Ep. 066 - Budgeting with a Kingdom Mindset: Setting Financial Finish Lines

Episode Transcript

Austin
Creating a budget is one of the first steps to managing money wisely. Considering how your budget honors God can be overwhelming. Today we will discuss how to budget with God's Kingdom in mind.

Spencer
Finish lines. They sound great and it's fun to get there, but that process can be pretty tough. So this series we get to talk about a lot of different finish lines. And even before we get there, we need to talk about budgeting because they are kind of the crux of that. Right?

Austin
Yeah, absolutely. And so we'll talk about finish lines in terms of income, savings, and for the next generation. And we've mentioned this before that it's a wise decision to trust God day to day with the money that he puts in our hands, because we want to be conduits of grace. We don't want to be like a river that's dammed, and we just have too much in our own hands.
We want to let God's resources pass through our hands to others. And one way that we can tangibly do that is by setting finish lines. And so, but we can't set a finish line if we don't know where the money's going and how it's being used right now. And so that's where we're going to be headed in the future.
But today we want to discuss both, what do we mean when we say finish lines, and then how do we actually set up a budget. So when we say finish lines, in simplest terms, a finish line is a cap on either how much you take in from your savings and keep for your [sic] or taken from your income, and keep for your living expenses.
And then anything over that you give away. Similarly, with savings or heirs, you set a limit, a cap and say, “Once I hit this number, then everything else moves out of my hand and either moves to a charity, to the church, to some other institution. So we're not just allowing ourselves to build a second, a third, a fourth or fifth barn.
We want to be conduits of God's grace. And so why is budgeting important in this area, Spencer?

Spencer
Well, budgeting gives us a target. We know we're going to be off from it unless, you know, you have a consistent bill that's coming in that, you know, every month that's going to be $94.31. That's easy to budget. But for most of us, for the rest of life, our groceries, our gas, all other kinds of things in our budget, it's just going to be a target.
It's a marker, though, that tells us, “Okay, do we need to adjust here in some way because we're either spending too much here?” for instance, let's just say that we are spending twice as much as we had accounted for and eating out. That could tell us a lot of different things that might just tell us that, “Wow, well, things have changed and we need to eat out more because we're under significant duress, because we have family sickness or other things that we've just got to, get other service providers’ help.”
But it could tell us that maybe we're not paying attention in that area, and we need to kind of come back to being good stewards of what the Lord would ask.

Austin
Yeah. And really, at the end of the day, budgeting shines a light on how we are using the money that God has placed in our hands. If we don't live by a budget, if we don't set a budget, if we don't come back to a budget and reassess it regularly, then we're not shining that light. We're not opening it, lifting back that veil per se, to say, “Okay, are we actually using God's money wisely?”

Spencer
Right. So we can, as we think about budgeting, it's kind of in that, “cool state”. We're not in the midst of trying to make a purchasing decision. We can reflect on the budget and we can set “Well, here's where I really want to be,” and we can do that in that cool state, and not in a state where we feel like there's pressure against us.
We make the decision before, and that can help us to be able to live that out in the moment.

Austin
Yeah, absolutely. So when we think about where do we begin on a budget; we're going to come back to this every week for the next couple of weeks, is we need to pray and ask God for wisdom. We come back to James 1:5: “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given to him.”
We trust God, we pray, and then we listen. We actually have to listen to God about what he would say. We have open conversations with our brothers and sisters in Christ, whether that's a spouse, a roommate, a friend. We really need to have these conversations in community. It's really wise to open your budget to other people. As scary as that may be.
And then we want to consider being open handed, again: there's not “One size fits all.” There's a different life season. A family of five with three kids under the roof that are eating them out of house and home is going to be very different than a retired couple who may make most of their meals at the house.
So we need to say there's not a one size fits all budget. And so the next step is really once we've prayed, once we've considered, okay, who are some trusted people to talk to you, you got to get a baseline. And so getting a baseline will mean you need to actually download the different bank statements, credit card statements, all of your spending.
You need to get your income and you need to see where it's actually going. You can't set a budget that you don't know where money's going. Now you can if you know, “Okay, I make maybe $5,000 a month after taxes,” then you can kind of start to say, “Okay, well, I think that things should go here, here and here,” but you really need to look back and see, “Okay, what have I been doing?” to kind of get some sort of a baseline. And then you can adjust.

