Tuesday Guy - Married to Christmas: A Financial Check-up

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Financial Stewardship and the Christmas Spending Trap

Welcome to No Compromise Radio. This is Steve Killea, the Tuesday guy, and it is Tuesday guy on Saturday day. Welcome, welcome to No Compromise Radio. Hey, today I wanna talk to you. I wanna know if you had a merry Christmas or to phrase it another way, I wanna know if you married Christmas.

M-A-R-R-Y, did you marry it as in make it your bride? Because I'll tell you what, this is the time of the year where people are, I think, you know, they talk about the holidays being a time of depression.

I think this is the time of the year where people have the most trouble, more arguments about finances and whatnot. And basically, I'd like today to be a little bit of a counseling session for you. And if you have no financial problems, well then, good for you.

Please send me an email at tuesdayguyatnocompromiseradio .com and tell me how you've done it. Because here's what I mean by the whole concept, the question, did you marry Christmas? People think that there are certain expectations they have to meet.

I mean, it's like, you know, wanting to please your spouse or whatever. Christmas is set at a certain level and you have to do it. And so what happens is people spend really recklessly during Christmas.

And then the bills start coming in in January and then in February, and it gets harder and harder to keep up. And so basically, I want to talk today just about some general features, some facts of life.

You know, I wish I'd learned maybe 30 years ago. I have to tell you, if I knew when I was 23, what I know now, I'd probably be a millionaire. And it's not because I would have, you know, changed line of work or whatever, or, you know, become a massive stock exchange, what do you call it?

Bond, you know, broker on Wall Street or wherever. What would have made the difference is some very basic facts of life. And number one, spend less than what you make. People don't do this. I am shocked constantly.

You know what? Here's the easiest thing. And I did a whole series on Sunday school and I really wish I could force everybody at our church to listen to this, but I did a whole series about money. And it was based on whose money is in any way from John MacArthur and some other writers.

But, you know, here's the amazing thing is that Christians don't really think about their money much differently for the most part than unsaved people do. And you say, well, I don't understand what you mean.

Well, here, for example, would you expect a Christian to be joyful about their giving? Yes, you would. Now, would you expect them to do it in a pre-planned way? Well, that's what it means when the Bible talks about giving each as he has purposed in his heart.

Purposed, what does it, you know, if I tell you that I've purposed to run 100 miles this week, well, you would expect that I would have been training for a while, that it was part of my plan, right? You wouldn't think, well, he just showed up on, you know, Saturday morning and said, well, I'm gonna start today and for the next seven days.

And in that seven days, I'm gonna run 100 miles because you'd think that was crazy. And yet this is what most Christians do when they show up for church on Sunday. They haven't thought about what they're going to give.

And so it's whatever is in their wallet. I like to call it the lint offering because they'll just give the money and whatever lint is in their wallet goes with it. It's not lint, but lint. It's just wrong.

Well, why is this? It's for the most part, it's because people, Christians don't have a plan. And I read over and over again, and I talked to Christians over and over again, whose marriages are stressed and they struggle and they fight.

And for the most part, I mean, there are varieties of disagreements about things, but for the most part, they can be tracked back to one thing, money. And I know my wife and I, before we got saved, this is a shocking revelation that you'll probably only hear on the Saturday show here.

We used to have disagreements and they were mostly about, and I can confess this because A, it's before Christ and B, it only reflects poorly on me. I used to get mad at my wife because she was too selfless.

My wife, even before she got saved, was a very selfless person. And my discomfort with her was that I was a selfish jerk. She was very selfless. And so it made it hard. I mean, even as an unsaved person, she put me to shame.

And it really put a lot of strain on our marriage because I felt, I'll just say unworthy, you know? And so I would get mad. I mean, this is the illogic of an unsaved person. I would get mad at her instead of thinking, hmm, maybe I need to change something.

But there are a lot of Christians who struggle with money. They don't like the way things are in their household. They feel constrained. They feel confined as an individual. Well, why is that? Well, one of the first things I tell people is, well, two things.

Number one is I say, do you have a budget? Everyone will say they have a budget. And may I say that in 95 of the cases, they're lying. Let me say that again. In 95 of the cases, they're lying. Let me just explain why.

Because when I say a budget, I mean you actually track where your money goes. I don't mean we pay our bills. Paying your bills is just part of life. The fact that you can pay your bills every month doesn't tell me that you have a budget.

