you put in up to a certain amount, they would match it and you just go, that would be nice to have.

Okay. I think we went to, we're down here talking about, or maybe

I gave you this. Dave Ramsey said, if you can live on 8 % of what you've saved, you're probably safe, meaning you won't go broke.

He's talking about retirement now. Annualized, and that means 8 % of what you have saved equals your current income minus savings.

So in other words, what he's saying is if you shoot for a million dollars and you can live on 8 % of that, well, what's 8 % of a million bucks?

80 ,000. You people are good. Now, if you add Social Security to that and you're making $95 ,000, that doesn't sound so bad in your retirement, your golden years, especially since you have your house paid off because you didn't remortgage it over and over and over again.

You're probably doing pretty good. Imagine that. Imagine retiring $95 ,000 a year income and no mortgage.

You could probably do that. In fact, you could probably still be saving money at $95 ,000 a year.

Leave something for your kids if you like them. If you don't, you can give it to BBC. I'm just saying.

Yeah. And so ultimately, my point is this, that you need to be saving for retirement now.

Now, if you're 15, you're listening to me. You don't have to be saving for your retirement just yet, but it's a good thing to start thinking about.

I mean, I think a lot of us are living and saving and looking forward to retirement as if we not only hope that the

Lord returns, but we're just depending on it because if it doesn't come back, we're going to, you know, it's like we built, if there's a bridge between working and retirement, you know, the island called retirement, we're going to build that thing about a third of the way across and just kind of hope.

Not a good way to be. Okay. I've mentioned reverse mortgages before, but I just can't help myself.

Those things drive me crazy. There is, you know, they say they're entirely safe. That's what they say on the, you know, and if it's on TV, you know, it's true.

Let's see the FBI talking about reverse mortgages.

They note that these have increased 1300 % between 1999 and 2008.

Why do you suppose that is? What's that?

Yeah, I think there was a, well, we're at the end of the dot -com bubble.

Things kind of went south and all that, but I think that really people started thinking that again, just like, why did we buy houses at the height of the market?

Because we presume it's going to go up and up and up. So why are we going to refinance? Because the housing market's always going to go up and up and up.

Why do we get a reverse mortgage? Because it's really not that big of a deal. You know, I own my house. It's $300 ,000 house.

I get X per percentage a month and the value of the house is going to go up and up and up and up. But listen to this.

The FBI says that there are many, that this has actually created significant opportunities for fraud, for fraud.

Well, why would that be? No offense to anybody who's older than me.

And there are, there are just a few here, but what's that? Yeah, they, they prey on elderly folks.

I mean, it's a, it's a little bit in, you know, plus, especially just think of this. If you've seen Robert Wagner, by the way, he used to star in a

TV show called It Takes a Thief. I don't know. And he was accused of murder, but that's a whole different thing.

But, you know, they, they see this on TV, they think it's safe. And so they get involved in it. And sometimes they're not, they're not entirely safe.

And, you know, the best case scenario, best case scenario on this reverse mortgage is what?

That you wind up spending every single penny that you've saved your entire life, you know, by virtue of your house.

The worst case scenario is, you know, I start my reverse mortgage at 65. I, you know,

I live to whatever, 85, and I've got nothing left. That's not, it's not good thinking.

I mean, you know, we always say, well, I'd like to die at, and we don't know. So the worst case scenario is the

Lord blesses you with extra years, and you wind up in someone's basement. You know, I mean, not because you want to be, but because you have no choice.

Okay, another myth here is that gold is a good investment. Gold is a good investment.

Again, you watch these TV stars. I mean, the guy from Law and Order is telling us that gold is a good investment.

How could it not be? I don't know. It's interesting.

It can be a good investment. And certainly, if you bought it a couple of years ago, you know, like I wish I'd bought Apple stock, that would have been a great investment.

But the average, listen to this, this statistic on gold, the average rate of return since Napoleon, which, you know, he lost the

Battle of Waterloo in what year? 1815. Thank you very much. We all knew that.

