A Biblical Perspective on Money

Krisan Marotta: Welcome to the Wednesday in the Word podcast. I'm Krisan Marotta, and this is my podcast about what the Bible means and how we know. Today we'll be listening to a talk entitled Wealth Wisdom: A Biblical Perspective on Stewarding Money. My husband and I gave this talk at the Center for Christian Study in 2018. And this is a live recording of that event. You can find the original handout for the talk in the show notes, which are at wednesdayintheword.com slash wealthwisdom. Thanks for listening. MC: Okay, so for our topic for tonight, money. I don't know about you. I'd rather just not talk about it. That's about where I am, so I think it's worth naming that. I thought about it, and actually, in terms of like things you're not supposed to talk about at a dinner party, they say religion and politics, right? But I think money is probably even worse than those two, less talked about. So if we can do pleasure reading, let's say, in a book club, in a way that's faithful to Jesus, surely that's true with our money, too, and the things that God gives us. And so it really is important that we do talk about it, that we are intentional with it. So I'm glad to have our two speakers here tonight, David and Krisan Marotta. They've been an active part of this ministry for years as parents of UVA students, as board members, and they've given a number of talks for us as well that you can find a few of on our website. David, I didn't know that you'd given a series on comic books back in 2008. That's what I found from digging the depths of our website. You can go listen to a four or five-part series on comic books. Pretty cool stuff. So David runs a company called Marauder Wealth Management, and he's worked with hundreds of families helping them to manage their family finances. And Krisan also runs her own company called Krisan's Back Office. And she's taught the Bible for many years in a number of different settings. And I'm glad to have them both here, precisely because of the money is something you don't talk about thing. Both of them have expertise in money and in managing money, but they also happen to be married to one another. And I think this is a really significant thing. Because it is true that where we are tripped up is by not being willing to talk openly about how we are using our money. And so words that I think of when I think of the Marotta, I'm going to flatter you for a sec, are candor and intentionality. I think you possess both those qualities, and I'm thankful for that. And so I'm very glad for you to bring that to our discussion of money tonight. So thanks so much for coming. Please join me in welcoming them. How about that? Do I have to do something to that? Nope, you are good. You might have to do something to that. Krisan Marotta: Well, thank you all for coming. I'm Krisan Marotta Morata, and I have to correct you. MC: Oh, what did I do? Krisan Marotta: I grew up in a family that didn't talk about money at all. And money was taboo. I didn't know anything about it. Didn't know anything. But I married someone who was a financial genius. So I lucked out because I learned it all from him. So even if you grew up in a family where they didn't talk about money, you can still learn. Well, we are going to talk about wealth and money. We're going to talk about a theological perspective on it and a practical perspective. So this you may go away thinking this talk is kind of schizophrenic. And it is, because we are going to get into theology, but we're also going to get into some of the nitty-gritty of, well, what do I do with money or how do I use it wisely? So we're going to try to hit both sides of those coins. So we're going to jump in. The basic principle when it comes to money is that we are stewards of it. That everything we have, all our resources, our wealth, our gifts, it all comes from God and it belongs to Him and not us. And our job is to use it wisely. And you've probably heard this before if you've been around Christian circles. So a steward is someone who manages someone else's property, someone else's affairs, or steward would handle the master's estate. He often had the authority to act on behalf of the master. He could sign contracts for the master. And everything he said or did was to reflect his master's wishes and his master's interest and his master's goals. And that's the model the Bible gives us of how we should handle our money is that it belongs to God. We are stewards of it, and we are to use it for his purposes. So the question is not who owns it, because God owns it. The Bible tells us the earth and everything in it belongs to the Lord. He's the owner, he's the creator. Whatever we have, he has entrusted to us. And it is our responsibility then to use it wisely as his representative. So we like to think the distinction is am I an owner or is God the owner? And we kind of make these lines about how much is his and how much is mine. But that's not the distinction God makes. And if we're taking it to use for our purposes as opposed to his, then we have embezzled that which is not ours to take. So it's not who owns it, God owns it all. We're the ones that are to use it wisely. It belongs to him. Now the temptation you're all going to face as soon as you get out of college and you get a job and you start acquiring something in a checking account or a bank account is to start thinking it's mine. That I earned it, so it's mine. And we're not unique in this. When the Israelites were about to enter the promised land, Moses was giving them instructions. So he says, You're about to leave the wilderness. So just think you're about to leave college. You're going to go into that land of prosperity, get a job, and have all this wealth, however big or small, is going to start amassing. And the temptation is going to be to think, it's mine, I earned it. It's not God's. So this is Deuteronomy 8. I'm going to read 11 to about 18, but the key verses I want you to notice are 17 and 18. So Moses is giving them instructions. He says, Take care lest you forget that the Lord your God by not take care lest you forget the Lord your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today. Lest when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks multiply, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then your hearts be lifted up, and you forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. So when you get out into the real world and you start earning your way and start having some prosperity and some comfort, he says, He talks about your herds, your flocks, your silver, your gold multiplied. The temptation is to say, It's mine. And then skipping down to 17, beware lest you say in your heart, My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth. You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the power to get wealth. That's about as clear, I think, as the Bible is on money. It all comes from God's hand. He's the one that gives it to you. So the temptation is going to be to think, I got this education, I worked hard in school, I got this great job, I worked hard, climbed the corporate ladder, I earned this. And yet, from God's perspective, he's saying, Who gave you the education? Who gave you the ability to study? Who gave you the job? Who gave you the ability to climb that corporate ladder? It's all from his hand. So the crucial question then is if we're a steward, what does God want us to do with our money? So here's the second principle. So the first is that we are stewards. The second is that stewards must use the resources God gives them to meet the responsibilities God gives them. So you're gonna, you've probably talked about calling and vocation. You've there's some path that God wants you to walk. It'll involve your career, it may involve usually a spouse and children, it might involve elderly parents, it might involve all kinds of things. Whatever it is he's called you to do, providing for your basic needs and meeting that calling, is your primary job as a steward. You're to use your finances, your gifts to meet the responsibilities of the calling that he's given to you. So that means the money is not there primarily to make you happy. The money is not there primarily to make your life easy or comfortable or pleasurable. Money can do those things, but that's not its primary purpose. Whatever God gives you, however big or small the slice of the pie he gives you, he is giving it to you because he's also giving you a calling and he wants you to meet that calling. So you use that money to meet the calling that he gives