If you can show me where all your money goes, then I'll go, you know what? You probably have a budget. Most people can't do that. The second thing I like to ask people is, if they say they do have an allowance, because the second part is you really want to sit down with them and do a budget.

But the second thing is, do you have an allowance? And they look at me like I'm crazy. What do you think? You're talking to a couple of kids? No, an allowance. Why? Because I think an allowance is so valuable.

If a husband and a wife each have a certain amount of money that they're allowed to spend as they wish, for example, I like to buy games. So if I get $20 a month and there's a $60 game I want to get and I have to save for three months to get it, well then I can get it and there's hope at the end of the tunnel and I don't just go out and buy the game and go, well, honey, you're going to have to figure out how to budget that because I don't know where it fits.

And a lot of people don't do that. And so they get frustrated, they go out and spend, they splurge on themselves. And what do you think that does? If I splurge on myself and my wife's like stressed out because she doesn't know how we're going to pay the bills and then I come home with $200 worth of stuff, well, of course she's going to be stressed out.

Of course we're going to fight. People don't understand that. It's a mystery to me. But again, this is something I wish I would have known 30 years ago, it would have made my life a whole lot easier. And it's not enough to say, I have a budget, you actually need to plan.

And people are like, well, we don't make that much money and so it wouldn't really work for us. I actually had somebody tell me that, that this whole idea of living on less than what you make and planning things out and sort of having little funds for this and that, that won't really work because we don't make that much money.

Listen, the less you make, the more you need to budget, the tighter things are, the more responsible you need to be. And here's the other problem is, and this kind of goes back to how we purpose to do things.

Our tendency is to think that it's my money, it's not your money. Everything that you have is a stewardship. Whether that you're kids, I mean, certainly there are things that we look at in life and we think, oh, that's a stewardship.

But it's all a stewardship. If you're a husband and a father, then you have stewardship over your family, true. If you're a mom and you have, well, obviously you have kids if you're a mom, but then you have a stewardship over your kids.

We would say we have stewardship. I mean, there are a variety of places where we would acknowledge that we have responsibility, that we're gonna be held accountable. But somehow we don't think that God cares about how we handle our money.

Did you know, and I'm sure maybe you do know this, but Jesus talked more about money than he did about heaven and hell put together. Money matters. That was the name of my series on Sunday school, and I really wish I could have forced people to listen because it would have saved me a lot of time in counseling and trying to intervene in people's lives.

Money matters. God cares about it. God has spoken about it. It is important as reflects what our priorities are. If we say that we love the Lord, and then we look at the end of the year, and I'll just make up numbers so that nobody knows exactly how much I make.

If I make $50 ,000 a year, and at the end of the year, I've given $400 to the local church, I'm gonna tell you, it doesn't really look like I'm prioritizing the local church. What is it? I mean, that's less than 1 of my gross.

Now, I'm not one who says that you have to do it on your gross because then if you do it on your gross, well then, when you get Social Security, is that tithe or giving free? I don't even like to use tithe because that makes people think that you have to give a 10th, which is an Old Testament concept, and I don't even wanna go down that road today, but here's what I would say.

I would say if you can look at the amount that you give and think at the end of the year, now those end of the year statements are coming out. If you look at that total and you go, wow, just think what we could have done.

We could have bought a car with that. We could have gone on X, Y, or Z vacation with that. I commend you. You know why? Because now you're giving sacrificially and you're thinking rightly about your money.

You can now look at it and go, that hurt, but because you planned it ahead of time, maybe it didn't hurt as much. You know what? It doesn't bother me the way my wife and I give because week by week, I'm not thinking, oh, wow, we could be eating out every night of the week instead of giving to the church.

I don't think that way. But when I look at what we gave, looking back last year, I'm like, wow, we could have done a lot with that money. Well, that's the point. The point is it's supposed to be sacrificial.

It's supposed to be a little bit painful. It's supposed to change the way you live a little bit. God deserves our first fruits, not our last fruits, not our leftovers. You know, imagine if, and this will be kind of a crazy example, but if God was coming over for dinner and you had some knowledge, which we do.

We know the Sundays are coming. So just imagine God was coming over to your house for dinner. The Lord himself was coming over to your house for dinner. Would you just go, you know what? Instead of kind of preparing a good meal, what do you say we just clean out the leftovers from the last week and we'll just give that to him?

You'd never do that in a million years. You'd wanna know what he wanted to eat. You'd wanna know the whole nine yards, right? You'd want everything to just be the best it could possibly be. And no matter how good it was, you'd probably still be embarrassed.

