November 17, 2023 • 52 mins
In this practical episode, Pastors Brent McQuay and Carlton McCarthy provide a roadmap for getting out of debt and achieving long-term financial health. They explain the critical first steps of setting goals, budgeting to eliminate "nonsense" spending, and saving up an emergency fund. Next, they break down strategies like the debt snowball method for aggressively paying off debt while staying motivated. Finally, they discuss growing your savings, establishing automatic retirement contributions, and eventually reaching the point where you can generously invest in God's kingdom. If you feel stuck in an endless debt cycle or just starting your financial journey, this episode will give you hope and simple action steps.
If you're looking to get even more out of this podcast episode, check out the full sermon on the same topic on our YouTube channel https://go.clc.tv/ps36.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(03:21:30):
Hello. Welcome back to another episode of Between Sermons
(04:04:36):
where we get to hang out and talk about
(05:30:49):
our Sunday sermon here at CLC. And as always,
(07:40:08):
you don't have to have listened to the sermon
(10:32:34):
in order to get something out of this, because
(14:08:06):
really what we want to do today day and
(18:26:44):
every time we film is we want to turn
(23:28:29):
the monologue from Sunday into dialogue, to actually turn
it into a real conversation to give us a
chance to get a little bit deeper and get
a little bit more practical. Sometimes a preacher will
say something from a stage and you're like, that
sounds good, but how do I actually do that?
And so we are in a series on finances,
and so I brought in CFO Extraordinaire. That's your
new full title, by the way, Extraordinaire.
Yeah.
You can't say CFO without extraordinaire, but Carlton McCarthy.
Pastor Carlton, thank you for hanging out with us.
Sounds good. Yeah.
And you preached on Sunday. How's that feel? As
a CFO who's now been thrown into the preacher
role?
Yeah, it's really tough. I became an accountant to
hide in a closet with a pencil and a
calculator.
You like numbers, not words?
Yeah. I tell people I got a degree in
numbers, not letters. So it's interesting. But God stretches
us and he has us doing the thing that
we don't want to do sometimes to build our
character and grow us. So my theme this year,
and I've been talking to Pastor Asa about is
that do the hard thing. So whatever the hard
thing is, Carlson is going to try to do
it.
I like it. I read a book early on
when I was maybe 1819 years old. It was
written by teenagers.
Oh, wow.
Two brothers. And I think it was called do
the Hard Thing. It was a really good book.
And yeah, it was inspiring. So I ran a
marathon and climbed a mountain. I did the hard
thing.
Did really hard things.
But you're preaching. Hey, no, look, when the vast
majority of the public says that they would rather
die than give a public speech.
Yes, I know what that means.
I mean, not bad. This Sunday, it was part
two of a finance series. You had to come
up there after Joe SangeL. How's that feel?
Well, that was a little rough because he does
this day in and day out. So just coming
behind him was a little bit scary. But when
we're preaching the Bible, the Bible's a living word.
And so you get new translation and new ideas
and new thoughts. And so it kind of just
gave me comfort that if I preach the word,
the word will speak to the lives of individuals
almost individually. A lot of people came up to
me after and said the different things that they
got from it. That may have been my point
or may not have been my point, but the
(23:33:12):
word spoke to them, because it's.
Crazy when somebody comes up and be like, man,
when you said this, it just really changed my
(23:59:59):
life. And I'm like, I didn't even say that.
But that's what you heard. So that's what the
Holy Spirit did.
It wasn't even part of the message. Yeah, absolutely.
Very cool. So you preach on Sunday, and then
you turned around on Monday night and you started
a finance class.
Yeah, absolutely. I was broke. Now I'm not Joe
Sangle. Six week class. Monday night was the first
night, and we kind of went over your financial
goals and then the path to get there before
we get into each individual segment of finances, budgeting,
savings, investments. So it was a great class, very
interactive. The place was packed. We had a lot
of fun, a lot of jokes. We laughed, we
cried, a lot of crying over our finances. But
it was a really good opportunity to see where
people are in their finances, to see where their
goals are, their hopes and their dreams, and then
how to plan it out appropriately. So it was
a tremendous class. I was really happy that we
had it.
I love it. I know it's a smaller sample
size, obviously, than the full church or even the
country, but what were you seeing as these 30
or so individuals are sharing their financial goals, their
financial struggles? What are you like, man? It seems
like there's a theme happening here, or the majority
of people are facing this.
Sure. Yeah, absolutely. The one thing that really struck
me is that it wasn't so much hardship as
it was just knowledge base. A lot of people,
the majority of the people had income that could
provide for them. It was a matter of managing
and organizing that income and their expenses. And how
do I apply this to the goals I have
for my family, for myself, whether it's in ministry,
or just our finances in general? And so the
common theme was, okay, how do I organize what
I have? And I think that's so encouraging to
know that a small sample of our church body,
at least, is not necessarily struggling with. It's not
an income issue for them. It's more of just
a knowledge base of how do I organize my
finances to reach the goals that I now learn
that we have, which was really good.
So sounds like we need to make this podcast
extremely practical. Here's what you do, and here's why
you do it and how you do it. But
before we get into all of that, there was
this principle that you gave. The whole thing was
about seed time and harvest, right? So you're talking
about if you don't have your investment, you're not
going to have a harvest. And you said something
that I loved. How did you say it? It
was just simply don't eat the seed.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, man, when you said that, I was like,
suck. Because I'll be honest, the example you gave
of you found $20 in your pocket, and now
you're like, yay, I got $20 and I'm going
to go buy lunch. Yes. And it's like, man,
that was a seed for you to invest in
something, and you missed the opportunity because you ate
the seed.
Right. And I think the one thing, at least
for me, the important point of that is that
God is providing the seed. And we have to
recognize when he's providing a seed or when something
is a harvest. And a lot of times God
has probably given us more seed than harvest we're
receiving because we keep eating the seed. So he
keeps trying to deposit seeds to us, but we
keep seeing those seeds as a harvest. And God
is saying, listen, your goal, my plans for you
are bigger than you finding $20. So don't count
that as the harvest. The harvest that I have
for you, the plans and the desires that he's
put in us is much bigger than what we
count as actual harvest. And so God, he keeps
giving us seed, and he's like, hey, that seed
that can be used for the kingdom, I circulate
money, funds finances through the kingdom, through my people.
And so he wants us to partner with him
in taking care of other people and taking care
of the kingdom. But when we receive something unexpected
or even during a budget of our own finances,
we say, okay, well, God's given me this money
to live on and to take care of myself.
And he's like, hey, part of that is the
seed that I need you to invest back into
the kingdom. And so it's really interesting to see
people's mind shift when they think about finding money
or unexpected money that comes in. It can't always
be a harvest. Sometimes it is a seed because
God is providing that seed.
Yeah, it was cool. I had this moment. I
was a student, an intern, basically. So I had
no income at all. And a guy had come
to visit and he was doing some ministry stuff.
And on his way to the airport, I was
living in Mexico. On his way to the airport,
he gave me all of his leftover pesos.
Oh, wow.
Because he's like, I'm not even worth exchanging this.
So he gave me, and it was like, I
don't know. It was like $50 worth of pesos.
And, man, as a guy that has zero income,
I was like, this is awesome. And in my
head, I started thinking about all these things that
I could do. And I got back to the
church and I had a team, and I walked
in the room with my team and I saw
them, and I was like.
You had $50 and they had $0.
I got $50 because I went with the guy
and they didn't.
Right?
And I'm like, all right, everybody, we're going to
lunch. I'm buying. Right? But it was such a,
like, on the whole way back to the church,
I had all these ideas of what I was
going to get. Absolutely, man, I need some new
shoes. I need to get this. It would be
great to go here. But, man, the moment I
saw the people, it was like, okay, holy Spirit,
that's pretty good.
You recognized that that was a seed. Even though
you were in need, you gave out of that
need and you invested into your team, which is
building the kingdom.
I'm not trying to make myself a hero because
I definitely eat the seed sometimes, too. I get
it wrong, but that was just one of those
moments that just popped in my head of how
great it felt in that moment. To recognize the
blessing that somebody gave to me wasn't for me
to be blessed. It was so that I could
then bless another group of people that didn't have
access to the person.
And the reverse is also true, too. We need
to recognize when it's a harvest. And one of
the ways that we recognize when something comes to
us that it is a harvest, is that we
already had a plan and a goal for something.
We've already talked to God about it. We've prayed
about it, and in partnership with God for God's
will in your life and what your goals are,
you can start to recognize what harvest is. For
example, I love your stories about Pastor Soul and
the immigration process. When you receive money that goes,
that is the exact amount of what you've been
believing for what you guys have been praying for.