you. Now, typically, he's not going to drop money out of the sky into your lap. He expects you to work. So this is principle number three, and that is stewards must work to meet their responsibilities. So, whatever responsibilities God gives you, it usually involves work. Now, if you're part of a married couple and one of you stays home, that's I still that's still work. That's dividing the responsibilities and figuring out how best as a couple to meet them. But let's let's assume you're single at this point. So part of what God expects you to do is work. So this means you don't go live in your parents' basement. If you can help it, you go out and find a way to support yourself. And Paul makes this very point in 1 Thessalonians. He's writing to a church and he's as he concludes the letter, he's wrapping up and he says two things that he wants to emphasize on how Christians ought to live their lives differently than the world around them. One is sexual responsibility, and the other is financial responsibility. I find that very interesting that those are the two things he picked. He says in 1 Thessalonians 4, 3, for this is the will of God for your sanctification. So he's saying, let me remind you of the ways you are supposed to be different, the ways you are set apart, and when you get out in the world, the way you're supposed to look different than the world, one of those is sexuality. So this is 1 Thessalonians 4, 3 through 5. For this is the will of God for your sanctification, that you abstain from sexual immorality, that each of you know how to possess his own vessel and sanctification and honor, not in muscle passion, like the Gentiles who do not know God. So one of the ways we're distinctive when we get out in the world is the way we handle sexuality. And the other way is finance. Now there's a lot we can talk about on that, but since this is not a talk on the biblical view of sexuality, we're just going to leave that for your pondering and meditation and go on to look at his other point because when it gets down to verse 10, he turns to finances. And he says, But we urge you, brethren, to excel still more and to make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, attend to your own business, work with your own hands, and work with your own hands just as we commanded you, so that you will behave properly toward outsiders and not be in any need. So, right up there with being responsible sexually is being responsible financially. Notice, make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, attend to your own business and work with your hands. And I think that so that you will behave properly toward outsiders is probably a reference to hospitality, because hospitality was a very big deal in those days, or being able to be generous to the stranger who comes into your midst, and then not be in any need is the idea that you're not dependent on someone, that no one else has to support you or bail you out of situations. So he's making the point, you need to work. God's going to give you a calling, he's going to give you responsibilities, and part of the way that you meet them is through working. The problem with Thessalonica was that some folks had decided this not working is pretty good. So they got into this Christian community where people were generous and others would take care of them, and they decided, ooh, I'm just going to let others take care of me, and we're not working. So Paul, that's part of the reason Paul has this in 1 Thessalonians, but apparently this letter didn't solve the problem because when he writes to them again in 2 Thessalonians, he has to get more specific. So this is in 2 Thessalonians 3.10. For even when we were with you, we used to give you this order. If anyone is not willing to work, then he is not to eat either. Well, that's pretty clear. Says, if you want to eat, you work. If you want to be part of the community, you need to be able to pull your own weight. He goes on, for we hear that some among you are leading an undisciplined life, doing no work at all, but acting like busybodies. Now, such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to work in quiet fashion and eat their own bread. Now the distinction he's making is between working and being idle. So I don't think if you say, well, what about someone who's on support? I think you would say, they're working. It's just the kind of work they do requires support. The distinction here is someone who's being undisciplined, who's doing no work at all, who's being idle. And he's saying you need to get out, you need to work. So there's a popular attitude today that says that if I don't get a job right out of college that is like stellar and fulfilling, then I shouldn't take it. So if I can't find a job that is rewarding every moment of every day, then I'm just not going to work. And I don't know where that attitude came from. That was not the case when we graduated. People would work at Taco Bella if that was the only job they could get. And everybody expected to start at the bottom as the gopher and the administrative assistant and work their way up. So I think Paul would say, you need to work. Whatever door God opens, take it. If you can find a job that is rewarding and you would do it even if nobody can do anything, then go for it and be grateful that God gave it to you. But if you can't find a job like that, then take a job. Take whatever job God gives you. If it's your only opportunity to work, take it because if that's what it takes to put food on the table, it's better to put food on the table than to be idle, to be doing nothing. And whatever you're doing, do it as a way of, do it to the glory of God for His honor, and then just wait and see what happens. What other doors open? I've been doing running a business for 20 years I never thought I would do. It just literally got dropped it in my lap, and I didn't really want it. It's totally boring, it's totally repetitive. It pays mega bucks and takes very little time. So I can do that for a day and then teach the Bible for four days, and it's been wonderful. It's been a huge blessing. Because apparently, people will pay you a lot of money to do boring work that they don't want to do. Who knew? But I learned that surprisingly. Alright, so the first principle is that we are stewards of whatever wealth and resources God gives us. It belongs to Him, not to us, and we're to manage it wisely. We have to use whatever resources He gives us to meet the responsibilities He gives us, and we typically that means working to meet those responsibilities. So let's say you've graduated, you've gotten out, you've got a job, you're working, what could possibly go wrong? Now what? Well, there are two ways I think you can get out and get into the work first and go wrong. The first is to spend everything you make. So a lot of Christians are know they shouldn't be in debt, and so they they aren't in debt, but they spend everything that's left over after their basic needs. So if you're spending 100% of your take-home pay, you are not being a good steward because stewards need to plan for the future. That means you ought to be funding your retirement. That means you ought to be saving so that when disaster strikes, like the car breaks or great Uncle Frank dies and you need $800 for a plane ticket, that you can weather that disaster without turning to someone else. It also means when disaster strikes your neighbor, like their house burns down, you have the means to help them and you can be generous. If you've spent everything you have, then you have robbed yourself of the opportunity to be generous to someone else or to offer them a hand up when they when they need it. So we're going to talk more about how not to spend everything you make. But that's the first way you can fall off the horse is to spend 100% of your take-home pay and not plan for the future. I think the other way you can go wrong is to give it all away. There is somehow this idea in Christian circles that once I meet my basic living expenses, I should give everything else away, and that there is virtue in that. But that is foolishness because you're still supposed to plan for the future. And if you throw yourself off a bridge, God may catch you, but that's not faith. That's just foolishness. And I think from God's perspective, he's saying, I've given you the resources to meet your calling. I expect you to use those resources to meet your calling. And you can give it all away, and then when disaster strikes or the unexpected happens, or I change your calling, you will have nothing to meet that need. So God expects you