He started his campaigns in 1796, of course. So there you go.

A little history lesson. It's 2%. 2%. So if you bought gold in Napoleon's time, 2%.

Now, typically, in the stock market over time, you'll wind up getting 6, 8, you know, over a long period of time, you'll get a lot better percent return than gold.

And one man notes that over the last 50 years, gold has returned an average of 4 .4%.

And until the last couple of years, it was a very poor investment.

Of course, if you bought it in the 1970s and kept it till now, you'd be wealthy. Okay? Of course, that's true.

But there are a number of problems with gold. One is, contra the movies, you can't throw bricks of gold, you know, through the...

It's heavy. You can't just move it around. It's kind of scary, I think, to have a lot of it in your house.

But it's not necessarily a good investment. And here's the key thing, the key truth about gold.

How many of you remember, because we've talked about this briefly, this does sound like a history lesson. What happened in Germany post

World War I? I'm sorry? I don't know if they did or not, but here's what...

That part I didn't know. They confiscated precious metals. Okay. But here's what I do know, that the

Weimar Republic was instituted, it was a democratically elected government, all that kind of stuff. All that kind of nonsense.

But here's what happened. Inflation took hold because it was a fiat currency.

And inflation took hold because people had no confidence in it or anything else. And so what did you buy your food with?

You know, what you made in the morning was worth nothing by the afternoon. Same thing happened in Zimbabwe a few years ago, where they had 4 ,000 % inflation.

You know, these days, if we have 3 % inflation, of course, food and energy is subtracted from that.

Never mind. But if they had 4 ,000 % inflation, you get paid in the morning, and by the evening, it's worth what?

About a third of what you got paid in the morning. So what do you do? You rush out and buy things. So in the

Weimar Republic, people are running around with wheelbarrows of money trying to buy a loaf of bread. Now, just imagine you come up to somebody and you say, well, you know, forget that money.

I've got a brick of gold. Let me have a loaf of bread. Now, there are a couple of things.

If somebody is really fat, dumb, and happy with bread, they could go, sure, here, here's a loaf of bread, and I'll just take that, you know, that gold ingot, and I'll put it in my safer safekeeping, and when things turn around,

I'll be wealthy. But the truth is, what can you do with gold? You personally, what do you do with it at home?

Wear it. Kind of hard to wear an ingot. Use it as a weapon.

Sell it. Sell it for what, though? If money is not worth anything, what are you going to sell it for? And that's exactly the point.

What happens when an economy collapses, and this is what they want you to buy gold for, right? When the dollar is worth nothing, what are you going to rely on?

Gold, silver, platinum, copper. What you're going to rely on is barter, trade.

It's like, you know, I'll give you a loaf of bread for a quart of milk. Deal. That's what's happening.

That's what's going to be happening, not any, you know, kind of, oh, here, I'll give you three pieces of gold. What am

I going to do with three pieces of gold? You can't eat it. This still has value.

Sure. And maybe you can. Charlie was saying, if you can sell it into another currency, this still has value.

Very true. Like rubles.

But, you know, here's the interesting thing. It really is funny. I don't know how many of you are following economic matters these days, but do you know why we have gotten away in this country with selling our bonds at a relatively low interest rate?

Do you know why that is? It's not because the United States of America is a rock solid investment.

It's because compared to everybody else, we're a rock solid investment. It's like if I owe $10 ,000 and everybody else in the room owes $200 ,000, well,

I'm the wealthy guy. Right? And that's kind of the situation. It's not that the United States is rich.

It's just we're not as poor as everybody else. So they're like, sure, we'll buy your bonds. You know, and we'll buy them at 4 % or 5 % or whatever, because that's more than we're going to get anywhere else.

I mean, how many countries are on the verge of bankruptcy right now? Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, the

United States. Oh, sorry. But there are several that I just saw, I think it was last night.