Know that that's a harvest. That's not a seed
for you being to go and invest in something
else in the kingdom. We're in church. That's absolutely
a harvest. And so I think if you one.
Way praying for $87.52 and God gives you $87.52,
you don't have to go. I wonder what I'm
supposed to do.
Right? But that makes us have to take the
step in first having a goal, having a plan,
and then talking to God about it. Before we
even do anything with monetary transactions, we have to
talk to God about it. And I think that'll
help us determine, okay, what's a seed and what's
harvest.
Yeah. So I have two different thoughts I want
to talk about. One, you kind of sparked, but
the one I had first was, when you're hungry,
how do you not eat the seed?
Yes. I mean, that's really good. And it's a
sacrifice that we have to make. I think that
part of our partnership with God is making a
sacrifice of ourselves or our desires, our earthly desires,
or even our wants for the kingdom. And that
lets God know that it's not about us, that
it's about the kingdom. So much so that we
will sacrifice our needs, our wants, our desires, even
the thing that we think sustains us. We talk
about Elijah and the widow. She gave to Elijah.
She invested into the kingdom the very thing that
her and her son needed. And that's when God
opened the door for her harvest. And God wants
to know, who is your God? Is the things
you need your God or is God your God?
Are you only praying to God because you have
idolized provision? You've idolized the miracle. You've idolized the
things that you need in your life. And sometimes
God tests us in our faith, where the sacrifice
that we need to make is the very thing
that we think will sustain us. And that's part
of the reason why we fast, because we're rejecting
our body's needs. We're rejecting what we want in
order to get closer to God.
That's brilliant.
Yeah.
And, I mean, Jesus even chastises some people in
scripture when they're just chasing after him for the
miracle.
Yep. Absolutely.
They're just, hey, you gave us bread that one
time.
Yes.
I really like that bread. It'd be nice if
you gave me some more of that bread. And
he's like, you've got this thing twisted around. You're
chasing after the sign. You're not chasing after the
one doing the sign. You're not chasing after the
one. The sign is supposed to be pointing you
to something, but you keep chasing the sign.
Yeah. He's like, if I didn't do miracles, would
you still believe me?
Right.
It's the miracle that we idolize. Yeah, absolutely.
Crazy stuff. But I love that concept of just
trusting in God and the sacrifice that it is
when you're hungry. I'm sure there's times when a
farmer is like, man, I could just take this
and I'd be set for right now.
Right.
And the sad reality is, I think that's why
a lot of people get into financial problems to
begin with, is it's that immediate gratification. It's that
I want this thing right now. I don't know
if I want that thing in six months, and
I don't want to wait for six months to
find out if I still want it.
Absolutely.
I want it right now.
Right.
And so I think that leads us to a
lot of times eating the seed instead of doing
what we're supposed to do with it.
Right? Yeah. And sometimes when we don't eat the
seed and we actually plant the seed or invest
the seed, we invest the seed into the kingdom.
The harvest that comes sustains us through another time
when we think we need to start eating seeds.
And it's something that we have to think about,
that there's a cycle now. It could be an
actual harvest that's real, that's material that we have,
that we say, okay, God has blessed me with
this harvest. This harvest is going to last me
through a rough patch or it's emergency funds. But
sometimes a harvest is a revelation of God's provision,
and it's a building of the faith. A harvest
may not be money, but it may be an
increase in faith. And when you go through something
where you don't eat the seed and you invest
in the kingdom, your faith builds, and then that
faith becomes applied faith. For the next time you're
thinking about eating the seed, you say, hey, God
took me out of that position that I was
in when I didn't have anything. He can take
me out of this next circumstance in life when
I don't have anything. And so the harvest could
be material. It could be something that you actually
get that sustains you through the next dry season.
Or the harvest could be a building of faith
that lets you endure the next season because you're
believing God for provision.
Yeah, it's funny. Sol and I had so many,
and we're going to talk about this in our
sermon on Sunday, but we had so many financial
needs early on in our marriage. And it was
one of those where it's like we kept seeing
God provide miraculously. But then the next time we
had a severe financial need, we were still panicking.
I could just picture God just shaking his head
like, dude, like, I just did this. Okay, Brent
needs a miracle. I give him a miracle, he
panics. He needs a Miracle, he gets a miracle,
he panics. It's like this cycle and it's like
every time, this new thing, we have very short
memories of how God got us through. Because when
your stomach is, you just.
It happens all the time. And it reminds me
of the story when Jesus raises Lazarus from the
dead and he wants his disciples and all to
see that he has the power of resurrection because
he is going to die and saying, I'm going
to be raised in three days. So let me
show you what I can do now, because the
next moment of my life, I'm going into Judea
to be arrested to die. And then you're going
to have, this should help you with your faith.
I'm claiming I can raise in three days, so
let me raise somebody after three days. So you
can see me do it? Yes.
And they still don't believe. They're like, oh, no,
absolutely. And so we go through hardships and times
where we're believing in God for something and he
comes through for us, and then it seems like
we just forget. And I'm like, okay, we got
to be like Joshua and start making monuments and
writing these things down because these are testimonies of
faith that'll help us through the next season of
life.
That's actually what sparked it for my wife and
I. We talk about it sometimes. We've got this
jar at home, our memorial stones, but that actually
started in this season of, like, we were sitting
around one day and we're like, why do we
keep going through the same cycle?
Right?
Why do we keep forgetting how much God has
blessed us, how much God has provided miraculously? When
we were at the worst scenarios, God showed up.
But we keep forgetting these things. We need to
stop forgetting these things.
Yeah.
So literally we got a glass jar. And it's
funny, over the years, I think we're on our
third jar now because we keep putting too much
stuff in it. So we have to get a
bigger jar. And so it's a much larger jar
than it once was, but it's just filled with
little things of, just reminders of miracles that God
performed, things that he did, protection over our kids
and provision and all kinds of stuff.
Yeah, that's great when you have that jar because
you actively see God working in your life and
now it's like your faith is not blind faith
anymore. You actually have evidence of God working in
your life, and then it's something that you can
share with your kids. Like, hey, before you were
born. This is God moving in our lives to
build the foundation of our family, and then that
gives them hope and faith in God for the
foundation of their lives.
Exactly.
It's really good.
And God may not answer those prayers exactly how
I expect him to or want him to, but
I've got a track record with God that says
it's going to be all right.
I know that's the issue that I have with
God. If I can have an issue with God,
is that God is a creative God, and he
doesn't necessarily do things black and white exactly how
I want to do it. I'm like, God, this
is logical. This logic makes sense. You've given me
a brain. You've given me wisdom. One plus one
is two. Why can't you do the thing that
I need you to do, exactly like this? And
if he did do it exactly how I wanted,
then it will be easy for me to eliminate
God from the process. It's like, oh, well, that
happened because of this. Because of this sequence of
things or this timeline, or this logic, or this
earthly process. But God is a creative God, and
so he provides for us. He brings us a
harvest that's totally different than what we would expect,
to let us know that he is the one
that does the impossible. And the thing that we're
praying for is in his realm, we do what
we're supposed to do up to the point where
now it's impossible. And that's where he steps in
and he does it so creatively that we just
sit back and say, it must have been God,
because there's no other way that this could have
happened.
Yeah. You're praying for more money because you got
financial problems and God gives you a second job.
Yes.
You're like, I just wanted the money. I didn't
want the work. Just give me the check.
Where's that person that's supposed to come by and
knock on my door and give me a check?
Man, we used to say it all the time.
Checks in the mail, right?
Yeah, checks in the mail.
Sometimes the check in the mail is from your
employer.
The pay stub. Pay stub for 40 hours of
work.
Yes, exactly. There's times when we're praying, it's like
we took a pay cut. God, if you just
restore our finances back to before the cut. Give
us a raise. Give us a raise. Give us
a raise. And God's like, no, but here's some
groceries. Right?
And God's funny like that, too. Sometimes the harvest
is a revelation of what we need or don't
need. Sometimes the harvest is us downsizing life. And
I think God does that to get us focused
on him. He's like, okay, I'm not here just
to give you stuff. I want you to have
life and have it abundantly, but abundantly in me.
I'm not here just to give you cars and
jury and money and big houses. Listen, that stuff
is great. And if you have acquired it in
your lifetime, fantastic. The comforts of life are good.