But when it comes to giving, we're like, oh, you know what? I just, I don't know what to do with that. So, excuse me. I don't know really what to do with that. So kind of whatever, you know, I'll give him the, like I said, the lint offering.

It's just wrong. But now, you know, let's talk about bills and how to avoid them. Every week I become aware of people who are struggling financially at the church. And one of the reasons that people struggle is because they don't do certain basic things.

They don't do preventive maintenance on their vehicle. They don't have a fund to repair their vehicle. They don't have a fund to repair their refrigerator or whatever they, so when things break, they're just like, oh, what do we do now?

You know, we're just sunk. We're gonna have to, you know, borrow money. We're gonna have to bust out a credit card. Mom and dad are gonna have to loan us money. We're gonna have to, you know, maybe call the church and see if they can give us some money.

My friends, it is all about, it falls into the category of stewardship. And I said Christmas, well, because this is the time of year or that was the time of the year where we get ourselves into the most trouble.

Listen, let's just start thinking about next year. Let's just start planning now. How do I plan to get out of debt? May I tell you the most obvious first thing is to stop borrowing money. Second thing you need to do is to set up a budget and to set it up in such a way where you start paying off your bills.

You sacrifice. You stop eating out if that's what you need to do. You stop going to Starbucks so often for coffee. You make the little changes in life and you actually track the money that you spend so that you can get out of debt.

The Bible says that the borrower is a slave to the lender. And isn't that true? If you borrow money from somebody, then don't you have to then, as I said during my Sunday school class, don't you wind up working for the man?

Just like we used to say, I'm just working for the man. Well, who knew that the man was named MasterCard American Express Visa or any various department store charge card. We wind up working for the man.

Every month working to pay the, a lot of times just the interest, the minimum payment. It is no small deal. And it really cuts into our giving. It cuts into our peace of mind. It cuts into the harmony of our home.

I mean, imagine how much less drama you would have in your life if at the end of the month, instead of having to panic or having to borrow, take some kind of payday advance or whatever, you could put money in the bank.

You had money left over. It's possible. You can do it. You absolutely can do it. Now, I don't ascribe to everything that Dave Ramsey says, but I'm gonna tell you that his total money makeover is a lot of common sense.

And if you look at the practical steps that he gives you and you do them, you will get out of debt and you'll have a lot less stress and worry in your life. And may I say it just as an extra added benefit, as if this wouldn't be enough in the first place, you'll give glory to God because you will be a good steward of what he has blessed you with.

And again, that's what we need to come back to. This isn't your money. You know, when you die, you don't get to take it with you. He's blessed you with the opportunity to work. He's given you the talents you have.

He's given you the abilities you've had, the education, everything that you have, he has brought into your life and you need to honor him with that. So if you sit down and you do your budget, you sit down and you figure out how you're gonna pay off your bills.

But here's first step, step number one, get yourself some kind of an emergency fund. I'd say, you know, a minimum of $500, minimum, and you say, well, I don't know how I could possibly do that. You can do it.

You absolutely can do it. And if you have to put your bills on minimum, you know, pay the interest only for a month or two so that you can do it, well, then you do it. If you need to sell things so that you can do it, you do it.

You know, garage sale, eBay, whatever it takes, you just sell stuff, you get rid of stuff, you cut back so that you can get that money. And really for most of us, for most of us, unless you're making minimum wage, or unless you've got yourself way in over your head in debt, you should be able to get that money together, at least $500 within a couple months if you're really, really tight.

And then what you wanna do, the objective is to set up a budget and part of that budget should be, like I said before, preventative maintenance. You know, how old is my car? Well, if my car is five, six, eight years old or older, I mean, you know, people think, well, you must be really rich.

Well, my last car before these two cars that we have now, my last car was 20 years old before we buried it. We tend to just kind of buy a car. I don't like buying cars. So we'll just buy a car new and just keep it until it's dead.

And you know, if you do that, then maintenance becomes a pretty much a problem. I remember my wife saying to me sometimes, well, you know, seems like we're repairing that thing every two or three months.

And I'm like, well, it's still a lot cheaper than a car payment, right? And it's not like we could just go in and buy, pay cash for a new one. But if you have money set aside for maintenance, if you have money set aside for repair, if you have it just sitting there, then it's no panic.

You don't have to panic when these things come up. Now, my wife and I, over the years, we've developed some things that we do. We have ING accounts. ING is an online bank. It's not the only one, and I'm not really plugging them or anything.