to work, to earn money, to save and invest it, to use it wisely so that you are meeting your responsibilities, both the ones you know about right now and the ones that may come up in the future. Some you know are coming up in the future, like retirement, probably children, college, uh, elderly parents, well, those needs you can expect are coming, and you're supposed to plan for them. So if God gives you an abundance of financial wealth such that you're rich, then you also have an abundance of responsibilities. So your goal as a steward is to use whatever he's given you wisely, however much or however little it is. And that may be different at different seasons of your life. So I'm gonna stop there because you're gonna do this next section, right? MC: Hold on, let me make a switch. David John Marotta: After so many years of marriage, you find yourself finishing each other's sentences and being very easy to talk about finances. Also, as she said, we've been very intentional about our finances from pretty much the day we were married, trying to figure out what we should do together. And I will say for um a lot of couples, it's a way of drawing you closer together because your budget is really what you value, and there's nothing more romantic about dreaming about what you value in the future together and your plans. Um, one of the reasons why a lot of couples get divorced is actually because they have money troubles, and when you have money troubles, you're fighting about every dollar spent rather than dreaming about what God has called you to do in plans for the future. So if you want to have a good marriage, you should pay attention to the rest of this lecture. We're going to talk about three very practical things. There are things that you should have been learning between zero and twenty, but my guess is that you haven't been learning them because in America we're not very good at teaching these things. Even sometimes when we set out to teach these things, we're not very good at teaching these things. We're going to talk about how to spend, how to earn, how to save and invest. Very practical stuff. Now I will say that one of the reasons why it's difficult to teach these things is because people don't learn these things by teaching any more than you learn how to play soccer by a lecture. So it really requires either watching someone do it or then trying to do it yourself to really learn these things. It's an experiential skill. As much as it sounds like it might be a lecture skill, so maybe what I just told you is the rest of this lecture is useless. What you need to find is godly examples and then go out and try it yourself. Maybe there'll be some gems of wisdom in here, but um but really a lecture is the worst way to try to learn these things. So the first thing we're trying to learn is how to spend. And the reason why it's difficult, and even an allowance, you probably had an allowance growing up. Allowances can make things worse than learning how to spend. Because if you have an allowance, what do you do with the allowance typically? Typically spend it on food and entertainment. Those are the two things that your parents give you to spend money on. Well, that's learning the pleasure. Yourself with your allowance. You've never sort of tried to actually pay for your room and board, or have to make a decision between are you going to eat or are you going to drive a car? And there's a great scene from one of the shows that we like to watch where they say, now, if you have to make a choice between your rent and your car, pick your car because you can sleep in your car, but you can't drive your apartment. So those are the kinds of hard choices that you have to make when you're actually running a budget. So this is a typical post-college cash flow. We're going to build on this and change it a lot, but I just want to show you. So you have your paycheck, it comes into the checking, and every dollar that comes in gets spent. This is sort of a typical budget. And so right now I just want to talk about how you spend it on the spending side and what that might look like. So if you break it down, you might break down a post-college budget, something like this. Now, there's nothing magic about the percentages I have up here. I have 40% for housing because you are not making very much money. You left your parents' lifestyle at the height of their earning career, and you won't see that for another 25 years. So I remember we were we were talking to my son when he was very young, and he's and I was teaching him this lesson, and he said, Yeah, you know, when I'm out on my own, I'm gonna have to buy bagged lettuce. And I said, Brendan, you know, putting lettuce in a bag with the carrot shavings, that's actually a luxury item. Shaving the carrots yourself, that's what you're gonna have to do. So there's a budget you have to learn, and it's a very poor budget. So I put 40% for housing because you're not making very much money, but you still have to have a place to live. And then I've sort of shown you some of the categories that you might have: household, food, transportation, entertainment. There's nothing magic about these percentages. So when you set up your budget, y'all take your take-home pay, you'll multiply times some percentages like this, you'll get some dollar amounts, and then you'll find out every category seems to be cost more than you've got. And you've got to move the money around and start taking stuff away. So a budget is just a spending plan and it reflects your values. So maybe you don't value travel very much, but you value entertainment more, or maybe you don't value travel or entertainment at all, and what you really need to do is to eat better. So you're gonna have to move the money around when you when you create a budget. So this is lifestyle, and as Krisan suggested, this should not be 100% of your take-home pay. Because if there's 100% of your take-home pay, you've got no margin, you've got no planning for the future, you've got no anything else. So what your budget should look like is that this life is lifestyle spending, lifestyle should actually represent maybe about 65% of your take-home pay. And I've got 35% set aside for some other uh some other categories. So I put 15% for retirement, I've helped people through retirement hundreds of times. 15% is the right amount if you start saving from the moment you graduate from college to 65%. And if you think about it, if you save 15% of your take-home pay, in four years, you'll have 60% of a year, and that's all. So you're gonna have about nine months of your retirement saved. So it's got to grow a lot, and you've got to save a lot. So 15% is really that's what you need to do if you start at 20. If you start later, you're gonna have to spend a save a lot more than that. Audience: Is that before or after taxes? David John Marotta: This is after taxes. So we'll we'll we'll talk about how you how you do that. We're gonna get to retirement and saving when we get to saving and investing. I'm gonna save the rest of that. So the next one is unknowns, and the next one is charity. So let me talk about those. So, first of all, set aside 10% for unknowns. We've done this, Krishna and I have done this from the day we got married, we were setting money aside for who knows what. And if you ask, well, what is the unknown unknowns for? That's exactly right. You don't know what it's for. And so it's for the car breaks, the roof leaks, your kid needs orthodontier. Every stage of life has its own unknown unknowns. Clear up through, your daughter gets married, and you have grandchildren. So there's always another thing that needs money that you didn't anticipate when you first got married, and every single age has that. If you don't have 10% set aside for unknowns unknowns, then you'll have about 10% set aside for your credit cards, and that's how people get in credit card debt. Every story of getting credit card debt is I was doing just fine spending 100% of my income, and then X happened. And that's the problem, and so that's what will end up sinking you. If you set aside 10% for unknowns, then the first time you get an unknown, you have to move it into the budget because another one's coming. So the first time you get married, you find out the car breaks and it costs $1,200, and you think, okay, I didn't have that, so now I've got to spend my entire unknown budget. But now, $1,200, that could happen every year. So I'm gonna set a hundred dollars a month aside for car repairs. And I'm gonna take it out of my entertainment budget. And that's how you start working through a budget. Every time you hit an unknown, you think, I should have known that. Let's move that back into the budget and then keep your unknowns for true emergencies. 