Absolutely. But I think God sometimes wants us to
say, okay, the thing that I've been believing for
no longer matters. Because the process in believing and
having faith for it going to God, for talking
to God about goals and plans and vision and
Will has brought me to a place closer to
God where that becomes the harvest. The connection and
relationship with God becomes the harvest. And you no
longer need want believe for the thing that you
have been praying for. And a lot of times,
I think that's what God wants for us. That's
the harvest relationship with him downsizing our life. So
nothing's in the way of our connection to God.
And we don't have any idols.
Yeah, absolutely. When my wife and I were trying
to get out of debt years ago, we realized
we're paying way more than we needed to on
cable. And it was like the revelation that we
had from God in that moment, we're praying for,
like, we need an extra $150 to really just
be able to do this debt snowball thing well.
And it was like, hey, your cable bill, just
get rid of that, right?
Yeah, we talked about it Monday. I said, what's
the best way that you could increase your income
decreasing your, you know, I gave them homework. I
said, listen, I want you to print the last
three months of your credit card statement, your credit
card statement, your checking account statement, and your Amazon
order history. Because a lot of people's credit card
statements just says Amazon fulfillment. Amazon, Amazon, Amazon. So
I said, okay, I need you to print the
last three months of your order history on Amazon.
And then I want you to take a highlighter.
And if you don't have a highlighter, this is
the one time where you can use Amazon and
buy yourself a highlighter. It'll be there either that
night or early in the morning. So get a
highlighter and then highlight all of the nonsense. And
we know what nonsense is. We absolutely, if we're
honest with ourselves, we know what the nonsense is.
We go grocery shopping and then go out to
eat. We know what the nonsense is. And so
highlight the nonsense and add that up nine out
of ten, that's the dollar amount that you need
when you think that you don't have enough money
to meet your expenses. And so if you get
rid of your nonsense, you have a harvest. And
God wants us to use our lives to honor
him. Honor him with our possessions, not our nonsense.
And so the harvest that we have is eliminating
that nonsense.
That should be the title of this podcast today,
this episode. Just get rid of the nonsense. Eliminate
the nonsense because the nonsense may be your car.
Absolutely. Yes.
You've got a $600 car note, right?
You should be driving a Corolla.
Absolutely. It could be how much you pay for
cable. It could be Amazon. It could be that
Starbucks. Yeah, man. My wife loves Starbucks, but I
love my wife because she knows we have budgets
and we stay to them. So she gets gift
cards from people all the time. And then I'll
get them like random ministry friends. They want to
remind you that they still exist. So they'll send
you a little card in the mail with $15
Starbucks card. So I hand it over to soul,
and she's liKe, I got money in the account.
She doesn't go to Starbucks when there's no gift
card balance.
Right. That's nice. So now we know what to
get Pastor Sol for.
Anything you want to just love on her. It's
funny, like, we do staff birthdays here, and we
get to pull a gift card out of the
thing. Every time I get a Starbucks one, she's
like, yay, it's her birthday. Throw it over to
her. I'm like, it ain't even mine.
Your birthday is in December, so not in September.
Yeah, exactly. But, yeah, so you had said something
earlier about vision and having a plan, and there
was something that I sat through a financial meeting.
It was about church finances and the pastor in
charge, I think it was Chris Hodges with Church
of the Highlands. But he said, if somebody in
your world, in your life was going to write
a million dollar check to your church, oh, wow,
what would you spend it on? And this is
what he was pushing. He's like, if you don't
already know what you would use that million dollar
check for before it's written. It's never going to
be written. You have to have a vision. You
have to have a plan.
Absolutely.
And so if somebody were to walk into Carlton's
life and write a ridiculous check, I don't know
that million dollars, what would Carlton do with it?
Well, yeah, so I talked about this a little
bit on Sunday, and I said, okay, this needs
to be a practice before I then go and
preach this to everybody. It's like, okay, if you
received a million dollars, the first thing that we
think about is our own comfort. The second thing
we think about is making sure that comfort is
secure. So whatever is creating the comfort from the
million dollars, the next phase, or the plan is
to make sure that that's stable. And so my
wife and I, we talk about this and we
say, okay, we can't be self minded, that we're
not kingdom minded, because if it's only about ourselves,
then God's going to say, what am I giving
you a harvest for? And so we immediately think
about the kingdom. And the first thing we ask
ourselves, okay, what do we have a Heart for?
Okay, we have a heart for, surely humanitarian efforts,
but what kind of humanitarian efforts are we just
going to feed people and children came to our
mind, okay, children, nine out of ten don't have
control over their circumstances, the poverty that they're in,
the struggles that they're in, their parents issues, the
region of the world that they live in. And
so we have a strong heart for children. And
so we said to ourselves, okay, we have to
be kingdom minded first. So the first thing we're
going to do, if we ever received a million
dollars is to honor God by taking care of
the people that he loves and his heart is
for. And then whatever's left over, then we can
take care of ourselves. Because surely part of that
is the provision for us. We got a son
that needs to go to college and nine out
of ten, he's going to pick a college that's
going to cost an arm and a leg. And
there's many things in our lives that we need
to take care of. But in preparing for the
message, I had to revisit my heart. I didn't
mention it in the service, but I can't preach
a message where my heart isn't there. And so
I had to look at, okay, we joke about
if we win the lottery, what comfort things are
we going to take care of first? But we
had to shift our thinking to be more kingdom
minded because when we give generously, God returns it
generously, and then we can give again generously. And
it's a cycle. So when you're kingdom minded, what
you're doing is you're creating a conveyor belt of
blessings and harvest in your life, so then you
can have more seed to sow into the kingdom.
But when we're self minded, there's no conveyor belt.
It's a one way ticket. Of harvest from God
to us. And then he's going to say, wait
a minute, what am I investing in? Because God's
invested in our lives so we can then invest
into the kingdom. And if it stops with us,
if it doesn't circulate, God's going to say, I
need this blessing to circulate. If it stops with
us, he's not going to give it to us.
Well, and I think it's even more dangerous than
that, than just, you don't get it. It's like
water. So when a river flows into a body
of water, if there's no outlet, then that body
of water dies.
Yes. It dries up.
The Dead Sea is dead because it has no
outlet.
Right.
So anything that pumps into it, like if you've
got a pond or whatever, if there's no way
for water to circulate, for it to get out,
then it creates disease and death and it dries
up. Right. If that's what we're experiencing in our
own lives, why is God going to bless something
that's just going to kill the stuff around it?
Right.
And so we've got to become a funnel where
stuff comes in and it goes right back out.
Right. Yeah. That's good. And it's a spiritual principle.
It's not anything that we made up or a
misinterpretation of the Bible. We're not that smart. Right,
exactly. I mean, God set this in motion from
the beginning of time. As long as the earth
endures, there's going to be seed time and harvest.
And it's the circulation of that seed time and
harvest that's going to keep the kingdom advancing. And
that's our ultimate goal. We want lives changed. We
want people to know who Jesus is, and this
is the way to do it. Our ultimate goal
in life as Christians is not to have the
absolute best life we can have. God didn't promise
us that we wouldn't suffer. As a matter of
fact, not only did he not remove suffering from
us, but he came down to suffer with us.
And so that's something that we really have to
think about. Is our ultimate goal in life to
live the most comfortable, blessed life we can live,
or is it to be a blessing to the
kingdom?
Yeah. And that's a huge paradigm shift, because just
naturally we want comfort.
Absolutely.
I want to eat good food. I want to
stay in a nice house. I want to drive
a nice car. I want stuff. But God didn't
put us here for stuff.
Right.
I think the part of the problem is, and
we've talked about this in other episodes, but when
our mindset is just earthly and it's this finite
amount of time, we get so focused on 60,
70, 80 years that we miss out on. Okay,
therE's an eternity after that.
Right?
An eternity. Last time I did the math is
a lot longer than 70 years. But we're so
hyper focused on these 70 years have to be
the best possible.
Right.
Well, what does the best mean? Does that mean
the best car? No. Living your best life isn't
about having a Louis Vuitton. Whatever. Living your best
life is knowing that you're doing what God has
called you to do, that you're providing a way
for more people to end up on the right
side of eternity.
Yeah. And this is not a poverty message or
mentality that we're promoting, but really, can we invest
our lives for eternity? That's a huge return on
investment. The 70, 80 years that we're living on
Earth compared to all of eternity, that's a tremendous
return on investment. That's a harvest that can't be
calculated. And always joke about this. I say we're
going to be in heaven and we're going to
look back and say, what were we doing in
that time? We're going to be laughing at moments,
but then we're going to have a realization like,
what were we doing? What were we believing for?
What were we praying for? What were we pursuing?
