Budgeting

In this lesson, Khaleef Crumbley discusses budgeting as an aspect of godly stewardship. Khaleef Crumbley first discusses why Christians need budgets and then describes the steps of creating a good budget:

1. Identify all sources of income
2. Track current expenses
3. Set goals
4. Evaluate expenses

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budget worksheet as well during the week but this week we’re going to talk about how to start a budget how to create a budget if you don’t have one and also if you do have one some things you can do to make your budget more efficient to look at your budget and see where are we making mistakes so just what can we do better um excuse me just remember some of the things we talked about last week we looked at exactly what can we do with God’s money and so we looked identified three areas we can spin or we can consume we can save or invest and we can get we also a few weeks back talked about some of the functions of stewards and one of the ways that we looked at being a steward is that you are an accountant that you’re responsible for every penny that you spend an accountant has to keep records of how he handles the money and for every item whether it’s small or whether it’s great in in value or in just cost you have to consider that you’re using the Master’s money and that it’s not your own so um we are still looking at we’re looking at something very practical today but we’re still thinking about the idea of being a steward that we are managing God’s resources we’re managing God’s riches and he has given it to us so we can do specific things with them so with that in mind we’re going to talk about budgeting and look at that some practical things we can do but all of it is still understanding that we’re stewards and we’re managing God’s money so before we go into today’s lesson let’s have a word of Prayer of great God we thank you for the richness of your word we thank you God that you’ll Supply everything that we need for life and godliness we thank you God that even with something as practical as budgeting that everyone has to do that your word to say about it and your word has much to say about how we are to be faithful and how we handle money and how we handle wealth and what you’ve given us so I pray Lord that as we go through this that all of us will be called to take another look at how we spend money and those of us who may not even have budgets of things set up would want to do that so so that we can be diligent we can be faithful with what you’ve given us so I pray Lord that you would bless our time together and that you would speak to our hearts in Jesus name amen okay so why do we need a budget I think the one or one and a half verses that really show us why we need a budget as a Proverbs chapter 27 verses 23 and the beginning of 24.

and it reads know well the condition of your flocks and pay attention to your herds for riches are not forever and that passage actually goes on from there to talk about um how God God provides especially through uh faithful use of his Provisions uh particularly in this case um livestock and land so know well the condition of your flocks and pay attention to your herbs now remember in in this time this is where wealth was tied up especially in a society where if you gain land every 50 years it would be turned back to the original owner so land wasn’t something that you had forever in some cases it was depending on how you how you got it um but livestock really represented uh someone’s wealth what the livestock produced themselves and also what you could sell the livestock for um so in this case we get this picture of understanding what’s going on with your finances with the wealth that you have knowing their condition knowing if there’s weak spots weak areas and these sick animals uh any prey that are looking so look did I just cut out a back-end okay start yelling all right so the idea here is to pay close and careful attention to what God has given you that generates wealth so what what are some things we can do with a budget you know why do we need a budget from a practical sense how does that work out well it can help us accomplish a financial goal you know sometimes we’ll have budgets that are for a particular project as I mentioned before someone in my house loves watching house hunting shows and they always talk about this is my budget my budget for this project including any renovation is four hundred thousand dollars and so they’re saying this is how much we have allocated for this purpose it’s just one project it’ll help us handle shots to our finances when things happen whether it’s losing a job our income drops or some catastrophe happens it’ll help us be able to handle it if we know exactly where our money is going and how it’s coming in then we’ll be better able to handle those things than if we just kind of spent money as long as it was in the checking account it’ll help us identify areas of waste this is I think a large one for most of us because when as we spend there’s inevitably inevitably going to be times if we’re not tracking diligently there’s going to be times when we’re spending on things and we may look back and say where did all my money go and there’s a lot of people who talk about that people I talk about and pro talk to in private that that’s one of the biggest concerns is that I don’t know where my money goes at the end of the end of the month or the end of the pay cycle I just don’t have any money and I’m just praying that this bill that doesn’t hit this check I wrote doesn’t uh clear before my paycheck hits the account and that’s a situation for a lot of them so help us identify areas of of waste and it’ll ensure that any surplus is not spent on frivolous items will be able to plan again we’re not looking and saying oh wow there’s 200 in my bank account and I’m getting paid tomorrow I guess I have 200 to kind of spend any way I want and it will help us to avoid those type of situations and everything even Leisure will be planned out and it’ll help us develop discipline so there should be an order in not just creating a budget creating a lifestyle well first we should consider our income that comes first and then we add on the expenses we create a lifestyle that’s based on the income that’s based on God’s provision God God will provide us for a certain lifestyle and if we decide to indulge and go over what God has provided for us then we end up in a situation where we talk about next week which is that and that in every case that is that but in some cases there is some strategy behind it so anyway that’s for next week I won’t say much more but um do understand that we need to look at our income and say this is what God has provided for us now