10% for charity. 10% for charity, there's a whole theology about the tithe. I don't particularly think that the tithe is anything magical. I think that you can give 20%, you can give 30%. I know a lot of people, we have a lot of very well-off clients who actually are working not because they need to work, but because it helps them support the charities that they really love. And I know people who are living off 11% of their take-home pay and they're doing incredible things with the other 89% of their take-home pay because they're trying to do things. The reason why you should have some amount of charity is because if you don't have any charity in your budget, your question would be, should I be charitable or not? And that's a charitable question to be asking yourself. But if you've set aside a dollar amount, then the question is, where am I going to prioritize this little bit of money that I've set aside for charity? What needs it the most? And so if you have an amount in your budget for charity, it makes you more generous. And God is in the process in all of us, I think, of taking us as white-fisted, you know, grabbing onto our money and gradually loosening up our hand and opening it up and making us cheerful givers. I, you know, I try not to judge where people are on the step on that process because I know that every step of a process we've been trying to push ourselves to be more generous, and that's a process that we've been encouraging each other in, and so we're trying to find more ways to make the money worthwhile. So setting aside something for charity is, I think, important. Charity does not all have to go to the Center for Christian Study. Audience: But it can. David John Marotta: But it can. It doesn't all have to go to your church. It may be that you find that there are students who can't go out with the gang because they can't afford to eat out, and you pay for their way out to make them part of the gang. That's a part of charity. So you can look around for ways to be generous that don't necessarily have to be part of the generosity that you normally think of when you think of giving to a 503C. You can just set aside a budget, and then when a need comes up and you see that need, you can decide: do I want to spend my charity budget on that? Because that's a person who really needs it more than I do. And so another thing that charity does is charity makes you grateful. And gratitude is one of the best things that you can have in your life, is being grateful for the things that you have. And so if you give some of the money away, it makes you happier than it does if you try to take that same amount of money and pleasure yourself. Pleasuring yourself with money is actually a very inefficient thing to do. And I find it an incredible burden. It's like, okay, now I've got some money and I need to figure out what's it going to do to make me happy. And I don't particularly feel happy, so I just I have this work I need to do, and I love my work, but that that's not spending money. Somehow I've got to spend money to make myself happy. It's very inefficient. Um, and it's also a burden of trying to be some kind of a consumer mentality to make myself. I I don't I find it much easier to think of what does God want and what are God's priorities, because that's what I want to be in my life, than it is trying to figure out how to make myself happy with money. Okay, so 35% is going elsewhere, and only 65% or less is going into our lifestyle. This is a technique we've used with literally hundreds of clients that I recommend. It's called the automatic millionaire, which was a book that was popular in the 1990s. Instead of putting your paycheck directly into your checking account, you put your paycheck into a brokerage account, and then you take out some lifestyle of 65% or less. You know, when we first got married, we still had a college mentality. We were only maybe spending less than half of what we were making, and so we were saving a lot more. So less than 65% is going down in your checking where you're spending your lifestyle, the rest remains in your brokerage account. This does all kinds of wonderful things. Normally, if you put your money in your in a brokerage account or into your checking account, you just spend it. And now you have to, it has to build up in your checking account before you decide to put it somewhere else. And you always think it's never a good idea to put it somewhere else because if it builds up in the checking account, well, there's things that might happen. I'm where I might need to buy a new car, and I might need to, and there's always something I might need to do. Whereas if you leave it in the brokerage account and it just brings down what you need to spend, then you'll spend less money. Also, then when you get a raise, it gets left behind in the brokerage account. It just doesn't automatically go into your increase in your lifestyle. And lifestyle, it's a lot easier to creep your lifestyle up than it is to ratchet it back down. So the minute you let your lifestyle start creeping up, pretty soon you find you're spending $250 a month on your cable package and $100 a month on your data streams and all the other things that you're doing, and those things will build up month after month until pretty soon you're falling behind on any kind of a lifestyle check. So, um, from your brokerage account, if it's invested, you can give your charity from there if you need to. And if you need the unknown unknowns, you can transfer it down into your checking account, and now you've got this store up there. Um, also, then 15% or more maybe is going into your retirement. We're gonna talk about that later. I'll fill in the rest of this chart, but there's some amount that's going toward your retirement. And then there's your parents. So there's no way that your parents can help you learn to live within your means if they keep supplementing your means. That's just if one of your goals is to try to be independent, and your parents are gonna try to help you. So my recommendation is every dime that your parents again give you does not go into your checking account, it just goes into some savings somewhere, and you decide what to do with it later. Because if you're living off of a lifestyle that's supported by your parents, you're not independent. That's one of the goals of finances, is to be independent, to not be dependent on other people. So I recommend if your parents give you money, great, store it away. Um, when they're old and they need money, you can give it back to them. So just count on that. In ancient societies, it always went the other way. It was like, I had you, I raised you, now you have to support me in my old age. But today it tends to go the other way, and we're constantly sort of helping and supplementing our kids. So, this is called the automatic millionaire, and it's a technique I recommend that you set up as soon as you have a paycheck, set it up this way. Okay. How to earn. So this is a yeah, go ahead. Audience: Before we go on, I'm sorry. Where do you long-term loans earn that? How do you decide or evaluate how big of a mortgage or a car loan you can take out? David John Marotta: Yeah, great, great question. Uh the question was um, how much of a um mortgage can you take out, or a car loan, or something like that? Um, I recommend that you not take car loans because that's spending the money forward. Uh, instead, you do what our son did, and that is you buy cars for under $1,000, and when they break, you leave them in the ditch, and you buy another car for under $1,000. Um, it is a great way, and then you take all that money that you would have been paying on the car loan, and you put that into getting a new car and a better car. So, car is transportation. It doesn't cost that much to get good transportation. If your car is a status symbol, it costs a lot. So that's a little bit of a distinction. On a mortgage, on the minute you can afford a mortgage and you can afford the payments, interest rates are really low right now. So long as it fits within your housing budget of 40% of your take-home pay, that defines how big a house you could get. Audience: Um I was gonna ask about student loans. What's a reasonable amount to pay off? David John Marotta: Yeah, um, because student loans are a relatively low interest rate, you should pay them off as slowly as possible. We have a ton of articles on how to pay off student