GYC 2015: Called. Chosen. Faithful.

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Beyond the Tithe: Practical Lessons on Personal Finance

Alistair Huong

1. Neither Poverty Nor Riches: Redefining Wealth & Prosperity

This message was presented at the GYC 2015 conference called Chosen Faithful in Louisville, Kentucky.

For other resources like this, visit us online at www.gycweb.org.

Let me begin by introducing myself just very briefly before we get officially started.

I assume it's going and the recording should be online later.

Some of you probably know me from my work with Audioverse.

That's generally what I do when I'm in conferences like this is talk about Audioverse, which is much closer related to the mission of GYC and things of that nature.

But a couple years ago, my wife and I started writing about a strange hobby of ours.

You might call us personal finance enthusiasts.

But as you know, nerds and geeks, It's actually a compliment these days.

It's not so much of a derogatory statement, so I don't mind being a nerd.

And so as a result, we were writing about our personal experiences, saving money, managing our finances, biblical principles, and things of that nature.

And lo and behold, GYC asked that I share some of my experiences and what I've learned here at this conference.

I am not a professional, but hopefully through my experience as a layperson just like you dealing with regular everyday money issues, I can share some things that might be practical and helpful for you.

So with that, let's officially get started here with a word of prayer and then we'll get going.

Gracious Heavenly Father, we are so thankful that you give us an opportunity right here at the beginning, the end of 1 year, the beginning of the next, focused on things above.

And as we begin this particular seminar thinking about some practical things about how we can be better managers of the assets you have bestowed upon us, may we be faithful.

And may we learn how to live by faith, a faith that doesn't just talk and wish and hope, but a faith that works.

A faith that works according to your revealed principles.

And so I ask that you will guide us and teach us and help us to learn something useful today, we pray in Jesus' name, amen.

Welcome once again, the title of our seminar is Beyond the Tithe, Practical Lessons on Personal Finance, And the reason why it's called Beyond the Tithe is because when we think about stewardship, that's the general term we use in the church, I think that term comes with some baggage.

It's unfortunate because I don't think that's the case, but now stewardship has been sort of relegated to when the pastor asks you to pay your tithe faithfully.

I mean, that's pretty much how we associate the word stewardship.

And by the way, we are going to talk about giving to God, but there's so much more to stewardship.

And so I actually shy away from the term stewardship just because of the connotation, even though it's a fine term, and just stick with the words personal finance.

And we want to be practical this weekend in this seminar.

We're going to look at biblical principles and we could have whole studies about just what the Bible has to say about money and we'll deal a little bit with that but we're actually going to be spending more time on the nuts and bolts hopefully that, you know, we can actually apply.

Principles are important and you can actually check on Audioverse.

We have messages on there by other individuals that deal with a lot of good principles.

So Beyond the Tithe, it hopefully gives us the picture, it's not just about paying a faithful tithe and offerings, our money, all of it belongs to God, and we need to think in a holistic way.

So session number 1 here, the title is Neither Poverty Nor Riches, And I want you to think carefully because all of, not just this title, but all of the titles of all 6 sessions are directly lifted from inspiration.

And if you think carefully about it, it's actually, they're the key points.

And so keep that in mind and see if you can identify where is it in the Bible or the spirit of prophecy that this name comes from and how does it apply to the main point today.

It's going to give you some broad principles that we're going to build on on the next few sessions, and also give you an overview, an outline of what the other sessions are going to be and what we're going to talk about.

This is sort of an introduction, but also we'll give you some principles as well.

I need to make that clear up front, disclaimer.

We have a house and we have to pay bills and I have a feeling you do too.

I'm not a professional, but if it matters to you, I do have a degree in business, but actually that qualification is less important than the next 1, which is I know how to do math.

You're going to find out personal finance, If you know some basic arithmetic, that's all you really need.

A little bit of common sense, knowing how to do basic arithmetic, and you'll probably be just fine.

You don't need a business degree, but in case you care, I do have 1.

I graduated with a master's degree from Southern Advance University.

And I'm going to share a little bit about that when we talk about student loans and things in session number 4 this afternoon.

And we have, We bought a house and we paid it off in 2 years.