But what we do is we take money every month and we put it into our different accounts so that we're saving up for our grandkids. We're saving up for, you know, car repairs, house repairs, all these kinds of things that just come up.

I mean, they just, they happen. This is just part of life. You can't say, well, who knew the lawnmower was gonna go out? It's gonna happen. All these things, nothing is going to last forever. You know, you can't be shocked when your repair or your refrigerator needs repair and it's $300.

You can't be shocked because everything wears out. If it has a moving part, it's gonna wear out. If it doesn't have a moving part, well, sooner or later, you know, dust or whatever is gonna cause those circuits to fry and you're gonna have to get something new.

Now, it might be 20 years. It might be 50 years. People say, well, I've had a refrigerator. I don't care. I'm just saying things are going to break in your life and you need to be ready for that. And the answer to life's emergencies, quote unquote emergencies, is not a credit card.

And so if you have money set aside, then you say, why an emergency fund? Because emergencies do pop up where nobody could have expected it. You know, I'll just give you a little insight into our current situation.

We just had one of our dogs get injured and, you know, it's easy to say, well, just put the dog to sleep. It's not so easy to do when you love your dogs. And, you know, I was even thinking about it. I'm going, well, if God cares about the birds of the air and he provides for them and he's given me these dogs as a stewardship, there's that word again, then shouldn't I, as much as I can, as much as is reasonable, balancing it against everything else, shouldn't I try to take care of them?

So we were able to do surgery for this dog. Now, was it easy? No. I mean, we had to clear out a lot of our kind of reserve money but we also have insurance so we'll get some of that money back. But you have to be ready because what happens if you don't, you know, people are like, oh, you're right, Pastor Steve, I need to get out of debt.

I'm going to start paying off those credit cards and that's good. But if you just start doing that right away without setting up that emergency fund and without starting to budget for these other things that will break, then what's going to happen is something is going to happen.

Your car's going to break down or whatever. And your first thing is going to be, well, okay, we were making progress on our credit card and now we got to put $1 ,000 back on it. Well, if you start budgeting rightly now, you know, Lord willing in a couple months, it will no longer be the same situation.

And if you have to use that emergency fund, then your first step after you get that emergency fund, after it's depleted is you build it right back up again. And in fact, the more you own, the more money you make, the bigger that emergency fund needs to be.

And you say, what does this all have to do with Christmas? Because again, this is the one part of our lives where we just, you know, it's Katie bar the door. We don't have to have a budget, it's Christmas.

We're going to spend whatever anybody wants and it's just upside down. It's wrong. It's not the time of the year to forget your priorities. It's a time to kind of tighten your belt all the more. If everybody that you know doesn't get a Christmas gift from you, it's not the end of the world.

If you go to your, especially your kids and those in your family and you say, listen, we are really trying to honor the Lord with our finances. And this year we're cutting back. We're cutting back on what we're doing and we're not going to spend as much as we did before.

And we hope that you'll just understand that we need to be more accountable before the Lord. We need to be more responsible. And, you know, at the end of the day, what's going to happen over time is you're going to be able to help people out more.

Not only because you'll be able to help them do what you've been doing, which is to get out of debt and to set up a budget, but you're also, at the end of the day, and when you go to be 65, 70 years old, whenever it is that you wind up retiring, you're not going to be dependent on social security alone.

We'll talk about it, you know, something that should make you panic, something that should make you wish you had an emergency fund. Just imagine being dependent entirely on social security, especially the way our government's going.

That seems to me like not your best move. And it's certainly no way to really kind of have an easy retirement or, you know, be able to travel or to do anything else. You have to start planning now. And the more sacrifices you make now, the easier life will be for you in the future.

Housing, Debt, and the Need for a Bigger Emergency Fund

Now, let me just say a few other things. When it comes time to buying a house, you know, even before you buy one, I want to encourage you to talk to somebody who knows something about real estate, somebody who has no vested interest in selling you a house, because there are a lot of just false, there's a lot of bad thinking out there.

The first thing is, you know, that somehow you have to own a house. Well, it's helpful in some ways. It certainly shields some of your income, at least for right now, from taxes and whatnot. But when you own a house, now you're responsible for the maintenance on it, the upkeep on it, anything that goes wrong.

You know, if it needs a new roof or whatever's going on with the house, it's on you. So now you've got some all new emergency categories or, you know, some savings categories that you've got to start working on.

But not only that, it used to be, there was a time where you could just count on your house's value going up, and it was kind of like a bit of a retirement fund. Well, it's no longer like that. We've seen over the last several years that the real estate market can go up and it can go down.