I'm just grateful that it says that there's no
crying in heaven because I got a feeling that
brings me comfort. Because I got a feeling if
I were to look back on my life from
heaven, man, I'd be brought to tears on some
of my decisions and some of the things.
So we're not going to cry over our pain
on Earth. We're going to laugh about it. That's
good.
Yeah. I guess there's a principle, too, that we
have to recognize that a portion of every harvest
is supposed to be seed for the next harvest.
When we talk about don't eat the seed, well,
also don't eat 100% of the harvest.
Yes. Right.
Because a farmer that eats 100% of his harvest,
he doesn't have another season.
Absolutely.
He's done.
Yeah. The Bible says the first fruits of your
increase. Well, what's our increase? Our increase is the
harvest. So not only we can't just look at
the first fruits of our increase being, okay, our
paycheck. The next time I get paid, I have
to make sure I pay my tides and my
offering or give tides and offering. We have to
think about any increase, including harvest because harvest is
increase. And so that harvest is more seed to
be planted for the kingdom, for more harvest, so
you can have more seed to plant into the
kingdom. And so I just love the fact that
we are reminded that it's increase. It didn't say
paycheck or salary or earnings. It says increase. What's
increase? Anything that's increase. Yeah.
It's tough, though.
It is tough because we have a mindset that
it's like, oh, God gave me a harvest.
I worked hard, I got a blessing. Use the
blessing and listen, God, I'm going to build a
bigger barn and I'm going to store more stuff.
Wait a minute. I think there's a story in
the Bible about that.
Yes, absolutely. And God's not adverse us having a
comfortable, enjoyable life. I think he has joy when
we are happy and when we have joy, it's
just a matter of changing our perspective of what
our responsibility is to this whole thing. And I
think that's key for anybody sowing a seed and
believing for a harvest.
Absolutely. All right. So we talked about not eating
the seed. Well, one of the dangers of when
you eat the seed, that means you have nothing
to put in the ground and then you end
up in this place of you're praying for blessing
from God, you're praying for rain, but there's no
seed in the ground, right. When there's no seed
in the ground, what do you get?
You get mud, right?
Yeah, you get mud. It's nasty, it's a mess.
And so what do you say to people that
have been praying? And this is where maybe we
can start getting even more practical for people that
have been praying for rain but they don't have
any seed in the ground.
Right.
And they're about to get a messy life.
Yeah. And the mud that you get, sometimes it
leads people into maybe doubting God, right. Their faith
wavers. They start not believing in the process of
seed and harvest because they don't understand God. Why
haven't you given me the harvest? And God's like,
I've laid out an entire process for you. God's
responsibility in this is so much greater than ours.
He's given us the seed, he's given us the
soil, he's going to give us the rain for
the harvest. And when we don't plant seeds, it's
like the mud that we get in our lives
is more financial hardship, mismanagement of the possessions that
we have, bad stewardship. And it's like, God, what's
happening here? What's going on? And then you start
to drift from God because you're like, well, this
process isn't working, but you're doing the process wrong
because there's an element, a role or responsibility that
you have that you need to do.
You're missing the key ingredient.
Yeah, I love it when God's talking to the
Israelites in Malachi, and he's like, they're like, God,
nothing's working for us. We're not prospering. Crops are
dying. Everything's just bad is happening.
He's like, not us.
And he's like, yeah, of course, right? He's like,
you need to return to me. And they're like,
what? Return to you? We're talking to you now.
And he's like, no, you need to return to
me. And they're like, how do we return to
you? And God doesn't go into, well, you need
to pray. You need to fast. You need to
go to Bible study. You need to join a
life group. You need to go to church. He
says, there's a process in this that you're missing.
There's a role or responsibility that you're missing in
this process. The very next thing he says is
that, shall a man Rob God? You've robbed me
in tides and offering. And then he goes to
tell them what the curse is for not paying
their tithes and offering, and what the blessing is
for giving their tithes and offering. And so it's
like, okay, when we don't do our part in
the process and he gives us an opportunity to
invest, he gives us a seed to invest, and
he's waiting to pour out blessings on our lives,
and we forgot to do the one thing that
we're responsible for doing, and that's investing in his
kingdom. And God's like, there's not going to be
a harvest. As a matter of fact, he said
that he will rebuke the devourer for our sake.
So if we don't participate in this principle, the
devour is going to create hardships in our lives,
and we're not going to be able to stop
the locusts from eating our crops, and we're going
to be complaining to God, like, God, what is
going on? And he's like, we have a responsibility
and a role to play in this, and we're
not.
I told you what to do, and you chose
not to do it.
Absolutely.
Told you what happened if you didn't do what
I told you to do, right?
So when the money's funny, whether it's in our
control or outside of our control. It's a principle
that we're missing. It's a role in the process
that we are missing. And we're asking God give
us more money to fix the hardship that we're
in. And he's like, listen, money is not the
answer. Your heart posture to the process of seed,
time and harvest is the answer.
So you got to invest, starting first. Invest in
the kingdom. I think that's just a biblical principle
of putting God first. Yeah. My wife and I,
we were talking about this on the way home
on Sunday, and we were talking about investing, and
she stopped, and she was just like, I don't
understand what you're talking about. She's like. It's like
you're speaking another language.
Sure.
I don't know what investing is. I don't know
what investment is. What am I supposed to do?
And having that conversation with my wife, I wanted
to sit here and talk with you and just
give you a chance to kind of rapid fire.
Okay, so somebody's got some financial issues. Let's say
this is an average person. They are in debt.
There's not enough paycheck at the end of the
month. Let's lay out not necessarily a timeline, because
there's too many variables to map out a timeline.
Exactly. But what is step one for them? What's
step two for them? What's step three? And finally
get to a place of investing, not just returning
back to God. Natural. So what does that process
look like? So start with a family that says,
I've got a job. We have credit card debt,
we got student loans or whatever.
Absolutely.
And I make $60,000 a year, but it looks
like we're spending $70,000 a year. I don't know.
We're spending more than we make. We're in debt.
It's getting worse.
What do we do? Yeah. And actually, Joe Sango
has a whole plan for this. It's a ladder.
Each ladder has a. That you go up in
order to do these things. And some people look
at the wrongs, like, well, how come I can't
do wrong four first? Like, get out of debt
first before I do anything else. But what happens
is we have to understand that the steps that
we take in getting out of debt and fixing
our lives, there needs to be a prerequisite that
happens before something else happens, because there is a
learning process, an experience process. There's habits that need
to be created for us to get to a
point where we can do something different and so
the first rung is plans and goals like what
are our dreams? What are we living for and
shooting for? Because that's usually the motivator for the
rest of the ladder.
You got to know why.
Absolutely. Without a target, you're not going to even
attempt to aim or throw the dart. And so
you're going to say, well, I'm just living just
so we can pay credit cards. And that's not
motivating enough for people to keep pushing and keep
going in life when it comes to their finances.
So the first thing we have to do is
we have to pray, find out from God. And
usually it's already embedded in us what our desires
are, what the plans are, hopes and our dreams
are. And first you start with the goal. The
second thing you need to do is you need
to do a budget, because in the budget you
need to eliminate the nonsense. Right. The first thing
you need to do is eliminate the nonsense because
when you eliminate the nonsense now you can start
saving. Okay. We like to say we want to
pay ourselves first because we need emergency funds because
emergencies happen. Right. If we paid off our debt,
some people say, well, my available credit is my
emergency fund. No, your available credit is more potential
debt.
Right.
So you need a savings first. And the practice
of paying yourself and putting money in a savings
is an actual exercise that can be embedded in
you as a habit. So once you've reached a
savings goal, you've already made a practice of using
that money for something, and now you can use
that money for something different, like debt and investing.
So we have a goal.
So you start with your goal. You got to
know your why. Because when things get hard, it's
the why that keeps you going. Right. Then you
got to get your budget. And the budget should
have an item for savings.
Yeah, absolutely.
What would be like an average or a good
target for this scenario? Family, what dollar amount should
they be saving?
Absolutely. So you have to look at your expenses.
And this is why the budget is important, because
you have to look at, okay, how much savings
do I need to cover? One month of my
fixed and some of my variable expenses. And I
say some of your variable expenses because if you're
really down and out, you're cutting off the cable.
Right.
Okay, but you still got to eat. You still
got to eat. Yeah. So that's a variable expense,
but your fixed expense could be your mortgage or
your rent or your car note, things like that.
But we usually start with one month of expenses.