Most people think that's pretty remarkable, but the fact is there's really no secret.

I'll tell you all about it later on this afternoon as well.

So in 2014, we spent 23% of our take-home pay.

So just as a framework of how we have managed our money.

And you know, Babies are hard on the budget.

In 2015, we spent 24 percent, so yes, it did raise the budget.

We gave 22 percent, and it's really more like a rounding error, but we still saved 55 percent.

Even with a baby, and we haven't gotten our tax return for the baby and all that kind of good stuff.

And once we had our baby, my wife has stayed home.

She doesn't work anymore, and I work for a ministry.

Now I will qualify, we have godly parents who believe that both my wife and I, who believe it was their responsibility to give us an education.

And so I and my wife both had our undergraduate studies paid for, which is a huge blessing, huge blessing, and I praise God for that.

But with my master's degree, buying a house, all the rest, we don't have a secret stash, okay?

We don't have some – we didn't win the lottery.

So that's sort of a picture of why perhaps I have something to share.

So my wife and I, we write a blog, a personal finance blog.

So this is the website, you can check it out, savingthechromes.com.

And I also want to mention that all of the slides that I have here are in digital handout form already.

2. Gather Up the Fragments: Prospering by Saving the Crumbs

Father in heaven, we are so thankful that you have given us another opportunity to consider practical ways to manage your money that you have entrusted to us.

This session we ask in Jesus' name, amen.

Session 2, gather up the fragments, prospering by saving the crumbs.

Some of you are asking, so let me just reiterate this.

My wife and I, we have a blog where we write about personal finance, and we've written about a lot of subjects.

I'm just really scratching the surface in the 6 hours we have together here.

So you can visit savingthecrumbs.com to get more detail on things that we've written already.

Also the handouts, all of the slides, they're already available on the GYC app.

And also, they will be available to download later on when the audio recordings and everything are ready to go.

So, savingthecrumbs.com, Handouts, recordings, you can get that information even if you missed it the first time around.

And this is what the Desire of Ages has to say about it.

Jesus fed the 5, 000 with the loaves and the fishes.

And here's a man who can create food out of basically thin air, and he says, go pick up the leftovers.

He could have made more, but he said, go pick them up.

But he who had all the resources of infinite power at his command said, Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.

These words meant more than putting bread into baskets.

The principle to be learned is Nothing is to be wasted.

We are to let slip no temporal advantage.

The lesson of the feeding of the 5, 000 and gather up the fragments is simply less waste.

Take advantage of the things that we might feel like are unnecessary, but no temporal advantage should be allowed to slip away and to not be able to be used for God's work.

All right, Benjamin Franklin put it this way.

Watch the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves.

So I mentioned earlier, my wife and I, we named our blog Saving the Crumbs.

And Half of the reason why we named it that is really in honor of the parable of the feeding of the 5, 000.

Gather of the fragments, it's basically the same thing as saving the crumbs.

But there's a specific story that happened early on in our marriage that helped us come up with this name.

When we were first married, my wife wanted to bake bread for our home, and we had a bread maker, and she was trying out different recipes.

And they didn't work ideally at first, And so half the loaf of bread it seemed, that's an exaggeration, a lot of crumbs ended up on the cutting board when we sliced our bread.

And so what's the normal response when you have crumbs on a cutting board?

You sort of wipe it off in the garbage disposal, in the trash, whatever, and you keep going on with life.

Well, my wife, being the enterprising and crumb-saving woman that she was, she saved those crumbs.

Literally saved them in a Tupperware container, put it in the freezer.

And we were pumping out a lot of loaves of bread, because we were trying to experiment with this thing and trying to figure it out and before long the crumbs were enough for us to actually use in some other recipe.

We made onion rings or breaded okra or something, right?

You save the crumbs and the crumbs can amount to something else that is useful that you can apply to something else.

So the lesson from Jesus Christ, let no waste or let nothing go to waste.

The temporal advantages that he's given to us, we need to seize them and take advantage of them.

And so I have a very simple objective in this hour.

If you walk away from this session with 1, remembering there's 1 thing, and you commit to do it, It's sort of 2 things, but you'll see.

That is, I am here to convince you to spend less and to save more.