You know, Greece is already out of money. They're already tottering on bankruptcy again. They just got bailed out. You know, what's going to happen when the euro is done away with?

You know, there's going to be some economic chaos and stuff like if that happens. And of course, a lot of the wackier kind of eschatological theories will go out the window too.

You know, the European Union is the whatever in the book of Revelation, all that stuff.

Yeah, I mean, when, yeah, the unified Roman Empire, when people, when people try to put headlines into, you know, the

Bible, they wind up getting into trouble. But anyway, gold is not always a good investment.

When the economy collapses, people are going to barter. Let's talk about another myth.

Bankruptcy is an easy way out of your debt. You go, well,

I'm just going to run up these credit cards and then I'm going to jump, you know, it's like I'm going to jump into the arms, spread out the third story window into the big, you know, pillowy thing that they've set out there for me and I won't get hurt.

Bankruptcy, and it's not as easy, first of all, as it used to be. They've changed the laws over the last four or five years to where they've made bankruptcy harder to get.

But the other side of it is it stays on your financial record for a long time.

And so if you decide you're going to declare bankruptcy, just know that you're going to be dealing with a lot of cash for a long time because nobody's going to give you, well, they will give you credit, but there are going to be a lot of restrictions and a lot of interest rates and a lot of other problems.

So bankruptcy is not an easy way out. And not only that, not really a biblical way out.

Okay, another thing to consider, estate planning, estate planning.

You mean like Massachusetts should plan for that? No, no, no. Estate, your estate, what happens to you after you die?

And a lot of people are like, I don't really care what happens to my stuff. I meant to say my stuff after I die. That's fine.

But as I've mentioned before, when my mom had her aneurysm burst near her brain, what was that nearly,

I think four years ago, three, four years ago, she had no power of attorney.

And so we spent months and months getting control of her finances so that we could do something with her.

And as a result of that, if she'd spent, my attorney told me it was like $125 for a power of attorney, she'd be living here close by us.

And instead what happened was, and it also happened to coincide, so this must have been 2008, because it also, that whole situation coincided with the collapse of the stock market.

And she was invested in some high -risk stocks. I mean, I didn't know any of this until I had control of it.

And just watching the graph of those stocks, day by day, it was just like this, until they wound up worth a little bit less than half of what they were six months before that.

So that was not so great. Yeah, Pam says you can do a power of attorney and a durable, what did you call it?

Healthcare proxy online for free. So, I mean, these are just good things to have.

Why? Because you don't know what's going to happen. You just don't know. And the end result is, you know, sadly, my mom is in Denver and it would cost me tens of thousands of dollars to move her out here and I don't have that.

So there she is. It's a good thing to have.

A will. 70 % of Americans die without a will. What happens if you don't have a will?

Well, if you don't have a will, there's no way either. So, oh, sorry. Probate.

Same thing, yeah. I mean, what happens when you don't have a will and you die, then your stuff is, it's disposed of as the state law allows.

It's which may or may not be what you wanted, but that's what's going to happen. Yeah. I mean, for example, if you don't want your money to go to your kids, then that's ultimately who it's going to go to.

So, you know, if there's some reason, well, you know, people laugh, but I know of situations where people have a lot of money.

And if they asked me, which they haven't, but if they asked me, I would say, are you kidding? You're going to leave that to your kids?

So what? They can continue doing cocaine and, you know, all the other things that they're doing. Why would you do that? Well, I want to make sure they're fully supplied in their depravity.

I mean, they would never think like that, but that's going to be the end result. And don't leave it to your cat.

That's all I can say. You read those stories and you just go, what are those people thinking? For the men this morning,

I have a question. What happens to your wife if you die? Is she provided for? I've said this before, talking about insurance, but in every sense of the word, if she is not provided for after you die, you're not doing your job.

Remember when Tom Shepherd died and Nancy would just say, you know,

Tom really took care of me. And you just go, okay, in life and in death, that's a husband's job.