And if it goes down and you're just thinking, well, this is how we're gonna retire, you'll be sadly mistaken. So, but I recently became aware of somebody that thought that they could buy a house for X amount of value and somehow have some credit accounts kind of folded into that house loan.

And that's not the way it works. A bank isn't gonna say, well, you know what? We're going to give you a loan for more than the house is worth. They don't do that. Why? Well, we've just seen why. Because if you default on a house, they're stuck with it.

And they're not, banks are not in the real estate market. They don't wanna own homes. That's not what they're all about. So in actuality, you're probably going to have to come in with a lot of cash down.

I mean, this is where, you know, Ramsey is kind of like, he doesn't really think you should borrow money for anything. And I think for the most part, he would even include a home. But if you're gonna borrow money, he'd say that's the only reason you ever borrow money is for your house.

But he would want you to come in with a big down payment too so that your house payments would be less. And that's certainly wise, I think. People wanna buy as much house as they possibly can. Well, that's not always the smartest thing to do.

You know, you wanna buy a house in an area that you like, and you don't wanna buy more house than you need because then you've got areas that you don't ever use or that you're having to heat or keep clean or whatever that really you don't need.

And so you wind up just spending money for nothing. And finally, I would like to address one more thing, and that's working. The Bible says, you know, if a man will not work, will not work, he should not eat or he shall not eat.

And I think too often, we've just gotten to the point now where men fail to man up and take care of their families by being the guy who just goes out there and he's willing to work a job and a half, two jobs over time, whatever it takes to get the job done.

And men, if you're the head of a household and you've gotten your finances so upside down that you don't know what to do, well, first of all, do what I said, lay out a budget, you know, talk to somebody who knows how to do this, start getting your finances in order that way.

And then get a second job, get a part-time job, deliver pizza, deliver newspapers. I have a friend who got a job delivering newspapers. You do whatever you need to do to get the bills down, to get things right.

And if you think you're honoring the Lord by somehow just skimming by or by, you know, getting a minimal job and making the minimum payments and somehow getting on government assistance, you're just not thinking rightly.

You know, is there anything wrong if you need government assistance for a time doing it? Well, I suppose not. But if you possibly can, can I just tell you, you're going to think a whole lot better about things if you're not getting help by the government.

You're gonna think you're going to be, well, I'll just say it this way, you're gonna be honoring the Lord a lot more if you're not doing that. And it is important how we handle our money. It tells us a lot about what we really believe.

If we honor the Lord first, if we put Him first, and even as we're, you know, sometimes overwhelmed by the bills, and especially at this time of year, as I said before, overwhelmed by the bills and we don't know how to pay them, and we look and we look and we think, well, we'll start giving after we get out of debt.

Don't think like that. Put God first. And, you know, it may not be that you'll give as much as you will someday, but start giving now. Purpose to give now. Plan, and you know what, here's the thing, if you start planning right now, if you lay out a budget right now, you will be blessed.

Not, you know, in some kind of TBN, kind of give to get or anything else. You'll be blessed because for the first time in your life, panic will leave when it comes to financial issues. As you start to actually manage your money, be a steward of your money, rather than letting your money be the manager of you, the Lord will bless you.

And He will grant you not the peace of salvation, but a different kind of peace. And there'll be harmony. There'll be more harmony in your home than you ever thought possible. You won't fight about things.

I mean, I could go on and on about all the things that my wife and I have done over the years that have just made things better and better and better for us when it comes to money. I remember when, I'll just give you one more.

When our kids were in high school, big struggle about how we handled clothing and everything else. And you know what, eventually we did, my wife would go with them, but we would give them a fixed amount and they would be able to spend what they wanted.

And it meant that they could actually save for if they wanted something more expensive or they could buy lots of, I mean, my wife, we imposed standards on what was acceptable and what was not acceptable.

But if you do that, there's a lot of drama that gets taken. She was no longer having to argue with the kids about what they were gonna get and what they weren't gonna get because it was all limited by a fixed amount that we'd done.

You can take a lot of the drama out of your life by actually becoming the boss of your money instead of letting your money become the boss of you. And it's honoring the Lord. If you have questions, if there are ways that I can help you, if there are resources that you wanna ask questions about, any kind of way that I can help, I'd love to do that.

It's TuesdayGuy at NoCompromiseRadio .com. And thank you so much for listening.

May the Lord bless you. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's word through verse by verse exposition of the sacred text.

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