And I'm going to try my best to make the compelling case.

So when I was in high school, I got my first job.

I was a teacher's assistant for a junior high computer lab.

I was a freshman in high school, and I wanted basketball shoes.

Why did I want basketball shoes, do you suppose?

Doesn't matter that I couldn't play basketball.

I didn't even watch basketball, but I wanted basketball shoes.

So, I made $5.25 an hour, which was, you know, when I got my first paycheck, I'm like, I have never seen this much money before in my life.

High school kid and I realized a pair of sneakers $50 or so, I would have to work 10 hours to earn this pair of sneakers.

So when I got that paycheck, let's say I don't remember, it might have been a week of work, 2 hours a day or something, I got my check, $52.50.

How much of it do you suppose I spent on those shoes?

And so what do you suppose I started thinking next?

I was a gamer back then, not anymore, a recovered video game addict, and I was looking at the next game I wanted.

Okay, so it's like an $80 game, all right?

And so how much of my paycheck do you suppose I spent on that when the time came?

I'm about to drive soon, so mom and dad, get ready because I need a car.

I was in love with the SUVs and all that kind of stuff.

As a high school kid, I had a very narrow view of the use of money.

Money was good for 1 thing and 1 thing only, And that is to buy stuff that I wanted.

And wouldn't you agree that that's sort of become the definition now of the American dream?

You come here, you live life in America, you work hard, and you can buy whatever you want.

Well that's the life that I had and so it was very clear.

3. Counting the Cost: Relationships, Budgets & Your Life

Gracious Heavenly Father, we are so thankful for the clarity of your word.

And Lord, as we seek to be wise stewards, careful Bible students, help us to apply these principles in a rational, reasonable way that gives glory to you and that demonstrates our faith that we truly believe what you have asked us and that we will believe that you will enable us to do even that which we find terribly difficult.

And so I pray today, right now, in particular this session, as we talk about some nuts and bolts, looking at how to prepare a budget and think about the overarching tools at our disposal, I pray that you will teach us and you will guide us.

All right, come on in for those of you in the back.

So, session 3, the title is Counting the Cost, Relationships, Budgets, and your life.

I am just making this little statement at the beginning of every seminar in case you haven't heard it before.

We, my wife and I, we have a blog, savingthecrumbs.com, where we are writing on a fairly regular basis on financial topics, personal finance, a lot of it is just from our personal experience.

We try to keep it light hearted, try to keep it fun and we actually share a whole host of fairly private information.

Most people consider how much you earn and how much you spend and things like that quite private, but we figured that if it's going to benefit someone, we actually share all that information.

And just as a little teaser, in a few weeks here I'll be doing our annual financial report on how much we earned, how much we spent, how much we gave for the year 2015.

And you can already see what we did in 2014 and the years before.

But this is a special 1 because we had a baby.

You'll have to stay tuned, keep you in suspense.

But all of the handouts, or rather the slides that I'm using, The PDF handout has already been created.

You can already access it right now through the GYC app.

So I know a lot of people have been asking me about this.

It's available on the app currently right now.

So you can get it and follow along if you want.

But of course, you'll be tempted to read ahead, and you'll spoil the surprise.

And also in the handout, I don't show you on the slides here, but in the handout there are direct links to articles that I've already written on topics we address in each seminar.

So when we talked about why we should save money, and the importance of living a thrifty life, and all those things, and even specific articles.

Like I talked about how I have unlimited iPhone plan that has unlimited 4G LTE data on AT&T's network, phone, you know, calling, texting, unlimited everything for $20 a month.

I have a whole series of blog posts talking about that.

How I got my wife's iPhone for 50% off, all this kind of stuff, you can find it on the website.

How to save on electricity, heating, cooling, solar panels, and all the rest.

So, I can't cover everything here, so that's why I keep mentioning this, because if you have further questions, chances are it might have been addressed already in a previous blog post.

And we're always writing more stuff as well.

So the title of this seminar is Counting the Cost.

Jesus tells the story in Luke 14, 28 through 30.

For which of you desiring to build a tower does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it.

Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, this man began to build and was not able to finish.

Is that the Bible, Jesus himself, gives us a very clear principle that it is wise to have a plan.