And once we have determined, okay, and like you
said, the timeline varies. That could take you a
year, it could take you six months, it could
take you two years. But the goal is to
get you to one month of savings. The next
rung after savings is eliminating non house, non business
debt. So credit card debt, basic consumer debt. One
of the best ways to eliminate debt is to
stop accumulating debt. And I hear people say, well,
I put my credit card in a bucket of
ice. It's like, well, how long does it take
you to unthall bucket of ice? You could chip
away at it.
And these days you've got that card stored online.
That's what a lot of people, you.
Don'T pull the card out.
Virtual card.
You got that thing stored on.
Capital One will give you a card that afternoon
if you really want it. So eliminate debt by
stop accumulating debt. So close your accounts if you
have to. If you're not a credit card person,
certainly close your credit card accounts. And then there's
different ways that you can pay off debt that
we go through in the class. But the key
is once I get to a savings goal now,
I can start using some of that savings to
start paying off debt. I can put more onto
the principal to start bringing that down.
That turns into the debt snowball, right?
Yeah, the debt snowball. Right. Because what the debt
snowball does is that you start paying off the
smaller debt and you give yourself wins. And for
your site motivating, that's fantastic. It's like, yes, I
got rid of that target credit card, six credit
cards.
Now I have five credit cards.
Yes. And it's like, well, wait a minute, should
I be trying to pay off the larger credit
card first because it's accumulating the most interest? We're
human. We need wins. So let's eliminate the small
ones first and get those out of the way.
And then we'll snowball to the bigger ones. We're
still going to use that payment to pay the
next one.
Yeah. So that other method is what, the debt
avalanche?
Yeah, the debt avalanche.
Technically, you're going to pay things off slightly faster
because of interest rates, percentages.
Right. But you're not getting any wins.
And it's just like average person isn't going to
make it.
Right.
You need that debt snowball. And so you've got
a minimum payment of $100 on this credit card.
You found 50 extra bucks from doing your budget
the right way.
Exactly.
So now you're paying $150 on this one until
it's paid off. And then you take that plus
the next credit card payment. And now you're making
a new payment.
Right.
Same thing. Last month, we paid off our van,
my family. And so right now, I'm just transferring
the same amount of money that I was paying
for the van.
That's perfect.
Is now just going into a savings account.
That's perfect. Yeah. And so what happens is that
we think that paying off debt should be a
sprint. And it's not a sprint, it's a marathon.
And we got to treat it like a marathon.
Unless you win the lottery, and then you can
pay.
There you go. Then it's a sprint. Right. But
the debt snowball kind of helps. You have small
sprints along the course of the marathon. And I
think for us, for our psyche, I think that's
helpful. I like it. And once you pay off
your debt, or it's not once you pay off,
but some of these things can happen at the
same time. If you got a job like this
imaginary family we're talking about, nine out of ten,
you're getting a company match from your job for
your 401K, for an investment, and that's free money.
And so it's like, okay, let me automate that.
Let me get that taken out of my check
automatically, like taxes. So just tell yourself, our income
tax went up 3% and then invested 3% in
your four hundred and one K and receive the
company match of the same, which is free money.
And for those who are entrepreneurs, you can put
away 3% of your earnings into a Roth IRA
or some kind of brokerage account. So we say
either take 3% match or $100 a month to
put away for investing, because with compound interest, the
money grows. And before you know it, the $100
turns into a large number. And for every month
that you don't do that, you're decreasing the end
number by thousands of dollars. It looks like $100
now, but with time value money and compound interest,
it's thousands of dollars that you're sacrificing by not
doing it. And so that's the part of investing.
And that can happen right away. It's the wrong
after paying debt, but you can automate that immediately.
And then once you get into a habit of
investing that and receiving the free money from the
company, now you can say, okay, let me look
at my savings. Now I can go back to
my savings, and now I can invest. I can
put three months of expenses into my savings.
You're growing that savings account, right?
Because you are paying off your debt. You have
at least your company match, which is free money
for investing. And now you can grow your savings
to have more of a foundation under you if
Anything were to happen. And the one thing we
talk about our savings is, and this is a
question I asked on Monday night, do we save
money forever? And it was a mixed response, and
the answer is no. Once we have a savings
goal, right, stop putting money in the savings. And
then this is the next wrong. Now we can
look at. Now I can invest 15% of my
income into a 401K or a Roth IRA or
some kind of brokerage account because I paid off
my debt. Hopefully by this point. And the wrongs
have timelines. So you put in dates of when
you think that this can happen for you in
your life. You paid off your debt, you are
receiving your company match. Now and then you have
met your savings goal. So the amount of money
that you were put in savings each month and
the amount of money that you were paying on
your credit cards, those two things now is 15%
of your income that can be saved. Because people
look at that as like, well, I don't have
15% of my income to save. I was like,
well, let's add up your debt payments and your
savings. Once you've reached a savings goal now, that
money can now grow for you.
And I think one of the mistakes that people
make in that scenario is they treat it like
they just got a 15% pay raise.
Absolutely. Now they have more.
Now I got more.
They can go.
When we paid off the van, it was like
the first gut reaction was, man, we got an
extra. No, there's no extra. The extra doesn't exist.
You lived without that, continue living without that. Let's
use it for something better, right?
Yeah, absolutely. And that's where we can grow our
savings and we can grow our investing if we
maintain our standard of living. And a lot of
times with the money, it's like, as soon as
we get money, we want to increase our standards
of living, which increases our expenses, which ultimately increases
our debt. The moment that we decide to take
that money and not invest it or not save
it, we say, okay, well, I can get this
thing. And usually that thing is 100 and 2150
percent of what you've budgeted for. And so not
only do you have the added expense, but you've
also increased debt because now you've acquired this thing.
Name that thing. You want to buy a newer
car. Okay, well, if you go out and buy
a luxury car, your oil change is no longer
$100. Now your oil change is $500 or something
to that effect. And usually we say, okay. Wow.
I paid off debt. Now I can go get
this thing or do this thing, and it's usually
more expensive than what we realize.
Absolutely.
So we went from setting goals, creating a budget
so we can know what to put in savings
debt. Snowball or avalanche depends on what discipline you
have and what you need for your psyche. Then
we talked about investing at least the company match,
getting the company match, which is free money. And
then we talked about increasing your savings to about
three months of your expenses or whatever you think
your goal is, right? Because there's also emergency savings,
more than just like your household expenses. When are
your tires going to expire? Does anybody know that?
They told me yesterday that I was at half
the life cycle of my tire, that I should
get new ones. And all I could think was,
if.
It'S half, half the life cycle, why am I
giving you, why am I.
Giving you money right now? I got some time
then, right?
What's the life?
My kid needs braces.
There you go. What's the life of your roof,
man? Right? What's the life of your furnace? These
things have a life. Your water tank. So it's
like, do we know that? Are we ready for
it? Do we have a savings for it? And
so your savings could be three months of your
basic household expenses plus emergency funds for these things
that you don't realize you're going to need to
replace one day. And then once we tackle those
things and we reach our goals, we've paid off
our consumer debt. We've reached our goal with savings.
Now we can really fund our investment. We can
really move that money to fund our investment. And
once we get there, funding our investment and things
are happening with us, we can now pay off
our mortgage. We can start putting extra payments towards
our mortgage. And then once we've made extra payments
towards our mortgage, I think it's like one payment
a year knocks off six to eight years of
your mortgage, depending on your interest rate. How much
money is that? Right. Six years of your mortgage
is tremendous. So now you can pay off your
mortgage. Now the question is, how much do I
need to live on if I don't have any
debt? If my savings is capped, I have my
money automatically going to my investing and I don't
have a mortgage. If you're making the same amount
of money now, you can give more money into
the kingdom. Now opportunities of investing in the kingdom
will increase for you, or your time is now
different. Okay. I don't need to make as much
money as I did before. And now you've freed
up time to do things that God really wants
you to do.
Yes. And you get to a place where you
can say, hey, you know what? Instead of spending
$3,000 to go on a missions trip, I'm going
to spend $30,000 and buy an orphanage.
Exactly right.
You can take what you've done in missions or
what you've done for others, for the kingdom, and
you can just blow that thing up.
Absolutely. Because if your mortgage is $2,000 a month
and that car note is $500 a month, that's
$2,500. That's $30,000. That can go to an orphanage
in Kenya. That can change the lives of dozens
of children. It's pretty cool. And it's like, if
I have a plan for my life and I
have a timeline for that plan, I can get
to the place where I can change lives. And
that's the whole goal of it.
And I think that it all comes back down
to that plan. I think there's too many Americans
that their plan is just to get through the
month.
Absolutely.