Spencer
Right, because there's a level of, momentum that we've got in that particular area. And, trying to change everything at once is going to be likely difficult. So we need to say, “Okay, where am I at right now?” If we've not done a budget in the past, if we've done a budget in the past, then we started and we asked for wisdom and we understand this process maybe a little bit more.
But for those who haven't really taken this step or maybe just look at the end of each month and make sure they've got enough in the account before, you know, the paycheck hits and then we start over again. Starting off here and looking and saying, “Okay, where have I been?” Can be a really important step.

Austin
And you could do this on a three month basis. You can do it on a one year basis. You can kind of do it however long. We wouldn't say just look back at the last 30 days. You need to get a little bit more data because there's some months that just [sic], expenses are going to be higher. And so how should we think as the church, as the people of God about budgeting?
Well, we've talked in the past about the different uses of money. We can use it for our living expenses. We can give money to charity, to others. We can owe debt, owe taxes, or we can use it for savings. [The] conversation today is going to be a little bit more nuanced in, “What does a month-to-month budget look like?”
Not those general categories. We can slot the uses of money into those categories, but we're going to dive in a little bit deeper. And we want to come back again to Jeremiah 2:12-13. And this is where God is speaking to the people, and he says, “Be appalled, O heavens at this; be shocked, be utterly desolate, declares the Lord,
for my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken systems that can hold no water.” And we want to start here, because I think there's this polarized tension of with we [sic] when we think about money especially, when we think about God as our provider, if we trust in money to be our provider instead of God, it's like that cistern that holds no water.
It's that turning away from God. That's the second evil. The first evil is that I'm looking at, I'm turning from God. And the second one is that I'm looking to something else to provide for me. So we need to make sure that we're always reframing this conversation of budgeting of “God is our provider”. If we're looking to money to fill us, our satisfactions and our needs and our desires, they're not going to give us life.
Only God is the fountain of living water. And so that's why we say, we have to come back and pray: “What, where do you want me to use the money that you have placed in my hands? God, I'm only a manager. I'm only a steward. I'm not the owner of these resources, YOU have provided.” So we want to have that in mind as we think about this.
We respond, therefore, as we look at the income; the very first thing that we do with any budget is we want to say “We want to give back to God our first fruits.” And we look at this and we see this all throughout the Levitical law. We see it through Deuteronomy that when the people of God see funds come in, whether it's gifts to the temple or whether it is a harvest, they always give the first fruits back to God.
It is that sacrifice, that first thing to say, “this really isn't mine, God. I'm just giving it back to you. I want to honor you.” And we see this in the New Testament as well. When we think about the tithe and you look at all the different letters Paul sent to either the Philippians to encourage them to say, “Hey, you have always participated with me.”
Or we look in we see in the letter to the Corinthians where Paul talks about the Macedonian church being generous. We see it throughout Scripture that the people of God are always generous with God and the resources that he has given us. And so the first step to any budget before we start saying, “what do I keep for myself?”
it's: “What do I give back to God?” And we would encourage you all to start with 10%. That may seem like a lot. It may seem undoable, but it's what has been throughout scripture; the tithe, the 10% gift back to God., it's always been scriptural. If that feels hard, think about if your income were to drop today by 10%, could you survive?
It's a challenging question, but I think most of us would say, “Yeah, I could probably cut spending here, here or here.” If you can do that, let's honor God with those first fruits instead. So, Spencer, after we've started to think about, “Okay, where do we, we've carved out that first little bit and said, ”Hey, we want to give this back to God,”
we start thinking about our basic necessities. So what do we need to consider in budgeting for our basic necessities?

Spencer
I think the way that we look at basic needs, we think about those categories that, they're fundamental they’re core: food, shelter, clothing, transportation. There are elements of this that this is just the way that we live as Americans. And certainly food, any culture, we're going to feed ourselves, our family. There is a level of latitude here that I think sometimes, but [sic] we don't recognize because, maybe our pattern has been eating out or eating food
that is higher cost. That is pre-prepared or something like that. We've got more latitude even in these basic necessities, I think oftentimes, then we recognize. But, then there are other elements to that, that they have a wide array of different potential costs. So shelter, you know, do we select a home that is going to be more than we actually need?
Do we select a home in a neighborhood that's going to be more expensive than perhaps we actually need or, you know, some other direction there? When we think about clothing, this is probably the widest array, you know, of what we could look at. It's not to say that we can't enjoy beautiful clothes or clothes that fit well or what have you, but there's a significant difference in cost between clothes that you could buy at KARM and clothes that you buy, you know, that are, hot off the press that they're, you know, new clothes from a designer, a huge wide array, there.
And so I think as we face those decisions, we have to recognize that even if we say this is a basic need, clothing is a basic need, there's still a huge difference between what we could do if we had to live off of half of our income and what we might choose otherwise. And this is where we come back to that
James 1:5 because there needs to be a lot of wisdom here. And sometimes when we even look at the trade offs, that can help provide clarity of if I had an extra 20% over here and I could bless someone with it, would I be willing to get the second hand jeans from KARM? That might cost, you know, a third the price,
you know, there.