Is that sometimes we associate moving forward with no plan, we say, that's living by faith.

That ain't faith people because faith takes God at his word and what faith looks like is God you said that we need to look ahead and we need to lay down our plans.

We have done the best plan that we have been able to concoct and we believe you're leading us in this and so by faith we will embark on the plan and trust that you will make up the lack.

You see the difference between that and I don't need a plan.

So it might be a fine nuance and you may not necessarily be able to tell the difference if you're viewing from the outside, but internally I think this is important for us to remember as we apply to our own lives.

You must have a plan and that's what this seminar session right now is going to be all about.

How do we make a practical, useful, financial plan that actually moves us towards our goals, helps us to be faithful to God, and be able to avoid debt and the other pitfalls.

So there are 4, roughly 4 types of plans that we're going to discuss.

And they all interact 1 with another, and I'll show you how they do in a minute.

And you can call them what you want, but life event plans essentially is taking our goals in life.

So whatever it is in our lives that's going to cost us money, we start with the goal, okay?

And after we have a life event plan, then we move into what I call the savings plans.

And the savings plans are sort of 2 sides of the coin.

There is the long-term savings plan, things that we need 5 years or more down the road, and the short-term saving plans, things that we need within 5 years.

And then, after we figure out how much we need to save in the savings plan, then we move down to what we commonly call the budget.

And what I call that is the monthly spending plan.

Okay, it's the same thing synonymous with the budget, but I don't use the word budget mainly because I like the rhyme, everything's a plan.

And also, the word budget comes along with it a lot of negative baggage.

People associate budgets with tightening the belt, painful cuts, austerity.

You know, we don't want that kind of connotation.

What it is, it's a plan to help us reach our goals.

A plan is to help us get to our destination and our monthly spending plan is a part of the roadmap.

And then finally, this is not exactly a plan, but it's a context in which these plans are created and executed, and that is within the context of relationships.

And so let me just show you in the next slide.

Everything is going to start with our life events.

And life events, again, are the goals that we have for our lives looking forward.

And that will feed into our long-term and short-term savings.

And then from the long-term and short-term savings, it moves us into our monthly spending.

What are the goals we want to accomplish in our lives?

And then it filters down into let's break this down.

Okay, what are the long term things I need, short term things, and from there, it flows into our monthly spending, which is what we will be looking at on a more regular basis.

And then the monthly spending feeds back into the long-term and short-term savings column, and then we have a nice little loop of feedback.

It comes back over the monthly spending, And then there's a nice little loop there.

And then all of this happens within the context of relationships.

The fact is we mentioned this very briefly earlier this morning, and that is relationships, and money can't really be separated.

The family's finances, no matter how you slice it, they're gonna intersect.

And also, if you really wanna think about it this way, if you have life goals, Life plans, it's going to affect your relationships.

And so we can't deny this aspect of the money picture.

Series

Beyond the Tithe: Practical Lessons on Personal Finance

4. Indentured Servants with Smallpox: Dealing With Debt

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Ed Reid: Faith and Finances in the End Times

Making Major Purchases with Minimum Debt

59m

Beyond the Tithe: Practical Lessons on Personal Finance

3. Counting the Cost: Relationships, Budgets & Your Life

1h

Beyond the Tithe: Practical Lessons on Personal Finance

2. Gather Up the Fragments: Prospering by Saving the Crumbs

1h

Faith and Finance

Session 2: Dealing with Credit Cards, Student Loans, and other Debts

50m

Talking Points 1st Quarter 2023: Managing for the Master Until He Comes

05 Dealing with Debt

29m

For the Love of Money: Biblical Lessons on Personal Finance

5. Consider the Ant: Real Ways to Save

1h 8m

The Pathway to True Prosperity

1. Meiste & Nephew- Debt is Dumb

1h 9m

Financing Yourself

Financing Yourself- Part 4

1h 10m

For the Love of Money: Biblical Lessons on Personal Finance

4. Therewith to Be Content: On Debts and Budgets

1h 1m

Financing Yourself

Financing Yourself- Part 3

1h 11m

Ed Reid: Faith and Finances in the End Times

Savings and Investing in Uncertain Times

59m

Sound Doctrine