Money

I teach a young married Bible study class at my church. This month we are doing a study on finances based off of Dame Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. He has some biblical principles to help people get out of debt. The church in a whole has been giving classes to over 80% of the church to help everyone out in these hard economic times. The goals are to help families overcome the burden of debt and help reduce the financial stress that is on most marriages. In the long run if the majority of people in our church have no debt and are managing their money well, we can better serve the community needs. This program is not a quick fix with short term goals, but a slow process with long term results. My wife and I have already gone through the classes and have notice a big difference with our money in a positive way.

So our Sunday school class topic was on saving.

Proverbs 21:20 “In the house of the wise are stores of choice food and oil, but a foolish man devours all he has.”

We talked about the importance of saving for the future and to be prepared for when a crisis strikes the family. Also we talked about the example we are teaching our kids by saving. Someone brought up that kids just see us swipe a card when we purchase something. This made me think how often I use cash, never. Then I began to realize that our whole society could be based on imaginary magical numbers. I don’t get a paper pay check anymore. My numbers are directly deposited to my account; I don’t even get a print out of my numbers that I earn anymore. If I want to see how many numbers I have I go online and see if I have more numbers than I did before. If I want to buy something I take my card and swipe it then they deduct some numbers from my account. When I pay my bills I go onto my computer and move some numbers from one place to another. It is like a video game, if I have a lot of numbers at the end of the month I win. Can we call it money anymore when it’s really just some numbers on the screen? Do they even need to print money anymore?
So here is what we are teaching our kids. If you go to a store, pick out what you want, you just wave this magic card through a slot and that’s it. What kids don’t understand is why dad is pulling his hair out and screaming because the numbers at the end of the month are not as big as they need to be, in fact they might have a little minus sign in front of them, which means game over. By the way one of Dave’s lessons is to buy everything in cash. Cash is easier to keep track of and harder to let go of. If you don’t have the cash to buy something then you don’t need it and shouldn’t buy it.

Proverbs 22:6 “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”

If we have kids, I hope to teach them how to save their money. After all they'll be deciding which retirement home to put me in.