And that it's so short sighted and it's out
of a place of desperation. I get it. But
that desperation, for me, I think it's rarely caused
by too little income. It's usually caused by too
much expense.
Right.
And, yeah. Hey, look, you may be underpaid, but
I would still guarantee that you're overspending on something.
Absolutely.
And if you are severely underpaid, look for another
job. Look for an additional. Sometimes we got to
work hard.
Yes. Sometimes we have to work. We talk about.
I say, listen, if it ever goes south, I'm
going to be at Mariano stocking shelves at night.
If anything ever happens, you know where you're going
to find me? At Walmart, working. I'm going to
find a construction site. I'm going to do something
to provide because I can't be immune to work.
I've got pretty much one marketable skill. I can
work hard. Yeah, that's my marketable.
Got a body with all my limbs. I could
do something.
I can work hard. Yeah, this is good, man.
Absolutely.
This is a lot of practical help. People can
get more information by going to a Joe Sangle
class, getting the materials or any of that stuff.
But I think that this gives at least somebody,
if I'm just starting out, if I'm just trying
to figure this thing out, it gives you some
goals, some starting points.
Absolutely.
It's good stuff.
Yeah. We could talk about this all day, but
I know we can't we got.
A prayer meeting to go to?
We do.
We got to pray from money to prayer. It's
going to be awesome. But, hey, thanks for hanging
out with us. Thanks, Carlton, for being with us.
And we got one more of these on finance.
So some of you are like, can they stop
talking about money? The church always talks about money.
We got one more. But I promise you it's
going to be more on the spiritual side of
things. Because we're going to be talking about no
prayer, no miracle next week, and it's going to
be good. So we'll see you there. Take it
easy.
Hello. Welcome back to another episode of Between Sermons
(04:04:36):
where we get to hang out and talk about
(05:30:49):
our Sunday sermon here at CLC. And as always,
(07:40:08):
you don't have to have listened to the sermon
(10:32:34):
in order to get something out of this, because
(14:08:06):
really what we want to do today day and
(18:26:44):
every time we film is we want to turn
(23:28:29):
the monologue from Sunday into dialogue, to actually turn
it into a real conversation to give us a
chance to get a little bit deeper and get
a little bit more practical. Sometimes a preacher will
say something from a stage and you're like, that
sounds good, but how do I actually do that?
And so we are in a series on finances,
and so I brought in CFO Extraordinaire. That's your
new full title, by the way, Extraordinaire.
Yeah.
You can't say CFO without extraordinaire, but Carlton McCarthy.
Pastor Carlton, thank you for hanging out with us.
Sounds good. Yeah.
And you preached on Sunday. How's that feel? As
a CFO who's now been thrown into the preacher
role?
Yeah, it's really tough. I became an accountant to
hide in a closet with a pencil and a
calculator.
You like numbers, not words?
Yeah. I tell people I got a degree in
numbers, not letters. So it's interesting. But God stretches
us and he has us doing the thing that
we don't want to do sometimes to build our
character and grow us. So my theme this year,
and I've been talking to Pastor Asa about is
that do the hard thing. So whatever the hard
thing is, Carlson is going to try to do
it.
I like it. I read a book early on
when I was maybe 1819 years old. It was
written by teenagers.
Oh, wow.
Two brothers. And I think it was called do
the Hard Thing. It was a really good book.
And yeah, it was inspiring. So I ran a
marathon and climbed a mountain. I did the hard
thing.
Did really hard things.
But you're preaching. Hey, no, look, when the vast
majority of the public says that they would rather
die than give a public speech.
Yes, I know what that means.
I mean, not bad. This Sunday, it was part
two of a finance series. You had to come
up there after Joe SangeL. How's that feel?
Well, that was a little rough because he does
this day in and day out. So just coming
behind him was a little bit scary. But when
we're preaching the Bible, the Bible's a living word.
And so you get new translation and new ideas
and new thoughts. And so it kind of just
gave me comfort that if I preach the word,
the word will speak to the lives of individuals
almost individually. A lot of people came up to
me after and said the different things that they
got from it. That may have been my point
or may not have been my point, but the
(23:33:12):
word spoke to them, because it's.
Crazy when somebody comes up and be like, man,
when you said this, it just really changed my
(23:59:59):
life. And I'm like, I didn't even say that.
But that's what you heard. So that's what the
Holy Spirit did.
It wasn't even part of the message. Yeah, absolutely.
Very cool. So you preach on Sunday, and then
you turned around on Monday night and you started
a finance class.
Yeah, absolutely. I was broke. Now I'm not Joe
Sangle. Six week class. Monday night was the first
night, and we kind of went over your financial
goals and then the path to get there before
we get into each individual segment of finances, budgeting,
savings, investments. So it was a great class, very
interactive. The place was packed. We had a lot
of fun, a lot of jokes. We laughed, we
cried, a lot of crying over our finances. But
it was a really good opportunity to see where
people are in their finances, to see where their
goals are, their hopes and their dreams, and then
how to plan it out appropriately. So it was
a tremendous class. I was really happy that we
had it.
I love it. I know it's a smaller sample
size, obviously, than the full church or even the
country, but what were you seeing as these 30
or so individuals are sharing their financial goals, their
financial struggles? What are you like, man? It seems
like there's a theme happening here, or the majority
of people are facing this.
Sure. Yeah, absolutely. The one thing that really struck
me is that it wasn't so much hardship as
it was just knowledge base. A lot of people,
the majority of the people had income that could
provide for them. It was a matter of managing
and organizing that income and their expenses. And how
do I apply this to the goals I have
for my family, for myself, whether it's in ministry,
or just our finances in general? And so the
common theme was, okay, how do I organize what
I have? And I think that's so encouraging to
know that a small sample of our church body,
at least, is not necessarily struggling with. It's not
an income issue for them. It's more of just
a knowledge base of how do I organize my
finances to reach the goals that I now learn
that we have, which was really good.
So sounds like we need to make this podcast
extremely practical. Here's what you do, and here's why
you do it and how you do it. But
before we get into all of that, there was
this principle that you gave. The whole thing was
about seed time and harvest, right? So you're talking
about if you don't have your investment, you're not
going to have a harvest. And you said something
that I loved. How did you say it? It
was just simply don't eat the seed.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, man, when you said that, I was like,
suck. Because I'll be honest, the example you gave
of you found $20 in your pocket, and now
you're like, yay, I got $20 and I'm going
to go buy lunch. Yes. And it's like, man,
that was a seed for you to invest in
something, and you missed the opportunity because you ate
the seed.
Right. And I think the one thing, at least
for me, the important point of that is that
God is providing the seed. And we have to
recognize when he's providing a seed or when something
is a harvest. And a lot of times God
has probably given us more seed than harvest we're
receiving because we keep eating the seed. So he
keeps trying to deposit seeds to us, but we
keep seeing those seeds as a harvest. And God
is saying, listen, your goal, my plans for you
are bigger than you finding $20. So don't count
that as the harvest. The harvest that I have
for you, the plans and the desires that he's
put in us is much bigger than what we
count as actual harvest. And so God, he keeps
giving us seed, and he's like, hey, that seed
that can be used for the kingdom, I circulate
money, funds finances through the kingdom, through my people.
And so he wants us to partner with him
in taking care of other people and taking care
of the kingdom. But when we receive something unexpected
or even during a budget of our own finances,
we say, okay, well, God's given me this money
to live on and to take care of myself.
And he's like, hey, part of that is the
seed that I need you to invest back into
the kingdom. And so it's really interesting to see
people's mind shift when they think about finding money
or unexpected money that comes in. It can't always
be a harvest. Sometimes it is a seed because
God is providing that seed.
Yeah, it was cool. I had this moment. I
was a student, an intern, basically. So I had
no income at all. And a guy had come
to visit and he was doing some ministry stuff.
And on his way to the airport, I was
living in Mexico. On his way to the airport,
he gave me all of his leftover pesos.
Oh, wow.
Because he's like, I'm not even worth exchanging this.
So he gave me, and it was like, I
don't know. It was like $50 worth of pesos.
And, man, as a guy that has zero income,
I was like, this is awesome. And in my
head, I started thinking about all these things that
I could do. And I got back to the
church and I had a team, and I walked
in the room with my team and I saw
them, and I was like.
You had $50 and they had $0.
I got $50 because I went with the guy
and they didn't.
Right?
And I'm like, all right, everybody, we're going to
lunch. I'm buying. Right? But it was such a,
like, on the whole way back to the church,
I had all these ideas of what I was
going to get. Absolutely, man, I need some new
shoes. I need to get this. It would be
great to go here. But, man, the moment I
saw the people, it was like, okay, holy Spirit,
that's pretty good.