loans. Um, and in the meantime, store up money. Because if student loans are at 6% and your investments are making 8%, then the fastest way to pay off your student loans is to pay them off as slowly as possible and build up enough money to be able to slap it over anytime you want, and then just wait the 10 years because your investments will be making more than your student loans. Krisan Marotta: Those articles are on the website. David John Marotta: Yeah, those articles are on our website. It's MarottaOnMoney.com. We have about 8,000 articles, so you can almost search for anything you want. And there's a place where you can ask us a question. We have to write um three or four articles every week, so we're always looking for questions that people ask. So that's a it's a an open mic uh to be able to ask questions, and we'll write great articles about them. Okay. How to earn. This is also something that you probably didn't learn because uh money classes, it turns out, don't improve finances. And the reason is because money classes usually ask, so like in the game of life, do you want to go to college or do you just want to start your career? And everyone knows in the game of life, if you go to college you get a bigger salary than in the game, and if you just start your career, then you usually don't win. So everyone goes to college, but going to college on the little board takes about two turns, and going to college in real life takes at least four years, uh, and it takes a lot of stick-to-it-ness and grit, and that's what that's what does success does success. And in a lot of the money classes, it's like, what would you rather buy? A hamburger, or would you like to put that into an investment account? Well, of course you're gonna pick the investment account when in real life you'd actually like to eat the hamburger. So the problem is there's there's no cost to it, and it's shrunken down in terms of time, so there's no stick-to-it-ness. And that's why you can't actually teach it in a money class is because there isn't there isn't the skill that you're learning. The skill that you're learning is that discipline of not getting the hamburger and the cell phone and the tickets and all that kind of other kind of stuff, but actually learning to save and invest. So, um, so earning money. I recommend that you try out a lot of things in your career. I have two brothers, one went to med school and one went to law school, and surprise, surprise, one's a doctorate, one's a lawyer. Um, so there's a lot of upfront. But the best way to find out what you really love in life is to try stuff. And at some point, I recommend that you actually try starting your own business because that is your unique calling, if you will, of what you want to do in life. And, you know, in school, you study wait, pre-biz, pre-med, engineering, and then you go out and you look at the vocations that people have, and it's like I run a deli, I'm a belly dance instructor, I'm, you know, all these strange things in life that people don't realize are actually what wonderful careers. Um if you think about it, if you think about it, God loves the mundane things in life because he filled the world with them. So there's nothing special about this, you know, sort of higher stuff, the mundane things of running a restaurant or something like that. That's what God has filled the world with. Um and the the um the owner of Parchess Frozen Yogurt, which used to be in town, had a big sign uh behind his desk: God loves frozen yogurt. Because God loves the mundane things of the world and the businesses, and he is more interested in frozen yogurt than the frozen yogurt owner is, because he is infinitely interested in each aspect of the mundane part of our lives. So I suggest you try things out as a business plan, but at some point I think you should try running your own business. The reason for that is that um, first of all, it is more stewardship. You're you there's if you if you've got enough to be running a business, there's more stewardship. Um, about 50% of the people uh in the United States actually have a full-time job. So if you have a full-time job, congratulations, you're in the top half after graduation. Only about 10% actually own a job, meaning that they have a self-employed business that's incorporated. Not all of that is full-time, some of that is part-time work, but at least here you you own your own job, your boss can't fire you. In this day and age, you know, there's a lot of things where bosses ask their employees to do things or run their businesses in kind of a shoddy way. You don't have as much control when you are just an employee as you do when you're the business owner. You can really make your values um stick out. Um, as a business owner where you employ other people to work for you, that is actually less than 3% of the world. And I will argue probably the most important 3% is because that's employing a lot of other people. 3% here are employing the 50% here who have jobs. And then if you're an investor where money works for you, you're a business owner, but you don't have to run it, they're usually publicly traded companies. Um, less than 50% of the world actually have any investments, and less than 15% actually have any significant investments. So everything I just told you will put you in a 15% that actually have more investments uh than otherwise. I think that this is actually a form of charity, and I get that from um Mammamides, who is an 11th-century philosopher, and he made a hierarchy of charity from eight different levels. Level eight is when donations are given grudgingly. I would argue that this is the definition of taxes. People complain about taxes, taxes are collected, and then they're given to the poor, and there's like there's like no virtue in that. It's like it's not though I decided to give any money. They just came and take it and pointed the gun to my head and said, you owe this, and I had to give it, and then it was given to someone else. So this is that's the lowest level of charity. His highest level of charity is establishing a poor person being self-sufficient through employment. In other words, that has great honor and dignity for the person. You're not treating them like a charity case, you're treating them as though their work is valuable and important. You're providing a method for them to satisfy that dignity with work and be paid for it such that they don't need the charity in the first place. So I would argue that being a business owner is actually one of the most charitable things you can do because you're employing other people with dignity and making sure that they have good vocations and can be can and can have enough excess to be charitable to others as well. Okay, so we're now back on the 15% that goes toward retirement. Uh and we recommend that people invest, and we generally recommend that people invest in businesses, and that means buying publicly traded stock. So I just want to describe a little bit for those of you who've never thought about publicly traded stock, which apparently 15% of the world owns publicly traded stock in any significant amount. So I don't want you to be in the 85% that kind of goes publicly traded stock, what is that? Um, all the companies that you buy stuff from, most of them are publicly traded. And if you think about that, take Apple, for example. Um, Apple, you have to buy a share of stock for a certain value, and it has earnings of a certain amount. And I'm gonna make up a company, this company, the stock costs $10, and the earnings is one dollar. So you buy it for $10 a share, buy $10 every year, there's one dollar of earnings and they send it to you. And after 10 years, you've gotten your $10 back and you still own the share, and it's still sending you another dollar every year. So that's the idea behind companies. There's some price and some amount of earnings, and the price per earnings is the PE ratio, so you've ever heard of that. And a low PE ratio means you get more earnings for the share. And a high PE ratio means you get less earnings, but hopefully that company will grow its earnings. And so that's a growth company. So a lot of the tech companies, the earnings are small, but they have great hopes for the future, and they're hoping that they'll the earnings will continue to grow. At any rate, I would hope that, for example, you own more technology stocks than you spend on technology, and that way you're actually making money every time people go to Apple and buy stuff, including you. So maybe you own enough uh gasoline companies so that when you go to the pump, you're