Austin
And I think the key question that we need to ask here is 1. “Wow much is enough?” and “What is really a need versus a want?” And I come back to Philippians 4:11-13, and Paul is saying, “Not that I'm speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound in any and every circumstance.
I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” And Paul's commendation here is that we need to learn to be content in all circumstances. That our strength comes from a deep abiding in Jesus. Our ability to do these things comes from an abiding in Jesus and our contentment,
It's founded on Christ’s, humility and his gift and his sacrifice to us. It's not built on, “Well, I want to be able to do this, so God is going to give me the strength to do that.” No, it’s: “My strength is in that God has laid down his life for me, and I can be content whether I have a whole lot or whether I have a whole little.”
But I think it's that:”What is a need? What is a want?” And, “Can I be content with having my basic needs met, not to an extravagant level?” And so as we think about contentment and having those basic needs, we do want to come back and say “We don't all need to make a vow of poverty.”
You know, I think some, God may call some of us to do that. There are plenty of people that live in monasteries that God has called to a vow of poverty. Or maybe he's called you to live in a low income neighborhood, to be ministering to those around you and generously give to them. That's not everybody's call.
But we would say, “Let's not live either in extravagance or extreme need.” There's some place in a liminal space in the middle where we want to meet with God and continue to ask for wisdom. And so once we have those basic needs met; our food, our shelter, our clothing, then we can come to these other things that are discretionary or luxury items, per se.
So when we think about discretionary, this is allocation of a budget, allocation of resources away from things that are those basic needs to maybe some of those things that are wants or ways that I can spend my money to buy back time. We think about eating out. We think about lawn care services, home cleaning, things that are going to take my time.
But maybe I want to use a little bit of money in those ways so that I can buy time to maybe have a little bit of extra to spend with my kids, or, if I am constantly making dinner every night and I just need a break, I don't want to do the dishes. It's okay to go out.
But we also don't want to get in a rut where we're going out every breakfast, lunch, and dinner because we've got the money, and why else [sic] why wouldn't we do that? We can have good food and I don't have to do the dishes. So we want to think about those trade offs with these discretionary items. Yeah, it's okay! Go do it!
But how much is enough there, too? Do we really need to spend it on all of those things? And then when we think about luxury items, I think these are things that are, that can be anywhere from streaming services to travel or hobbies. Again, we want to come back here to Ecclesiastes 2 and say, “God wants us to enjoy this life.”
It, but it needs to be a partnership with God in life. We look at the writer of Ecclesiastes and he talks about how he pursued wealth, land, all these different things. He thought that they would satisfy. None of them did, because they were those hewn-out cisterns where we're trying to put that water end that aren't giving us life.
But instead, he says, we need to come back to a life lived alongside God. We see Jesus, he goes to parties, he celebrates, but he's not always at the party. There are many times in His life where He is not there. And so we want to balance. Yes, it's okay to have luxury items, but we don't want to overspend on that.
And I would even say we need to come back and think Netflix may not seem like a luxury item, but the reality, especially because we may only pay $10 a month for it. But the reality is my ability to be able to spend a de minimis amount for something that's going to take up a lot of my time,
that is a luxury item. Does my life, is my life drawn more to Jesus by binging Netflix? And I think this is really where I have to challenge myself and really pray. Yeah, it's okay to watch a movie. It's okay to subscribe to some of these things, but we need to really categorize them. They're luxury items that most humans, for the majority of human existence have not had them.
Hobbies are a good thing. I love the home gym equipment that I've got. A shiny new kettlebell is always going to look really enticing, but I have to come back to: “I have enough, I've had enough for years. Do I really need to spend that?” God may say “Yes, go ahead and buy it”. He may say “no.”
He may say, “wait”. The reality is, if I'm not having those conversations with God, then more likely I'm going to swipe the credit card, swipe the debit card, send the money to go if it's there. And so this really needs to be a conversation with God. When we think about those discretionary items, when we think about those luxury items. It's not just, “hey, God's giving me the money that means I can go do it.”