You recognized that that was a seed. Even though
you were in need, you gave out of that
need and you invested into your team, which is
building the kingdom.
I'm not trying to make myself a hero because
I definitely eat the seed sometimes, too. I get
it wrong, but that was just one of those
moments that just popped in my head of how
great it felt in that moment. To recognize the
blessing that somebody gave to me wasn't for me
to be blessed. It was so that I could
then bless another group of people that didn't have
access to the person.
And the reverse is also true, too. We need
to recognize when it's a harvest. And one of
the ways that we recognize when something comes to
us that it is a harvest, is that we
already had a plan and a goal for something.
We've already talked to God about it. We've prayed
about it, and in partnership with God for God's
will in your life and what your goals are,
you can start to recognize what harvest is. For
example, I love your stories about Pastor Soul and
the immigration process. When you receive money that goes,
that is the exact amount of what you've been
believing for what you guys have been praying for.
Know that that's a harvest. That's not a seed
for you being to go and invest in something
else in the kingdom. We're in church. That's absolutely
a harvest. And so I think if you one.
Way praying for $87.52 and God gives you $87.52,
you don't have to go. I wonder what I'm
supposed to do.
Right? But that makes us have to take the
step in first having a goal, having a plan,
and then talking to God about it. Before we
even do anything with monetary transactions, we have to
talk to God about it. And I think that'll
help us determine, okay, what's a seed and what's
harvest.
Yeah. So I have two different thoughts I want
to talk about. One, you kind of sparked, but
the one I had first was, when you're hungry,
how do you not eat the seed?
Yes. I mean, that's really good. And it's a
sacrifice that we have to make. I think that
part of our partnership with God is making a
sacrifice of ourselves or our desires, our earthly desires,
or even our wants for the kingdom. And that
lets God know that it's not about us, that
it's about the kingdom. So much so that we
will sacrifice our needs, our wants, our desires, even
the thing that we think sustains us. We talk
about Elijah and the widow. She gave to Elijah.
She invested into the kingdom the very thing that
her and her son needed. And that's when God
opened the door for her harvest. And God wants
to know, who is your God? Is the things
you need your God or is God your God?
Are you only praying to God because you have
idolized provision? You've idolized the miracle. You've idolized the
things that you need in your life. And sometimes
God tests us in our faith, where the sacrifice
that we need to make is the very thing
that we think will sustain us. And that's part
of the reason why we fast, because we're rejecting
our body's needs. We're rejecting what we want in
order to get closer to God.
That's brilliant.
Yeah.
And, I mean, Jesus even chastises some people in
scripture when they're just chasing after him for the
miracle.
Yep. Absolutely.
They're just, hey, you gave us bread that one
time.
Yes.
I really like that bread. It'd be nice if
you gave me some more of that bread. And
he's like, you've got this thing twisted around. You're
chasing after the sign. You're not chasing after the
one doing the sign. You're not chasing after the
one. The sign is supposed to be pointing you
to something, but you keep chasing the sign.
Yeah. He's like, if I didn't do miracles, would
you still believe me?
Right.
It's the miracle that we idolize. Yeah, absolutely.
Crazy stuff. But I love that concept of just
trusting in God and the sacrifice that it is
when you're hungry. I'm sure there's times when a
farmer is like, man, I could just take this
and I'd be set for right now.
Right.
And the sad reality is, I think that's why
a lot of people get into financial problems to
begin with, is it's that immediate gratification. It's that
I want this thing right now. I don't know
if I want that thing in six months, and
I don't want to wait for six months to
find out if I still want it.
Absolutely.
I want it right now.
Right.
And so I think that leads us to a
lot of times eating the seed instead of doing
what we're supposed to do with it.
Right? Yeah. And sometimes when we don't eat the
seed and we actually plant the seed or invest
the seed, we invest the seed into the kingdom.
The harvest that comes sustains us through another time
when we think we need to start eating seeds.
And it's something that we have to think about,
that there's a cycle now. It could be an
actual harvest that's real, that's material that we have,
that we say, okay, God has blessed me with
this harvest. This harvest is going to last me
through a rough patch or it's emergency funds. But
sometimes a harvest is a revelation of God's provision,
and it's a building of the faith. A harvest
may not be money, but it may be an
increase in faith. And when you go through something
where you don't eat the seed and you invest
in the kingdom, your faith builds, and then that
faith becomes applied faith. For the next time you're
thinking about eating the seed, you say, hey, God
took me out of that position that I was
in when I didn't have anything. He can take
me out of this next circumstance in life when
I don't have anything. And so the harvest could
be material. It could be something that you actually
get that sustains you through the next dry season.
Or the harvest could be a building of faith
that lets you endure the next season because you're
believing God for provision.
Yeah, it's funny. Sol and I had so many,
and we're going to talk about this in our
sermon on Sunday, but we had so many financial
needs early on in our marriage. And it was
one of those where it's like we kept seeing
God provide miraculously. But then the next time we
had a severe financial need, we were still panicking.
I could just picture God just shaking his head
like, dude, like, I just did this. Okay, Brent
needs a miracle. I give him a miracle, he
panics. He needs a Miracle, he gets a miracle,
he panics. It's like this cycle and it's like
every time, this new thing, we have very short
memories of how God got us through. Because when
your stomach is, you just.
It happens all the time. And it reminds me
of the story when Jesus raises Lazarus from the
dead and he wants his disciples and all to
see that he has the power of resurrection because
he is going to die and saying, I'm going
to be raised in three days. So let me
show you what I can do now, because the
next moment of my life, I'm going into Judea
to be arrested to die. And then you're going
to have, this should help you with your faith.
I'm claiming I can raise in three days, so
let me raise somebody after three days. So you
can see me do it? Yes.
And they still don't believe. They're like, oh, no,
absolutely. And so we go through hardships and times
where we're believing in God for something and he
comes through for us, and then it seems like
we just forget. And I'm like, okay, we got
to be like Joshua and start making monuments and
writing these things down because these are testimonies of
faith that'll help us through the next season of
life.
That's actually what sparked it for my wife and
I. We talk about it sometimes. We've got this
jar at home, our memorial stones, but that actually
started in this season of, like, we were sitting
around one day and we're like, why do we
keep going through the same cycle?
Right?
Why do we keep forgetting how much God has
blessed us, how much God has provided miraculously? When
we were at the worst scenarios, God showed up.
But we keep forgetting these things. We need to
stop forgetting these things.
Yeah.
So literally we got a glass jar. And it's
funny, over the years, I think we're on our
third jar now because we keep putting too much
stuff in it. So we have to get a
bigger jar. And so it's a much larger jar
than it once was, but it's just filled with
little things of, just reminders of miracles that God
performed, things that he did, protection over our kids
and provision and all kinds of stuff.
Yeah, that's great when you have that jar because
you actively see God working in your life and
now it's like your faith is not blind faith
anymore. You actually have evidence of God working in
your life, and then it's something that you can
share with your kids. Like, hey, before you were
born. This is God moving in our lives to
build the foundation of our family, and then that
gives them hope and faith in God for the
foundation of their lives.
Exactly.
It's really good.
And God may not answer those prayers exactly how
I expect him to or want him to, but
I've got a track record with God that says
it's going to be all right.
I know that's the issue that I have with
God. If I can have an issue with God,
is that God is a creative God, and he
doesn't necessarily do things black and white exactly how
I want to do it. I'm like, God, this
is logical. This logic makes sense. You've given me
a brain. You've given me wisdom. One plus one
is two. Why can't you do the thing that
I need you to do, exactly like this? And
if he did do it exactly how I wanted,
then it will be easy for me to eliminate
God from the process. It's like, oh, well, that
happened because of this. Because of this sequence of
things or this timeline, or this logic, or this
earthly process. But God is a creative God, and
so he provides for us. He brings us a
harvest that's totally different than what we would expect,
to let us know that he is the one
that does the impossible. And the thing that we're
praying for is in his realm, we do what
we're supposed to do up to the point where
now it's impossible. And that's where he steps in
and he does it so creatively that we just
sit back and say, it must have been God,
because there's no other way that this could have
happened.
Yeah. You're praying for more money because you got
financial problems and God gives you a second job.
Yes.
You're like, I just wanted the money. I didn't
want the work. Just give me the check.
Where's that person that's supposed to come by and
knock on my door and give me a check?
Man, we used to say it all the time.
Checks in the mail, right?
Yeah, checks in the mail.