let’s shape our lifestyle based on how God has provided for us and looking at some averages and actually I was on the low side especially for New Jersey with uh some of these things but this is just looking at what happens if we just develop a lifestyle and we don’t really think about how much money we’re bringing in we just say I have to live this way and I just put together what a typical budget would look like uh let’s say in New Jersey housing um it’s definitely low and uh some of the other things here are kind of in line with national averages but said we’re we kind of lead the nation in a lot of income and spending categories so what’s the problem there’s only five categories that we’ve spent money in and we only have 250 left for the month so everything else that you need to do in life outside of these five categories has to be done with 250 a month we didn’t mention anything about giving we didn’t mention anything about saving we didn’t mention anything about planning for a future and we’re down to 250 dollars in a month and this is what happens to a lot of us and it’s definitely happened to me at different times in my life when I just said oh okay here’s this car I want this car not well how does this impact My overall finances God hasn’t provided me with the income to be able to afford this and so I should get something else and so it sounds very easy very simple when we think about it that way but a lot of times we just go through life it’s easy to do something like this and that’s what we want to avoid and that’s why we first think of our income and then we go on to expenses so this is typically when I’m talking to someone or given the new Financial counsel this is the order I usually would go in so you identify your income and this is every source of income it’s not just um looking at a main jobs anything else it’s you know alimony it’s anything else that that you’ll receive any bonuses commissions things like that so identify your income then you track your expenses then you set goals and we’ll see why setting goals is number three and not number one in a minute then we evaluate expenses so let’s look first at identifying your income and you’ll probably see the slide again but this is pretty much the outline for the rest of today so some of the ways for calculating your income and I’m going to try to go through income a little a bit faster than we’ll go through expenses that’s going to be what we spend the bulk of our time so one way is average income all you do is add up your after tax income for the whole year and then divide it by 12. and then you say that’s what you’re going to earn each month so here’s an example if you make 35 000 from a regular job and two thousand eight hundred fifty dollars from a side I don’t know why I chose a number like that and then just say three thousand um your plan to receive three thousand one hundred fifty four dollars and Seventeen cents each month and that’s that’s gonna be your monthly budget so it’s just looking at what do I get it for the whole year and I divided by 12 and I allocate that amount to spend each month so what’s good about this method well it’s easy to calculate right you just kind of add up what you are going to get and if you have the same job as you did last year you can really just look at uh what you earned last year look at your last pay stub look at your W-2 whoa your last pay stub would actually have uh your net and then just divide that by 12. so it’s easy to do but here’s the the con unless you’re paid monthly you’ll be overestimating your income in most months and you’ll be underestimating your income in some months so again this is just an average so there’s going to be sometimes where your income is below the average and so if you plan to spend that exact amount but your income comes in under that you could be stuck unless you’ve made other provisions so here’s another method projected actual income so it’s just like it says you figure out how much you’re going to make each month and then you write that out in the budget and here it works best when you have income that fluctuates or you receive infrequent payments so if you receive bonuses or commissions or anything else that could fluctuate month to month or even week to week but you know kind of the pattern that you collect them then it’s best like say you get quarterly uh bonuses or you get commissions and that they’re paid out quarterly you can kind of estimate those and say okay April I’m going to have a larger income because that’s when I get my my uh commission check the things like that that you you want to look at throughout the year and say when in what month what uh will this extra income come in and when will sometimes my month be a little light and here’s an example you don’t have to look at the entire thing but just look at April and October for instance um those have more income because they’re three weeks in some months and so whatever year a basis on I actually think this was 2010 um the April and October had five weeks in it and so on some pay Cycles you would have gotten three paychecks if you got if you earned if you earn money every two weeks so this is why it’s helpful because if you’re thinking you’re going to earn um over three thousand dollars you see just about every month you’re short you’re short about 500 almost every month except for those two where you’re over and so when you’re when you’re thinking like that you know that that I want to look at how I’m how my year was going to play out rather than every month I want it to look the same it is harder so here’s our pros and cons it’s much more accurate if your pay is based on weeks so every week every two weeks you get paid this is a much more accurate way because as we said some months will have more paychecks than others and they’ll allow you to spot possible Surplus months and decide what you’re going to do with with that money the con is it takes more work to set up it’s just takes a little bit more time although I feel that spending the time in the beginning will or can save you from a lot of pain later on so another one discounted or adjusted income so you you take either your average or you take your projected amount and you uh reduce them by a percentage that accounts for any unpredictability so an example if we use our average that we figured in the first example and we said we want to discount it by 10 percent so that we can be safe when we receive less income in the month then we will be anticipating 2 800 a little over twenty eight hundred dollars in those months so it’s it allows us to factor in four things that are either unpredictable or it allows us to factor in for times when we just receive less especially if our income fluctuates and it’s