actually making more from the gasoline companies than you're spending at the pump. So the idea behind this is that you can own a little piece of a lot of different businesses, and business ownership is just like any other ownership. So if you go down to Greenberries and you buy coffee, um, Greensberries is a business, and then there's Starbucks, which is a publicly traded company. So all of that is investment, and we think that that's a good thing to do with your money. It's a good way to steward your money. To put it another way, the bore, the poor buy things, their houses are cluttered with them. The middle class buy liabilities, like boats and horses, and all it does is suck up money. And the rich buy investments, and then investment is defined as anything that pays you money. So that's the difference between the poor, the middle class, and the rich. And we think it's a good thing for you to actually have wealth to steward. I'm gonna get at the end, I'm gonna talk about is it okay for Christians to be wealthy? Because there are certain circles that say, you know what, Christians should take vows of poverty and Should never have a dime to their names. And I think that that is an extreme view and it needs to sort of be addressed. But at any rate, growing rich in terms of stewardship, I think, means buying investments, not just buying things or liabilities. Okay, how to save and invest. So the first thing to know is if you played any stock market games in high school, um, stock market games are completely wrong. So we even have a couple of articles on our website, how to win the stock market game. How do you win the stock market game? You find the most volatile stock you can possibly find, and if they make you invest in more than one stock, maybe they make, say, you can only invest, you have to have at least five stocks, then find five stocks in the exact same industry that are almost always moving in sync with one another. Take all the money that you have and throw it in those five stocks and then don't change and just hope for the best. Because if you're if there's 20 teams and you have a nice, broadly diversified portfolio, you will lose. You will not come in first because there's only one winner in the stock market game, right? No one says, oh, you guys came in second, congratulations. No, it's like you could you're going for first, and the only way to go for first, put it all in one basket, and then you'll either win or you'll lose miserably. And either way, it'll be a lot more fun than those people over there who doing the diversification round. So the problem is winning and losing has the same strategy to it. It's a coin cost, and diversifying gives you zero chance of winning. Now, that's the exact opposite of the way you do investments. The way you do investments is you're trying to meet your goals. And so you can meet your goals. In fact, all the people in the middle of the pack might meet their goals, and the three at the top and the three at the bottom, three will win, and three will be bankrupt and have no retirement. So you're trying not to not be in the ones at the bottom because the prize money in the middle is really good, even if you don't come in first, because you've made money. So stock market games are wrong, and that's just not a good sort of way to invest. I will tell you one thing that you should do, and that is you should invest, when you do have a chance to invest, you should invest in a Roth account. I'm gonna do a little bit of tax management. So, a traditional IRA, you put the money in and you get a tax deduction. But you're poor and you're not making much taxes because you're a new college graduate. So you get the tax deduction. Then later on, when you're 65 and you're a multimillionaire and you take it out, they're gonna tax you like a multimillionaire. So the problem with a traditional IRA is you get the deduction on the way in when you're poor, and then when you take it back out, you have to pay taxes on it when you're rich. Roth IRA works a little bit differently. You get taxed on it, and then you put the money in, and it grows tax-free your entire life, and then when you take it out, there's no tax. Now, the difference between the two is huge, and you want to pay tax on the acorn, you don't want to pay tax on the oak. So that's why you should, when you're at fresh out of college, be funding a Roth IRA. Now, it turns out you should always be funding a Roth IRA, but there's different reasons. Just trust me for now, fund your Roth IRA. And they let you put $5,500 into a Roth IRA in 2018 and 2017, and they let you do that every single year. So they limit how much you put it in. Currently, when you've graduated from college, 5,500 will sound like a lot of money to be putting in your Roth IRA. Then later on, when your salary goes up, 5,500 will sound like a little teeny bit, and you wish you could get more in because it's tax-free. So at any rate, Roth is the right way to go for all of you. And here's the retirement priorities. So number one is if your employer has a 401k or a 403B and they have a match, you should put in at least enough to get the match. Typically, you put in 5% and you get matched with 4%. So the first three is matched as 3%, the next two is matched with at 50% with one. So 5% gets you 4%. This is an immediate 80% return on your money. It's like free money, and you should put in at least enough to get the full match. If you do that, you've saved 9% out of the 15 you need to save. You're still gonna need to save a little bit more money. So number two is to put the 5,500 into a Roth IRA. And just by means, 5,500 is 15% of $36,000. So you can see if you're making $36,000 or less, it's gonna be hard to get that sort of $5,500 in. It's gonna be a lot to save. And then number three, you can go back to the 401k or the 403B Roth option, and you can put in up to 18,500. Unless you're earning more than about 160,000, you're not gonna make it past number three. And so number four, you're not even gonna get to. Number four, by the way, is just keeping a remainder in a taxable brokerage account. I recommend that what you put in this taxable brokerage account is actually that unknown unknown and the charity that you're gonna be giving because um because that way your emergency fund will be invested and continue to grow. Chrisana and I had an emergency fund since we were married. We didn't have as big emergencies as we had funded, and so that continued to grow for a number of years. Questions on any of that? We have a lot of time. Okay, great. So I've now added into our chart here the fact that from your paycheck, you should be funding the Roth 401k or 403B. That money gets matched. From your brokerage account, you should be matching, or you should be putting money into your Roth IRA, at least 15% up there for retirement, keeping your lifestyle as low as possible. And you can always um you can always be increasing your charity and deciding, you know what, I really have causes I want to support, and I'm gonna make that a higher percentage. Okay. If you do fund, yeah, question. Audience: What is a brokerage account? David John Marotta: Yeah, a brokerage account is just a stock investment account, but it's not a retirement account. So it's not a traditional IRA or a Roth IRA. So those accounts, the growth in there gets taxed. So it's a taxable brokerage account because the growth gets taxed. So if you own investments and they're not part of any retirement account, then you that's in a brokerage account. The broker is what executes the trades for you on the stock market. Audience: So in that list of like the four things you said for investing or saving your money, if if like a company doesn't do the match, you just go straight to the Roth IRA then? David John Marotta: Yeah, if the company doesn't do their match, I would put it in the Roth. The reason for that is all the money that you put into the Roth, you're allowed to take out tax-free, not the growth. So it's a great place to scroll money where the growth point doesn't get taxed. Okay. If you put 5,500 into a Roth IRA and from age 20 to age 65, and it earns 7%, which is actually a pretty small return, your $5,500 each year will grow to $1.6 million. This is the glory of compounded interest. Um, and this is you know what uh Einstein called the seventh wonder of the world. It's it's it's amazing that it does this, but it does. Um I'm not gonna scare you and tell you you're actually gonna need $8 million when you retire because of inflation, but you will. And uh my grandmother, you know, if you had told my grandmother