Let's talk about a budget here again. I've got a few things I want to say, and then we'll talk about this practical handout that I've given.

A budget works when, what's that? When you follow it.

Okay. True. A budget works when the husband and wife both agree on what the budget should be.

Because what happens if there's disagreement about the budget? Well, if you're a

Christian, Peggy says, you submit to your husband, you do what he says. Well, that's exactly right. But that's what ideally what should happen.

I'll ask the question this way. How many of the husbands here love their wives as Christ loved the church perfectly all the time?

See it? Show of hands. Okay. Now I'm repenting.

How many wives submit perfectly to their husbands, even as the church submits to Christ?

Okay. We have one. In money. In money. In money.

And one of the reasons why I bring this up again is because I want to bring up an item

I talked about this Thursday night that I think is pretty key. I've talked about money quite a bit.

One of the reasons is because there are so many problems in marriages with money.

And the worse the debt situation gets, then the more pressure is on the couple.

The more they tend to argue about it, the more it's like, well, why are you doing this and why are you doing that?

And we get into this whole thing. Basically, it's what we used to call in the business 415 family.

That means a family disturbance. I want to mention just a thing that I like to ask people.

The first thing I ask them is if they have a budget. And the number one answer I hear is what? Oh, I hear yes all the time.

I hear yes, almost a hundred percent of the time. Now, when

I ask this question, can I see a copy of it? Well, then we, yeah.

Well, it's not anything we really write down. Well, and then

I say, of course, I mean, this is just basic. I say, well, then what do you mean by a budget? Well, we know that we make this much and by the next paycheck, we still have money.

It's a budget. No, it's not. And that's one of the reasons why

I brought in this quickie budget, but don't turn there. I wanted to get to this other part here. One of the keys to staying on track, because here's the second question

I ask about money when I'm talking to people is, do you each get an allowance?

Do you each get an allowance, husband and wife? People think that's crazy. And you know why

I say you need to have an allowance or why I recommend that you have an allowance? It's not any biblical principle.

Well, it would be this principle. We're totally depraved. And the budget is what?

It's restricting, it's confining. And no matter how sanctified we think we are or how good we think we are, one of us in the marriage is going to want to do what?

Spend beyond what we have permitted in our budget. Now, in our marriage, that would usually be me.

Thank you very much. So what is the budget or what does an allowance allow us to do with our budget?

It allows a certain amount of flexibility. Steve says, quote, my computer is a doorstop.

And to dramatize the fact, I will unplug it and put it over and prop up. No, I don't do that.

But so if I want to get a new computer, you know, and it's not like I can just go to Best Buy and get a $300.

Why am I going to replace one doorstop with another? But if I have an allowance, what can

I do then? I don't have to break the budget and I can save for what I want.

And what do I mean by an allowance? It means I get to spend my money on anything as long as it's not immoral or illegal.

And my wife just has to go, well, good for you. And if she wants to go, you know, buy all the fabric in the stores out there and wherever, then good for her.

Right. She comes in packing all these quilting supplies. I just go, well, good.

And she's way better than I am. Trust me. And really, that does it does help.

It does resolve a lot of things because now I can just think, OK, I've got my goal in mind. I know how much I need to get.

And what am I thinking of myself? I need to stay within the budget and I need to not spend any money because I want my allowance to build up month after month after month so I can finally get what

I want. Charlie. Yeah, I mean, it really does introduce accountability to, you know,

I mean, what makes it hard to and this is kind of right along the lines of what Charlie's saying, which what makes it really hard for some people to stay in budget is, you know, it might be that trip to Starbucks or it might be, you know, whatever.

And you're like, well, how do I really count on that? Well, you know, that can come out of our if I'm doing the checkbook, it can come out of our groceries, you know.

All of a sudden, instead of having a steak once a week, we're having macaroni and cheese every night of the week because my

Starbucks thing has taken all the steak money, but that's neither here nor there. If I have an allowance, if I have some mad money, if I have whatever, you know, you want to call it, well, then now

I have to it helps in tracking all the expenses because now I can say, well, you know what

I did this and you can take it out of my allowance. I bought this, take it out of my allowance.