not just every week every two weeks we get the same you know if you’re a business owner or something like that it depends every week how many clients did you see how many customers did you see so many people actually will have their income fluctuate when you look at it month to month and you’re not budgeting every pay period so this method is is uh good for those who have unpredictable income and it creates a buffer against those slow months so that you can have a little bit more safety in your um in your budgeting there are people who Advocate doing this method for even people with stable income because they say it helps to build in discipline and helps you to live below your means if you say I’m going to live on 90 of my income and I budget everything on 90 percent um and then I have 10 left over every month and if something happens I still have that buffer but I’m going to just budget based on 90 even though I know what I’m getting each month um and so it’s kind of a way to force discipline I don’t like that and that’s really the con here is that if someone tries to do it and they don’t need to it’s not really the best way to build discipline I believe that every dollar should have a purpose and we even see that in some of the Proverbs that we looked at and even um you know the story of the Builder and thinking about counting costs we don’t see this idea of I’ll just play it safe and then extra money would show up we have we see the idea of planning all throughout scripture but especially the verses that we’ve looked at in the past two weeks we see this idea of planning we see this idea of having a purpose and if you assign a job to every dollar that you get or to every portion of a dollar that you get that’s much more efficient and I think it really lines up more with the examples we see in scripture and the admonitions we see in scripture especially concerning how we handle money so here’s a few uh guidelines if you’re paid once or twice a month so some people pay just on the first so some people pay first and 15th or maybe the 30th and most of your income comes from your main job then you can use the monthly average and you know there shouldn’t be too much fluctuation because you’re actually paid per month and so you’re you’re and if most of your income comes from that you should be fine if you’re paid every week or every two weeks then you should use projected actuals instead this is because you’ll have several months where you’ll receive an extra payment and you’ll be able to budget that extra money and know how you’re going to use it rather than just kind of have a windfall that dwindles away and when you look back you say wait didn’t I get two thousand dollars extra this month which has happened to it also if a significant portion of your income fluctuates then you should probably use a monthly average and you should discount it so now we’re going to look at tracking expenses and you know just remember each of each of these things we’re talking about kind of broad Concepts because everybody in here has a different situation the thing that we all have in common is we’re all stewards of God’s money and so we have principles that we are going to apply all the time but some of the details obviously they’re going to play out differently depending on our situation and our goals are even going to look different to some extent so when we think about tracking expenses um I have this as the next step instead of setting goals because it’s I think it’s easier to look at your finances and look at where you are and make adjustments rather than kind of make up arbitrary numbers and say for instance I want to spend 300 a month on groceries why I don’t know I just came up with 300 a month well if you’re spending 700 a month right now on food getting it down to 300 might be kind of difficult for your situation or the size of your family and so it may be better to look at that 700 and say I want to reduce it by 50 or 100 every month or I’m gonna find somebody maybe in the church who is very efficient at spending money has a small grocery bill I can actually point you out to someone now so if you come to me after I can point you out to someone who’s in this room right now who is a wiz when it comes comes to that but um yeah I’ll let you guys try to think about who it is and look around but you you want to identify people as well and say well how do you do it how are you able to feed a family of eight and only spend 400 a month how do you do it my family is five people we spend 500 I mean these are the conversations that we have a lot of people don’t like to for some reason there’s some taboo about talking about money which I really don’t think it should be there especially in the body of Christ because just like anything else well we’ll bear our souls to each other we’ll come to prayer and come to the corporate prayer meeting and call out things that will be shocking and because we know our brothers and sisters are going to pray for us but then we don’t want to talk about financial problems that we’re going through because we’re embarrassed there but we can talk about heinous sin like it’s nothing and say I need you to pray for me about these things well this is where I came from but yeah I’m kind of behind on my my rent or I think I’m stuck in this loan and I wish I didn’t you know take this long those are conversations we don’t have and I think it’s I think it’s kind of a it’s a way of thinking that needs to that needs to end because there’s a lot of help that we have even within the body on how to do things better so when we come up with a budget there are two things we have to think about there’s fixed expenses and there’s variable expenses fixed suspenses are costs that don’t vary based on how much of the good or service you use and here are some examples of housing insurance car loans student loans a bus or train pass that you may get monthly those things it doesn’t matter how much you use it housing you can go on a vacation all month or stay with family for the entire month your rent or mortgage is still due they don’t care that you didn’t use the house at all your rent or your mortgage is due and it’s the same amount each time you know it doesn’t matter your car loan whether you didn’t drive for that month or you drove a lot less than you drove the month before you still owe the same amount so these costs are fixed no matter what your activities are then we have variable expenses those are calls that can vary based on usage so groceries dining out Gas Utilities those are the ones that we have a lot more control over now we do have control over all of our costs or some take a lot more work to adjust than others so we’ll talk about some methods actually in a minute for tracking