Spencer
Right. Well, I love how you positioned that in light of human history. You know, even I was struck one time when I heard John Piper talking about drinking a glass of orange juice for the glory of God. It's like, you know, most people in human history have not had the privilege of drinking the glass of orange juice. Yeah, it's a simple, basic thing, you know, for many of us, but it tastes delicious.
And so if we can appreciate that, if we can give thanks to God with our whole heart for the people that grew the oranges and picked the oranges and, you know, transport- you know, did all the transportation and all those kinds of things, then it can be great. And it can be very, very basic and fundamental.
But if that becomes a level of, kind of experience and wealth and such that it doesn't even register for us anymore, we're not really participating with God in the world. We're not really appreciating all the gifts that He’s given us. And I think that could be said for really any of the things that you're unpacking, there.

Austin
Yeah, yeah. And so what we want to start thinking now is, “Okay, once we set those, those budget items,” we said, “Okay, we see where we've spent. Now let's start setting caps on it.” Okay. Maybe my grocery bill is $500 a month. Maybe it's $1,000. Maybe for the last three months, I've spent $1,500. Look and see where it is and set a realistic cap.
Okay, has it been 1500? But you're spending a lot on caviar. Well maybe you can cut back on the caviar. Or, it's a realistic budget because you've got a whole bunch of teenagers in the house that just eat a lot of food, and you want to spend money on good food for them. Maybe that's, but you start setting those caps:
“Okay, I'm going to stop there or I'm going to stop at “X” amount for luxury. I'm only going to set aside a little bit every month for travel, because maybe I want to take a little bit simpler of a vacation this year.” So you set those caps and then you come back and see, “okay, I've made these caps.”
And what you don't want to do necessarily is try to fill it up every single time. If your income is, let's say, $4,000 a month, you don't necessarily want to say, “I'm going to spend every one of those dollars.” You want to leave a little bit of margin because again, there's going to be some months, there's more and some months that are less. But let's say you finish your budget and you've set that $4,000, you've got $4,000 of income.
And you realize, “Man, after I've set this budget, even with giving my live. give, like, all of those things, my discretion, my desires, my basic needs; I've got $500. What do I do with it? It'd be really easy to say, ”Man, it's time for me to go buy X, Y or Z.” Come back and pray again: “Lord, would you have me,
How would you have me use these resources? I have access in my budget more than I need. Would you have me give that somewhere else? Would you open my eyes maybe to a church or a charitable need that is, “maybe I should be giving that extra 500 away.” Maybe you need to be saving it because you don't have an emergency fund.
And so some of these things, we always come back and we say, okay, as we reassess our budget, we come back again before the Lord and say, “okay, Lord, what, what now do you want me to do?” So as we think about what are the next steps, we've kind of given some practical. But we always come back to James 1:5. Seek the Lord, pray for wisdom, ask the Holy Spirit for guidance.
Once you've set your budget, consider going and saying, Hey, Spencer, will you walk through this with me? This is where my spending has been. This is where I think I could be. They may be able to say, “Hey, you've been spending X on food for the last five months. What makes you think that you can cut it by 30%?” You know, so there can be wisdom, not just in saying, “hey, I need your help,” but “show me where my faults lie.”
We reassess regularly. Maybe you said it, and then you realize, “Man, I can go. I can cut a little bit more from this area, experience the joy of giving away.” Maybe that's been really exciting for you. That extra 500 has been really joyful for you to be able to give to your church and see what God is doing there.
Maybe you want to increase it and continue to cut back on some of those other luxury or discretionary items. We come back again to contentment. We say, “God, how can I be content, whether it's in abundance or in need?” And then we just often reassess, “Okay, what are those finish lines?” Maybe my circumstances change. A kid graduates college or high school and they move out of the house.
Hey, it's time to reassess the budget. So again, these are malleable things. Your budget is never going to be set forever, so feel free to regularly reassess. Come back to the Lord, come back to your friends and say, “God, how do you want us to honor you with our wealth?” Clients, if you have any questions about budgeting, you want to talk about it with us,
you want to bring your budget in and go over line by line what's happening; we would love to do that. And always feel free to leave comments down below and we'll see you again next time for how to set income limits and finish lines. If you found this episode valuable, share it with a friend and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so that you don't miss the next episode.

Disclaimer
This content was provided by Second Half Stewardship. We are in Knoxville, Tennessee and you can visit our website at www.secondhalfstewardship.com. The information in this recording is intended for general, educational and informational purposes only, and should not be construed as investment advisory, financial planning, legal, tax or other professional advice based on your specific situation. Please consult your professional advisor before taking any action based on its contents.