I gave this to so and so take it out of my allowance, whatever. And to me, you know, far

I think you're right in the sense that it does kind of help keep the check register keeper person, whoever that is, more involved.

In other words, more accountable because now they have to think to themselves. They can't just kind of muddy the waters.

They actually have to account for it and it gives them a place to put it in the budget. So I think that's a good thing.

Any thoughts or questions about allowances, anything like that? I really do recommend that.

Okay. Let's just, we'll move on here. What I've done is provided, and these are just a list of things that we have or that we use.

And there are probably others that you can get in there. But if you just look at this list, you know, you really want to, if you're going to do this and by the way, on the right hand of this first page here, the handout, there is a couple of places where you can load spreadsheets to help you kind of do things, including there's one for calculating the debt snowball effect, which is you pay off the lowest credit card.

Then you apply that to the second one, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Kind of helps you visualize when you'll get out of debt.

But if you look at this list and there may be other things that you want to add to this list, it covers a lot of things.

And I would say to you, if you think you have a budget and you don't have things like heating oil or life insurance or, you know, some of these other things on there, then you, you know, excise tax.

Well, you know, sad times folks. But if you live in Massachusetts and you drive a car every year, you're going to get a bill for excise tax.

That's just the reality of it. So if you don't budget for it, I mean, to me, there'd be nothing more frustrating than every month

I get my income and then I somehow have to figure out how to handle all these bills.

And whoops, I didn't expect that. I forgot the excise tax was coming in or oops, I forgot I was going to have to pay extra social security or whatever the deal is.

Now, all of a sudden you're having to cut here to cut there, all that other stuff. And if you've got this structured, life goes a lot more steadily.

And what it does ultimately is it restrains you because you're going to have months, you know, during the summer, do you ever feel like you're kind of wealthy?

Not wealthy, wealthy, but I mean, all of a sudden, you don't have to pay for oil, unless you're on a 12 month plan or whatever.

But when you take oil out of your bills, all of a sudden, it can seem like you have extra money. Well, you don't because winter is still going to come around every year.

I promise you. But if you look down this list and you think, OK, we need to set we need to set aside a certain amount.

Well, and it's not even just enough. Let's just back up on the budget thing here. I would encourage everybody.

And by the way, there is not only there are spreadsheets there, but there's this just kind of this worksheet from Dave Ramsey here on the back to just kind of do what he calls a quickie budget, where you just write things down super quick and sort of figure it out.

But what good is a budget if you just put the numbers down there? And then, you know, three months from now, you're you're completely missing the mark on things you thought it was going to be an average of two hundred dollars a month for heating oil.

And it turned out to be two hundred and fifty. So you're four months into it and you're, you know, a couple hundred dollars in the hole in your oil account.

Well, you have to adjust your budget. That's why you have to track expenses.

And there are spreadsheets in here or on this one of these websites here, I think, on the first one for keeping track of all your expenses.

You need to know what's going out so that you can adjust your your budget to to match that.

And it could be that you're not spending as much money as you anticipated in some areas, too. There are things that actually once in a while go down.

It's pretty rare, but that could happen. You could call your. Here's an example, you know, you call.

I was listening to somebody. They were talking about Sirius Radio, XM Radio, and every so often they just call and say, yeah, we're going to cancel it.

And the company comes back and says, well, you know, we'll give it to you at 25 percent of the regular price or whatever, you know, so you can keep that budget lower.

You know, Sirius Radio is a necessity. Keep it lower by just sometimes negotiating or saying, yeah,

I'm going to cancel my Internet. I'm going to cancel my DirecTV. I'm going to cancel my cable. And they go, whoa, don't do that.

You know, we can save. We can give you our introductory rate or our retention rate or whatever it is. The worst thing that can happen anytime you call one of the service companies that you contract with and you ask for a deal, what's the worst thing that can happen?