expenses but the first thing you want to do uh when you’re just thinking about budgeting is you want to identify um all your fixed expenses everything every month anything that comes every month and it’s the same no matter what you do you have to pay this and write those down then write down all of your fix but infrequent payments so those are like could be Insurance some people don’t pay monthly they pay quarterly or even annually us any subscriptions membership costs you know I mean simple thing if you belong to BJ’s or Costco that membership cost shouldn’t shock you every year it’s something that you should plan for and budget for even if it’s something only comes once a year we forget about those things you know triple a membership things like that we forget about those types of things no subscriptions and let me just say as kind of from the other side as a marketer or a business owner the thing that you want more than anything is a subscription you don’t just want someone who’s going to come and pay you a lot of money once you want someone to subscribe because you usually have them hooked for a very long time and even if they’re not pleased with the service they oftentimes forget that they’re even paying and so thinking back to now a consumer we don’t want to do that we want to look at every single dollar that is going to come out of our bank account no matter when it comes out not just the ones that come out every month and then we have to figure out how much all our variable costs are and that’s the thing that I think takes takes more work and that’s what scares people and some people talk about budgeting and say that b word and they’re really just talking about a budget because it just it just the idea of a budget just kind of frightens them so here’s one method a bank provided summary this is a good way to track your expenses if you use a debit card a credit card for most or all of your expenses they do the work for you most banks and credit card issuers will provide a summary of how you spent money that month in either in the statement or something that’s available on the website not everyone not you know not every bank would do it but many and most actually that I’ve seen will provide some sort of summary so you can look at that and say wow they say I spent four hundred dollars on dining out and it may be one of two things that maybe it was in a restaurant and they got a little wrong but for the most part you can use that as a starting point wow 400 a month dining out I can save a whole lot of money if I don’t dine out my grocery bill will go up a little and dining out clothes and go down a lot and two weeks from now or three weeks from now I think we’re going to talk about opportunity costs um which is just a fancy way of saying if you choose one thing what are you missing out on and so we’re going to look at that as a way to evaluate some expenses because not everything like dining out in every case is is a bad thing and I’ll actually provide an example of that later on or maybe next time of someone who’s who spent a lot of money but it was actually a wise thing for her and her family to do so um a bank provided summary will allow you to see and overview of your finances especially if you’re only spending with one with your debit card hopefully it’s a debit card or if you’re using a credit card so you can get reward points or something like that and you’re still paying it off um but when at the end of the month in the statement cycle you can see a snapshot of how you spent your money oh Financial software there’s a lot of financial software and this is this is the method that I use and this is the one that I recommend to anyone who’s even just somewhat comfortable with using a computer or using the app you know there’s some people just I won’t do it and if you won’t the key with all of this I’ll just say I’m gonna say this a lot is do what you’re comfortable doing it doesn’t make sense to set up something that’s complicated and sophisticated but it’s so overwhelming that you never use it and you never do it I’d rather you grab piece of everyone most people here should know I’m allergic to paper I just I despise of using paper when something can be done electronically just like I don’t like phone calls and you can email the text it’s just with me I just have an aversion to all those all those physical things so I would say everybody do it electronic there’s less chance for errors a lot faster but if that means there’s less chance of you actually doing it because you’re not comfortable with it or you’re not familiar with the process then don’t try that stick to what you’re comfortable especially at the beginning if you’re going to write down a budget each month on a sheet of paper and everything you spend you’re going to check it off on this list or you’re going to put things in an envelope which we’ll talk about in a minute then do that do whatever you’re comfortable with doing whatever is going to get you to a better place as a steward of God’s money that’s what you’re supposed to do whether you use a certain technology or not it’s irrelevant it’s what you’re doing with God’s money and this is a way to make us better managers of God’s resources so here are some Financial software that I would recommend I put free by a couple of them some people Excel would be free for if it’s if you have the office suite but using this software the great thing about it is that it will sync up to your bank accounts and will download all of your transactions and you’ll be able to see so even if you use three or four different accounts for whatever reason you’ll be able to see everything grouped together and still get a summary of how you spent your money for the month so even if you’ve never tracked your money seriously you can go home today and you can know for the last couple of months where your money has gone and you can get an overview where you can get as detailed a look as you want and like I said some of these may need a little bit of tweaking um for instance we used to shop at a dollar store to get like households supplies and stuff and the name of it was called dollar power and because the word power was in it every time software picked up that charge they would assume it was a utility bill and they will categorize it as utilities so I would just have to scan through and say no dollar pop no that’s that’s not utility and just move it over to household so I mean you have you may have to do things like that usually they’re small and um once you do it once or twice now they’re better at remembering what you did the last time and saying oh okay I remember you told us this wasn’t utilities and so the software is is very good at picking up those things so if you are