she would need hundreds of thousands of dollars in her retirement, she would have just laughed at you because a week's worth of groceries was four dollars, and only the Rockefellers lived like that. But it turned out she needed hundreds of thousands of dollars in her retirement, uh, and she lived in ninety-nine and a half, uh, and and you, and you know, inflation is just sort of this thing that eats away at dollars. And when you're 99 and a half, y'all be telling your kids, when I was young, you know, sneakers only cost $50. I can't believe that they're $1,000 today, you know, and they're gonna be just like just like your grandmother is now, because you'll remember what things used to cost. I was amazed. I bought a pair of shoes and they cost you know $160 or $140 or something like that. I remember kids, they were $5, you know, and that's that's the way I think of shoes. So inflation is is a tremendous eater of uh of value. And anyway, the thing to notice about this is your $1.6 million 15 years from retirement, so at age 50, you might only have $561,000. You'll have less than a third of what you'd have in another 15 years because this continues to go up and up and up. That means if you don't start saving at 20, but you wait until 35, you will have less than a third of what you'll have in your retirement if you start when you're 20. So it matters so much what you save straight out of college, that matters a lot more than saying, oh, I can wait for 15 years and I'll get my act together later. So that's why whatever you earn, 15% should go into retirement. Okay, so Krissan covered a little bit of should Christians grow rich. Um the options are spend it all selfishly on yourself, give it all away and abdicate any stewardship of how it ought to be spent, or steward it yourself. And I think I think taking a piece of it and being generous with it, and taking a piece of it and stewarding it yourself itself allows you to do some things that you might not be able to do otherwise. Again, it's all God's money. There isn't 10% that's God and 90% that's ours. It's all God's money, and you have to figure out what to do with it, and you can figure out what to do with it, or you can give it to charities and let them figure out what to do with it, or you can do a combination of both. And I think the combination of both is good because people need some money now, and people need the world needs Christians who are stewarding money well and trying to put it together into things that will bring more light and goodness and life to the world. Okay, this is a little bit uh of a change, but sometimes it's easy to take a look at someone and say, well, they are clearly sinning with their money because they have a chauffeur, they have a cook, they have somebody that mows their lawn, they have someone who even plans their vacations for them. And that's clearly over the top of an extravagant and luxurious lifestyle. So I want to just play a mental game with you for a minute of why that might be okay, and it's difficult to judge unless you know someone's heart. So imagine you are shipwrecked on an island with 300 other people, and among the 300 people, um, there's one doctor. So they start dividing up who's gonna build the huts, and who's gonna feed the pigs, and who's gonna pick the coconuts. And where would you assign that doctor? Would you make him take a routine in all those other things, or would you say, you know what, his time is so valuable, he's the only doctor we have. We're gonna set aside him to just do doctoring work because that's really valuable, and we're gonna let all of the other people do work where they're best, and we're not gonna do an even rotation around everything. So if a doctor's time is really valuable and he's working really hard, he may have someone else who changes his oil and um mows his yard, and you may even have someone who plans his vacations because he's so busy, if he plans his own vacations, he'll never take a vacation. So there is an aspect of certain amount where you've got time when you're young and your time is not being compensated very well. And then you may have another point at which your time is being compensated that for what you can do in an hour, you can pay other people to work for two or three hours doing other stuff. And that's economics, and both parties benefit, and it's a good thing to do. So it's difficult to judge someone from the outside. Um, even sometimes when they're giving lavish gifts to people, it's difficult to judge from the outside. Because if a rich person gives you a very cheap gift, uh, it may not show their love for you, but if they give you a gift in accordance with their abundance, that might be able to express more love. So there's all different kinds of things like that. It's very difficult to judge from the outside. You really have to get inside to know what they're trying to do with the money. So it's just a it's just a way of thinking about not being quick to judge people just because they have a different lifestyle. Okay. Having said that, there are sins of money. Uh the Bible says the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, and I'd like to take you through a way of looking at three virtues for money and the three corresponding sins. I find this very helpful for at least my own life and judging my own heart. So this is Matthew 23, 23. It's not often a verse that is thought to be about money, but it's actually directly about money, and it's it's almost right on the nose. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You give a tenth of your spices, mint, dill, and cumin, but you have neglected the more important matters of the law, justice, mercy, and faithfulness. So here's Jesus talking directly to the Pharisees about how they handle money, and he says, Yes, you do. You tithe a tenth of your herb garden. But the most important principles regarding money are justice, mercy, and faithfulness. So we're going to pick apart those three sort of ideas as to what they mean. So, first, justice. Um, justice is the idea that people have value and it is not dependent upon how much money they have. So the rich are not more valuable than the poor. Psalm 49, 16, do not be overawed when a man grows rich, when the splendor of his house increases. The opposite of justice is pride. Pride says, I'm more important because I have money, or this person is more important because they have money. And justice and pride are opposites, treating people equally with value, or treating my, or saying, I'm more important because I'm rich. And justice and pride are really how we relate to ourselves and how we think about ourselves. So James 2, 4, and 9, if you show favoritism to the rich, you sinned, you'll become judges with evil motives. And again, it's hard for me to know I'm being jest, but it's very easy for me to know when I'm being prideful. So I find it easier to know when I'm sinning than when I'm being righteous. And so that's why I think it's helpful to take Jesus' virtues and to look at what the corresponding sins are. The second piece is mercy. James 2.13, judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. And again, mercy is this idea of being kind to someone who doesn't deserve it. With money, it's being given it's giving money to someone who doesn't deserve it or has need. The opposite of mercy is greed. We are not merciful to people and help them financially. Why? Because we want that for ourselves. We're afraid if we give them the money, then we won't have the money. And it's really this aspect of I would rather have the money than be able to help them. So mercy and greed really relate to how we relate to other people. And 2 Corinthians 9, 7, each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And again, God is in the process of making us cheerful givers. The good news about that is that God has promised that he will make us righteous. So he's promised that you will be a cheerful giver. Faithfulness. Luke 12, 15, a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. The opposite of faithfulness is fear. When we're faithful, we know that our life is dependent upon God and that God will take care of us. When we're fearful, we don't trust that God will take care of us. So we have to store up our own abundance in order to take care of ourselves. So this is really the relationship between us and God with our money. And Matthew 16, do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, do not worry, your heavenly father knows that you need all of these things. So again, um, faithfulness and fear are these opposites. And the one of the problems of having money is that you become accustomed to the kinds of problems that can be solved with money, and you think that therefore you can take care of yourself. I will tell you that there's a host of problems that money can't solve, and those are the most important problems of life. Um, everything from relationships to your health to everything else. Those are the things that really cannot be solved. And uh, if we learn to trust God in everything, then even with our money, we are not trusting in our money, we are trusting in Him. Okay, so justice and pride is how we view ourselves, mercy and greed is how we view other people, and faithfulness is fear, is our relationship with God. This is a great quote that puts together all three of those. 