Well, Mr. Cooley, just for calling, we're going to double your rates. That never happens.

The worst thing that's going to happen is they say no. And that's exactly, that was my approach when I called the mortgage company.

I just said, well, I'm going to ask for a lower rate. And if they say no, all it cost me was nothing.

And they said yes. And it saved me a couple hundred dollars a month. Calling is free. Unless you have some kind of crazy phone plan.

Now, look down at the second thing on the left there where it says other. And I put an asterisk next to every one.

And you have to look over in the second column to see why that is. And I don't know why I did that. I should have put it on the bottom of that. But that just means that it can and should be accumulated from month to month.

In other words, your savings rolls over from month to month. Your income taxes roll over.

If you're like me, self -employed, that has to roll over.

Car maintenance. Don't get into this idea, well, we have a car maintenance fund, but we didn't have enough money in there.

When was the last time you had a car repair? It was over a year ago. Well, how much do you have in your account? $100?

What do you mean $100? Well, that's how much we put in there every month. And if we don't spend it, then it goes back. No. No, no, no.

Don't do that. I mean, if you have to do that, but if you can forego that, if you can sacrifice, tighten your belt a little bit, keep the money accumulating.

Because I promise you, if you put $100 a month in your car payment or in your car repair fund, the day is going to come when you're going to have that $5 ,800 car bill.

Can I get an amen? And you're going to be thankful you've got that money sitting there, right?

At least to know that you can fix it. I would say the same thing about home improvement or furniture.

These aren't just impulse things. These are things that you should plan, you should save.

Same thing with clothing. There's just a great way to look at things.

If you have a clothing budget, it simplifies a lot of things. In fact, I mentioned before, when the kids were growing up,

Janet just said, let's just give them, this was her idea, an allowance and it'll cover their clothing too.

When the pressure is on them to decide what clothes they want to buy, they have a certain amount of money and then they want to buy one outfit or 12 outfits.

Who cares? As long as it all fits within the budget, it's all good. There's no debating or anything else.

Here's your money. Have a nice day. Simplicity. Let's see also, saving on a monthly basis for Christmas.

I think it's pretty wise because then instead of we overspent for Christmas, you've got a budget and you've saved the money and it's done and it's over and you can look forward to next year and another massive bill.

Birthdays. Other gifts. If you give gifts to people at showers or weddings or whatever you do, if you have a gift account, then it's not such a hit on your budget.

And of course, then you have essentials, things that you're going to have to do. Now, let's look at the debt column here just in the closing seconds here.

Account number one, I want to encourage you to do this. For every account where you currently owe money, put the total owed and then the interest rate and keep track of that.

For as many as you have, I put account one to infinity and hopefully you don't have that many.

But it's good for you to keep track of that. Why? So that you know which one you're going to pay off next, what the interest rate is.

And you know, it really can be, and Ramsey writes about this, it can be a great encouragement if you, only if you do this, if you start paying those credit cards off and one by one, you know, you've got a list on your refrigerator or whatever, you just go, okay, done.

You scratch it off. Done. You scratch it off. Done. You scratch it off. And when you get rid of them all, that is a great feeling.

It, well, it should, it should, it should cause you to at least think about, you know, your spending and should restrain you.

I agree totally. Anyway, we need to close, but this, this has some, I think, helpful information.

And some of those websites will really help you set up if you don't have a budget or if you don't do things on a computer, this, these things will help you.

And if you don't have a budget and you'd like to, please talk to me and I'll set you up with somebody to help you walk through how to set up a budget.

Anyway, let's pray. Father in heaven, I just pray that you would make each of us better stewards of what you've provided for us, that we would reflect your goodness toward us in how we view our money, how we handle it, how we even save, how we look forward to the future, trusting you, but acting wisely.

Father, I just pray that you would increase us in wisdom that we might do all things to your glory. In Christ's name we pray.