comfortable with that then definitely use one of these to track and like I said it will go back into the past so it’s not as if you have to start from today this next method is one where you actually have to start from today and that’s using an envelope system or any type of Cash System um some people like envelopes because I think it’s just something with having everything set up in front of them but it’s a great way to to track and control your spending so at the beginning of the month you would take your cash divide it into different envelopes that represent your budget categories you’ll have an envelope that says gas they have an envelope for eating out if you do that you know you have an envelope for all of their variable expenses that you normally pay um cash for and once money is taken from the envelope once the money once the envelope is empty then you can’t spend anymore that’s the control aspect of it if you do need to spend then you have to take cash from another envelope and of course you have to keep track of that adjustment that you just made you may have to say oh I want I want to spend more this month on this thing here maybe gas prices have gone up and so now I need an extra 20 I guess I have to take it from my entertainment envelope and move it over here and so those are the types of things that that you do with cash to be able to still track it I mean you can do other things you can actually decide to write it out if you want you can actually use Financial software and just make sure you just type in that you spent cash even I would say even if you go to a vending machine which hopefully most people aren’t but if you do if you go to vending machine even keep track of that because you want to know what you’re doing with every dollar so again it’s using the envelope may not be the fastest way because you can’t go back into the past unless you use some hybrid and say we’re going to look at our bank statements to at least understand some of the costs and then some of the other costs we only spend cash then I’m going to use that so the the point of all of this is to have a picture of where your money goes each month where it has been going so we still haven’t completely set up the budget we haven’t planned out and said this is what I want to have happen with my money this is what I want my money to do we’re still trying to figure out what it’s doing what have we been doing without money and what needs to be corrected like I said this provides us with a good base of knowing how we can um make adjustments so these were the three methods for calculating monthly income average income projected actual income or discounted or adjusted income and now we’re going to talk about talked about income we talked about tracking expenses now we’re going to look at setting goals and so there are at least two levels I think really three levels of goals uh when we think about our finances and one as Christians we really have this level and other people do but they don’t think about it this way as Christians having a Christian world view that affects what our goals are with how we spend God’s money because we know we’re just stewards and so that changes everything when it’s not I worked hard for this money and so I get to do what I want with it so those are some of the things that we talked about um last week especially when we looked at how we spend say the best and uh give God’s money but we spend God’s money to provide for the needs of ourselves and our family also to provide for our enjoyment and provide for personal evangelism and Ministry we save understanding that many times God will provide now the things that we need for future work and we really saw that in in a couple of places in the Proverbs but we saw a good example of that with King David making preparation for uh the temple for his son and God provided many things to David so that he can get things lined up so when his son was in a position to build the temple he had many of the things that he needed already because his father had made preparation for that and so we saw that God provided in in David’s time for something that would be done after David was gone and we give in order to support God’s work on Earth so the next level of kind of goals is that we want to base goals on our individual family or um our situation or family situation so those will be more specific and that’s where we really that we’ll see Divergence and how we do things even though we’re trying to accomplish the same larger overarching goals of glorifying God so here are some of the common goals and goals that I think that that people need to have in mind with budgeting and a lot of this can be either Project based or it can be something that’s built into what you do monthly the first one is to build an emergency fund now the thing about this is as the word implies it’s only to be used for True emergencies it’s a separate account and I would like it to be an account that’s at a different institution than where you do most of your banking preferably I would want it to be online I would want it to be somewhere that you don’t have access to it immediately somewhere where you can’t just get an Impulse to spend money and go and grab money out of the emergency fund because that’s not what it’s there for so there’s different ways to do this of course if you don’t have any savings or anything that even looks like an emergency fund the first thing I would do is try to build a 500 cushion in your checking account now obviously you adjust this number to based on what you’re comfortable with but 500 is a good round number so you start with building this cushion you know each paycheck you try to not spend the entire paycheck and when I’m talking about spending now I’m thinking about everything you do so I’m also talk thinking about giving saving investment you do all of that this is kind of where we talked about only spending 80 90 percent of your income this is one of the reasons why you would do that because you want to take that rest and you want to at least first build the cushion so that when something happens you have this buffer in your account especially if you’ve never or you at least aren’t in a position now where you can save if you’re in debt your emergency funding this this is separate from the cushion you built in your checking account this is now the separate account that is hidden from you um if you’re in debt I would recommend saving 1000 between one thousand and twenty five hundred dollars into an account to absorb for some emergencies that come because as we’ll talk about next week um getting out of debt is should be the priority if you are in debt especially because you are paying interest on that money and most likely the reason why