1 Timothy 6, 17 and 18. Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant, nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share. So if you take out just these sort of catchphrases, you can see that not to be arrogant is justice or pride, being generous is mercy and greed, and put their hope in God is faithfulness and fear. Okay. Um that's the end of our presentation. We have time for questions. Theological, practical, whatever you like. Audience: In our retirement account, what kind of things would you suggest buying that? David John Marotta: Yeah. Morningstar did a study and found that the best predictor of what stocks will do well is the lowest cost. So oddly enough, uh, Vanguard has great funds. There is a single Vanguard fund, which is every stock in the world, US, foreign, and emerging markets, in exactly the weight in which it exists in the world. And so if you want, you can buy a single thing. Um the the ticker symbol is VT Vanguard Total Stock Market. They have both an ETF and they have a mutual fund version. And you can and you can just invest in that and you'll you'll do fine. Because the most important thing about the stocks is not trying to pick stocks, it's just time in the markets as all the income comes in. We have on our website a Gone Fishing portfolio. We actually have four of them. They were just published in February, and they are trying to improve upon that one that one investment. So if that one investment invests in a whole bunch of stuff, what we try to do is to overweight categories we think will do a little bit better, underweight categories we think will do a little bit worse. Uh, and there's some known factors, small cap and value do better, urging markets does a little bit better, um, technology does a little bit better, countries high in economic freedom do better. So we just tried to play with it, and we did an asset allocation that has about 12 things in it to try to simplify that. We give those away for free, and there's there's probably hundreds of people in Charlottesville. I know from they keep emailing me when's the 2018 gonna be out. Um, there's probably about you know hundreds of people in Charlottesville that are um that are investing in that. And that's a great thing. But truly, you could get by with just a single investment, you'd do fine. Um, low cost. The average mutual fund cost is like 1.28, and we build portfolios that are like 0.26. You're almost getting a full percent more. If you get a full percent more just because of lower fees over your working career, you'll retire 50% richer or seven years earlier just by keeping the fees low. Yeah. Audience: Um would like saving up for your child's education, would that be part of your lifestyle budget, or would that be like part of a different investment? David John Marotta: It is part of your lifestyle budget because um at least at least for because you're spending it and it's going out. So the question was saving for your child's college education. We have a lot of money in college savings accounts, mostly owned by grandparents. So oddly enough, grandparents have the money and love their kids, their grandkids in such a crazy way that they're willing to fund their college education more than parents can. So sometimes parents need to be funding their um their own retirement and don't yet have enough money to say, I've got that down. And so sometimes it's grandparents that are doing that. Um, but you can also save in all the Roth accounts, you can also save in all the Roth accounts for your kids' education, too. So shoveling more money into a Roth for your kid is fine because you can always pull it back out again when it comes time for your kid to go to college. And you know, while I think it's a great gift to give to your kids or grandkids graduating debt-free, you can also get a college education for a lot less. I mean, you all probably know you can go to two years of community college and transfer in and do the last two years at UVA and basically get it for half price. So there is a lot of ways of getting a great education for uh for less money. Audience: Other questions? I'm curious either you or Krisan could unpack a word that I find very intriguing in scripture you mentioned earlier, that God loves a cheerful giver. And and I understand that today. Counterintuitive in some ways, where as you put on there, grudging, many people give grudgingly, they give out of a sense of obedience, a sense of obligation. Where does the cheerfulness come from in the kind of human DNA? Or is that Holy Spirit stuff? David John Marotta: Well, only I I I can remember before I was, Krisan and I were as cheerful givers as we are now, hoping for the day in which I would be the kind of person that was so kind and outgoing that I would be a cheerful giver. So, I mean, don't don't all of us want to be the kind of people that are just able to do that and it's just a matter of our walk-in life. So I think the reason why God loves a cheerful giver is it's a reflection of his work in our life. Um it's not, yeah, there, you know, I I I I heard all this stuff about, you know, just give and you'll your emotions will catch up to it. You know, it's fine, great. Um, but but that can also just make you more begrudgingly give because you're giving under a sense of obligation. But but if you think about it a different way, that God is going to make you the kind of a person that is so excited for helping other people and and things that you're going to be cheerful about that. Um, you know, that's that's the hope, I think, that we all want to be that kind of person. And and the promise of the gospel is we will. That's the that's the amazing thing, is that he's in the process of making us that kind of a person. And it's really his work. Um, you know, I don't I don't think there's anything you can do to screw up your sticking point or to you know to try to make yourself be a cheerful giver when you're not. You know, it it's something you can hope for, you can pray for, you can strive toward, but really um, really it's his work in your life as as he's opening your eyes to think more like he does. MC: Uh turn that on Corey. Yeah, so we're just about at time, so I'll let Kristan have the last word here. And then there is pizza, of course, in the kitchen, so please do continue asking questions and thoughts on the question. And we can hang around. That's great. Krisan Marotta: I was gonna respond to that. Dave mentioned this earlier, is to me the most amazing thing about learning to be generous was that it makes you grateful. That there is this joy and gratitude when you start giving money away. It's not only, wow, look how the ways God has blessed me, but then you're part of this bigger thing of kingdom work going on, and it just it brings about this gratitude, which I think is part of what's behind the cheerful giver. I no one ever told me that that was that would happen. But um, as we like when we were in our 20s, it was you know, oh I'm gonna give the money away. But you know, we learned over time to give money away and then just found wow, there's great gratitude and joy in it. MC: So there's a lot to think about here. Let's uh let's thank them for coming. Krisan Marotta: Thank you for listening to Wednesday in the Word, the podcast that explains not only what a passage means, but also shows you how to figure it out. The blog version of this podcast is on wednesdayintheword.com slash wealth wisdom. If you've been blessed by this podcast, please follow the podcast and leave a positive rating or review wherever you listen, but most importantly, tell a friend what you learned and where you learned it. Our theme music is graciously provided by Reggie Coates. You can find his music on heartfeltmusic.org. Thank you for joining me today. I'm Krisan Marotta, and I'll see you next week at Wednesday in the Word.