this is lower here than what I recommend if you’re not in that is because you’re not going to save money and generate anywhere near the amount of money you’re paying in interest so you want to pay that off and actually paying off your debt is kind of like earning interest anyway because it’s interest that you’re saving um so if you if you have no debt or if you only have low interest debt then I recommend six to nine months worth of living expenses now these living expenses aren’t going to getting lattes and things like that this is the money that you need to survive so it’s not six or nine months of what you currently spend right now maintaining this lifestyle if you lost your job today you would make some adjustments but if you have six to nine months worth of your needs saved then you can still provide for your family you don’t have to succumb to worrying and and sometimes even doubting God will he provide all these things that can happen when these Financial emergencies come when family members are in need we can even have an I actually would want you to have a separate emergency fund for them but that’s later down the road if you don’t have one like that now you can use your emergency fund it and it depends when you set up an emergency fund the first thing you should do is decide what’s an emergency especially if you’re married you and your spouse need to come together and decide what constitutes an actual emergency you don’t want to at one point say well my brother wants to borrow money from me okay well I don’t think it’s an emergency brother wants to borrow money but I think it is an emergency you have those discussions ahead of time when you establish this account and you you decide what’s going to be an emergency what’s not we know like I said lattes and new shoes aren’t the emergencies but there are other things that will be an emergency and you have to decide that because they’ll be different than what our emergency sorry there are some online banks that have accounts that let you have sub accounts two of them that you know I can think of quickly or smarty Pig and Capital One 360. Capital One 360 it was formerly known as ING Direct a lot of people knew it was ing directing and Capital One bought them so um what they allow you to do is to have one main account and then you have other accounts so you can say oh well we have to get a new dryer in a year or two so we’re going to start a savings account that’s only for the dryer and we’re going to start a savings account that’s only for whatever other expense you have we’re going to have one that’s just for the emergency fund which is separate from those things that we know we’re making purchases out of you know and and it allows you to do the smarty Pig actually it allows you not only to set goals it tracks how close you are to the goals so you can say I want to save three thousand dollars for a vacation and it allows you to see how close you are and then it allows you to share that goal on social media in a way that the people who see it can donate to that goal so if you guys get an email from smartypig or something saying that I I sent you a link you know what it’s for it’s so you can help us go on a vacation or something but it I mean I I don’t know how many people I would love to see numbers on that how many people have actually seen that their friend wants to do something and they’ve given them and it’s kind of like what’s it GoFundMe it’s a popular one and I actually saw an article unfortunately talking about how GoFundMe seems to be replacing the job of the church and how a lot of Christians who are who belong to churches start GoFundMe accounts and when they’re asked about it I don’t know how many people they interviewed they interviewed enough for this article they all made the same statement that you know I love my church family but they wouldn’t support me you know our medical bills are really high I know I couldn’t go to them and so you know I thought it was a sad thing of course we don’t know anything about the person’s church or how they are as members or anything else they’re even really Christians but this article was out there and talking about how people are going to those accounts rather than looking to the body of Christ in in times of need um but if we have accounts set up to be able to give in times of need we don’t have to worry about that so getting out of debt we’re going to talk about this a lot next week but as I said because of paying interest and the pain associated with that um most of your discretionary income should go to paying off that if you have um if you have any debt and paying one thing with paying off that um you should also be looking for ways to decrease your principle and the camera and calls which is the uh interest rate that you pay a simple phone call to a lot of credit card companies can lower your interest rate you know so that’s one thing even certain things when student loan that I had when I set it up uh it was through Sally May who no longer owns it and they said hey if you let us take the money right out of your bank account we’ll knock a percentage one percent off the interest rate and depending on the size of your loan that can be thousands of dollars so something that simple just let us take it out your bank account rather than trusting you to make the payment each month so they they understand even the ideal subscription because I don’t can’t tell you how many houses I’ve been to when Sallie Mae calls and they leave a message and people are like no no don’t don’t answer the phone that’s all they may they call around seven o’clock every night you know and people know they know when the when the bill collectors are calling and we don’t want to be in a situation if we are in that situation it’s one that we desperately have to get out of and so we have to put a lot of things to the side in order to pay off uh debt first so saving for a large expense we should figure out how much money that will spend on the expense when we’ll need the money how much we already have toward the goal so a simple thing is we want to know okay how much is this going to cost it’s going to cost ten thousand dollars and I have two thousand already I need eight thousand dollars and actually plan to save that not just say someday I’m going to have this if you can budget the idea of saving for this large expense especially if it’s something important and it meets one of your goals especially the overarching goals then you want to make sure it has a proper place in your budget and that you’re saving for each month another thing and I think a lot of us get tripped up on this uh anticipate how that large expense will impact your budget in the future so are there any fees associated with owning whatever you’re looking for are there maintenance costs is there any interest you know some people just save up for down payment especially for you know a home or something is there interest associated with it are there any taxes associated with owning this so those are the things that you want to know how is owning this thing or buying this going to impact me not just at that point of purchase but how is it going to impact me in the future and those are things that we have to think about especially you know the typical suggestion for home is that you save one to two percent of the cost of the home each year for maintenance costs and and so if you don’t have that then maybe you should buy a smaller home for a number of reasons but one of them would be we can’t maintain something this large or something with this many moving Parts because if something goes and then and two years later the roof needs to be replaced and then the water heater and then the calls keep mounting up so think about those things as well when you make a purchase at their costs associated with owning something saving for retirement and we’re actually going to have a part of a session that’s geared towards saving for retirement but a couple of quick things I can say now is make sure you’re taking advantage of any free money especially uh employer 401K match that’s you know whatever they match up to contribute at least up to that amount if you can and most people would say that you do that even if you’re in debt because you have a very limited time and again this is free money this is money that you’re not putting in yourself you’re putting in money and your employer is putting in money as well matching so if any of you have an employer that does that then you want this is something you want to take advantage of just your future self will thank you very much for for doing that make sure to choose the best tax treatment based on your situation and projected future situation do you want taxes deferred now do you want to deferred in the future well what would your income be in the future does having tax deferred money when you’re not making much money when you’re in your 60s or 70s because you’ve you’ve retired and so your only money is the income you’re drawing in from retirement vehicles if you’re not making that much money your taxes are going to be lower so it doesn’t really make sense to then have tax deferred money or is it better while your income is much higher now to have tax deferred money well there are other things to consider besides just that but those are the questions that you have to be asking those are the things that you have to think about um when you think about retirement and again we’ll talk about this in a little bit more more detail another area of budgeting that that’s really important is deciding how much you want to give and this is kind of a guideline that uh many people would apply if you’re not sure how much to give especially through church that you start out with 10 percent it’s just no it’s not we’re not tithing and you know the Mandate the time was something else specific to the Israelites not to the New Testament Church but 10 is just a good number to start with you know start with giving 10 percent and then look to increase over time pray about it plan for it and make increases um if any of you have been in the membership class lately I mean lately probably the last 10 or 15 years um when Dwayne does his class on finances he talks about how you know he started at a certain I’m not sure if it was 10 but he started a certain amount uh with his giving and then purpose to to reevaluate that every year how much he gives and to increase it by one percent and I think he actually read that somewhere um so that’s that’s something that you should be doing wherever you start looking to increase it and all the things we talked about giving last week of course will um should factor into your decision and thinking about this but it’s something you actually have to budget for it’s not just oh when I have extra money I’ll get some of it to the church this is something that God expects of us in the extent we really covered that a lot last week giving outside of the church this is where I talked about having an emergency fund for others so having some type of giving fund saving money having an account that’s set up so when people are in need and we feel led to give and help them with that need we can do it and it doesn’t impact our normal day-to-day budget or we don’t have to say man I would be able to give but this big expense just hit us and we just don’t have the money if you have money set aside in the bank account set aside just for giving to other people then when you feel led to give you’ll be able to give and you won’t be in a position to say ah if only so that’s another thing we have to think about is not just our weekly or bi-weekly or monthly giving in church is being able to have that Generous Heart that we talked about last week um even amongst other people especially God’s people so the last one and I think we’re actually going to go talk about this a little more next week as well when we actually talk about setting up a budget is evaluating expenses so that’s the last um the last piece to uh coming up with a budget so we tracked our income tracked our expenses we know where our money is going we set up goals so we know how we want to spend our money now we have to look to say well there’s our money the way we’re spending it match what we said we want to do with our money and if it doesn’t then we have to make changes so there are two uh key things this allows us to do identify areas of waste so when we budget and when we evaluate our expenses that’s the first thing we’re looking for we’re looking for areas where we’re wasting money I mean we may be in situations where we just don’t have enough income no matter what to meet our expenses even when we cut things away and we talked about that a couple weeks ago and we’ll talk about that actually next week when it comes to paying off that the fact that increasing income is also a part of of the budgeting process and evaluating what we are financially but identifying areas of waste I think is the first thing that should be done because as the name says it’s waste it doesn’t matter if you’re comfortable financially or if you’re struggling you don’t want to waste God’s money God did not provide this money to you for it to be so much of a waste that even we see it and even we recognize it with our imperfect brains and the perfect Hearts we can recognize that it’s waste and that’s not why God has provided US money to just kind of throw it away and be frivolous and a couple of the standard um examples that you hear all the time I’m going to use them as well I try not to because they become cliche but they’re just they’re so good and they’re so true and the things we don’t think about uh a cup of coffee each workday for a year costs over a thousand dollars over a thousand dollars for the year just on coffee and there are some people who who swear by it and some people who say I have to I have to do it I try doing it at home I just don’t have the time I don’t have the whatever and then you can just hear all the different reasons and ultimately it is a a personal decision that you have to make but this is one thing and if only I had an extra thousand dollars right now I mean if I could give you a thousand dollar check right now and all it meant was for the past year you brewed your own coffee or even bought a Keurig for a hundred dollars and you still have over a thousand because this is probably about twelve hundred dollars or something um I didn’t write the official number uh you still have about a thousand dollars in savings and you bought this one thing that’s going to continue to give you savings over time um even with buying the supplies so those types of things that we have to think about are there ways I could be more efficient so that’s this is why you track your expenses and you want to be precise with how you attract them so you can analyze them and say wow where am I just giving away money not taking lunch to work and having to buy lunch can cause between three and four thousand dollars a year so right there we just save five thousand dollars in one year and probably a little less just because if we don’t eat out our grocery calls it’s probably gonna increase a little but it’s definitely not going to increase by three to four thousand dollars a year especially if you see that person that I’m that I told you guys about about you know spending Less in your budget high-end cable package can cost you over twelve thousand dollars in five years is it really worth it to watch whatever weird show comes on TV now I don’t know I don’t really watch TV um so thousand shows that I’m forced to watch but um you know and we actually watched that on Netflix I think right I don’t know where where but you know the point is that there there are things we can do there are things we can look at to um in our budget to be able to be more efficient and to free up money same question if I gave you twelve thousand dollars right now but that meant that you had to either wipe your memory of the shows that came on cable and you don’t remember those episodes would you do it for twelve thousand dollars are you willing to forget what happened to the lead character in some show was Game of Thrones is that one of them right I don’t know is that is that something I have to look at somebody to confirm because I think that’s the name of a show right okay all right so are you willing to do that are you willing to give up your memories of what happened to those characters for twelve thousand dollars I mean just consider it that way what is it really worth where is the value and then think about it another way did God if if Jesus Christ walked through the door just think about us being in Jerusalem you walk through the door and of course it’s still modern day you know we’re speaking English and he says I’ll give you twelve thousand dollars right now use it the way you want and would you say oh that’s just what I need to go get cable for the next five years would you do that so think about it that I mean this is what happened God is giving us these resources and obviously we talked about last week about him giving us uh things to enjoy as well and we don’t have to sit here and say if it puts a smile on our face it’s sinful that’s not the attitude we’re taking but we’re talking about being efficient we’re talking about being faithful with God’s money and the last thing when we do this um we should uh look for different um without goals actually we should try to order them we should look for the things that are most important and set priorities on them because we may not be able to accomplish every goal at once financially we may not even be able to save for or spend towards every goal at once so we have to prioritize them another thing we can do when we evaluate our expenses and this is the last thing fortunately because we’re running out of time is look for ways to downsize in some examples here a smaller home move in with someone goodbye Odom out of a car change your cell phone plan we already talked about getting rid of entertainment or swapping it out for something that’s a lot cheaper you know like an Amazon Prime and Netflix if we’re talking about television or something or even you know phone carriers getting one that’s not one of the traditional ones there’s a lot of things that we can do um and we really need to look at the idea and again this is the the budgeting order we really need to look at the idea of that if something doesn’t at least indirectly support our goals then we should consider getting rid of it you know we we are not we are Eternal beings this world around us is temporal and it’s fading we are not going to be worse off if we miss out on some worldly pleasure or piece of enjoyment uh for the right to be or the ability to be faithful with God’s money and even more faithful with God’s money we should be willing not only willing we should take joy in making sacrifices to support the work of God so as always if you have any questions this is how you can reach us for this stuff and um like I said let’s go for the Lord and pray God we want to be faithful with all the resources that you give us especially God we want to be faithful to pray we want to be faithful to read your word we want to be faithful to attend uh gathered worship we want to be faithful to minister to the brothers and sisters that you’ve given us in Christ and we want to be faithful even in the financial goals that you set before us in supporting our um families supporting ourselves and providing for the work of the Kingdom supporting missionaries God having your gospel go out so I pray God that you would bless us to be able to look it out finances to look at how we handle your money handle your wealth and to make changes to repent of any attitudes that were sinful or even things that just held us back from running this race freely and clearly gotta also just pray for the food in the back and just thank you for it and those who work hard to serve and providing it thank God even for bringing the short Myers to us today and just pray that you bless the service that you bless the word that Brian preaches and that we will be attentive and that we would uh be ready to worship you in all that we do and we ask this in Christ’s name amen thank you