Sometimes the check in the mail is from your
employer.
The pay stub. Pay stub for 40 hours of
work.
Yes, exactly. There's times when we're praying, it's like
we took a pay cut. God, if you just
restore our finances back to before the cut. Give
us a raise. Give us a raise. Give us
a raise. And God's like, no, but here's some
groceries. Right?
And God's funny like that, too. Sometimes the harvest
is a revelation of what we need or don't
need. Sometimes the harvest is us downsizing life. And
I think God does that to get us focused
on him. He's like, okay, I'm not here just
to give you stuff. I want you to have
life and have it abundantly, but abundantly in me.
I'm not here just to give you cars and
jury and money and big houses. Listen, that stuff
is great. And if you have acquired it in
your lifetime, fantastic. The comforts of life are good.
Absolutely. But I think God sometimes wants us to
say, okay, the thing that I've been believing for
no longer matters. Because the process in believing and
having faith for it going to God, for talking
to God about goals and plans and vision and
Will has brought me to a place closer to
God where that becomes the harvest. The connection and
relationship with God becomes the harvest. And you no
longer need want believe for the thing that you
have been praying for. And a lot of times,
I think that's what God wants for us. That's
the harvest relationship with him downsizing our life. So
nothing's in the way of our connection to God.
And we don't have any idols.
Yeah, absolutely. When my wife and I were trying
to get out of debt years ago, we realized
we're paying way more than we needed to on
cable. And it was like the revelation that we
had from God in that moment, we're praying for,
like, we need an extra $150 to really just
be able to do this debt snowball thing well.
And it was like, hey, your cable bill, just
get rid of that, right?
Yeah, we talked about it Monday. I said, what's
the best way that you could increase your income
decreasing your, you know, I gave them homework. I
said, listen, I want you to print the last
three months of your credit card statement, your credit
card statement, your checking account statement, and your Amazon
order history. Because a lot of people's credit card
statements just says Amazon fulfillment. Amazon, Amazon, Amazon. So
I said, okay, I need you to print the
last three months of your order history on Amazon.
And then I want you to take a highlighter.
And if you don't have a highlighter, this is
the one time where you can use Amazon and
buy yourself a highlighter. It'll be there either that
night or early in the morning. So get a
highlighter and then highlight all of the nonsense. And
we know what nonsense is. We absolutely, if we're
honest with ourselves, we know what the nonsense is.
We go grocery shopping and then go out to
eat. We know what the nonsense is. And so
highlight the nonsense and add that up nine out
of ten, that's the dollar amount that you need
when you think that you don't have enough money
to meet your expenses. And so if you get
rid of your nonsense, you have a harvest. And
God wants us to use our lives to honor
him. Honor him with our possessions, not our nonsense.
And so the harvest that we have is eliminating
that nonsense.
That should be the title of this podcast today,
this episode. Just get rid of the nonsense. Eliminate
the nonsense because the nonsense may be your car.
Absolutely. Yes.
You've got a $600 car note, right?
You should be driving a Corolla.
Absolutely. It could be how much you pay for
cable. It could be Amazon. It could be that
Starbucks. Yeah, man. My wife loves Starbucks, but I
love my wife because she knows we have budgets
and we stay to them. So she gets gift
cards from people all the time. And then I'll
get them like random ministry friends. They want to
remind you that they still exist. So they'll send
you a little card in the mail with $15
Starbucks card. So I hand it over to soul,
and she's liKe, I got money in the account.
She doesn't go to Starbucks when there's no gift
card balance.
Right. That's nice. So now we know what to
get Pastor Sol for.
Anything you want to just love on her. It's
funny, like, we do staff birthdays here, and we
get to pull a gift card out of the
thing. Every time I get a Starbucks one, she's
like, yay, it's her birthday. Throw it over to
her. I'm like, it ain't even mine.
Your birthday is in December, so not in September.
Yeah, exactly. But, yeah, so you had said something
earlier about vision and having a plan, and there
was something that I sat through a financial meeting.
It was about church finances and the pastor in
charge, I think it was Chris Hodges with Church
of the Highlands. But he said, if somebody in
your world, in your life was going to write
a million dollar check to your church, oh, wow,
what would you spend it on? And this is
what he was pushing. He's like, if you don't
already know what you would use that million dollar
check for before it's written. It's never going to
be written. You have to have a vision. You
have to have a plan.
Absolutely.
And so if somebody were to walk into Carlton's
life and write a ridiculous check, I don't know
that million dollars, what would Carlton do with it?
Well, yeah, so I talked about this a little
bit on Sunday, and I said, okay, this needs
to be a practice before I then go and
preach this to everybody. It's like, okay, if you
received a million dollars, the first thing that we
think about is our own comfort. The second thing
we think about is making sure that comfort is
secure. So whatever is creating the comfort from the
million dollars, the next phase, or the plan is
to make sure that that's stable. And so my
wife and I, we talk about this and we
say, okay, we can't be self minded, that we're
not kingdom minded, because if it's only about ourselves,
then God's going to say, what am I giving
you a harvest for? And so we immediately think
about the kingdom. And the first thing we ask
ourselves, okay, what do we have a Heart for?
Okay, we have a heart for, surely humanitarian efforts,
but what kind of humanitarian efforts are we just
going to feed people and children came to our
mind, okay, children, nine out of ten don't have
control over their circumstances, the poverty that they're in,
the struggles that they're in, their parents issues, the
region of the world that they live in. And
so we have a strong heart for children. And
so we said to ourselves, okay, we have to
be kingdom minded first. So the first thing we're
going to do, if we ever received a million
dollars is to honor God by taking care of
the people that he loves and his heart is
for. And then whatever's left over, then we can
take care of ourselves. Because surely part of that
is the provision for us. We got a son
that needs to go to college and nine out
of ten, he's going to pick a college that's
going to cost an arm and a leg. And
there's many things in our lives that we need
to take care of. But in preparing for the
message, I had to revisit my heart. I didn't
mention it in the service, but I can't preach
a message where my heart isn't there. And so
I had to look at, okay, we joke about
if we win the lottery, what comfort things are
we going to take care of first? But we
had to shift our thinking to be more kingdom
minded because when we give generously, God returns it
generously, and then we can give again generously. And
it's a cycle. So when you're kingdom minded, what
you're doing is you're creating a conveyor belt of
blessings and harvest in your life, so then you
can have more seed to sow into the kingdom.
But when we're self minded, there's no conveyor belt.
It's a one way ticket. Of harvest from God
to us. And then he's going to say, wait
a minute, what am I investing in? Because God's
invested in our lives so we can then invest
into the kingdom. And if it stops with us,
if it doesn't circulate, God's going to say, I
need this blessing to circulate. If it stops with
us, he's not going to give it to us.
Well, and I think it's even more dangerous than
that, than just, you don't get it. It's like
water. So when a river flows into a body
of water, if there's no outlet, then that body
of water dies.
Yes. It dries up.
The Dead Sea is dead because it has no
outlet.
Right.
So anything that pumps into it, like if you've
got a pond or whatever, if there's no way
for water to circulate, for it to get out,
then it creates disease and death and it dries
up. Right. If that's what we're experiencing in our
own lives, why is God going to bless something
that's just going to kill the stuff around it?
Right.
And so we've got to become a funnel where
stuff comes in and it goes right back out.
Right. Yeah. That's good. And it's a spiritual principle.
It's not anything that we made up or a
misinterpretation of the Bible. We're not that smart. Right,
exactly. I mean, God set this in motion from
the beginning of time. As long as the earth
endures, there's going to be seed time and harvest.
And it's the circulation of that seed time and
harvest that's going to keep the kingdom advancing. And
that's our ultimate goal. We want lives changed. We
want people to know who Jesus is, and this
is the way to do it. Our ultimate goal
in life as Christians is not to have the
absolute best life we can have. God didn't promise
us that we wouldn't suffer. As a matter of
fact, not only did he not remove suffering from
us, but he came down to suffer with us.
And so that's something that we really have to
think about. Is our ultimate goal in life to
live the most comfortable, blessed life we can live,
or is it to be a blessing to the
kingdom?
Yeah. And that's a huge paradigm shift, because just
naturally we want comfort.
Absolutely.
I want to eat good food. I want to
stay in a nice house. I want to drive
a nice car. I want stuff. But God didn't
put us here for stuff.
Right.
I think the part of the problem is, and
we've talked about this in other episodes, but when
our mindset is just earthly and it's this finite
amount of time, we get so focused on 60,
70, 80 years that we miss out on. Okay,
therE's an eternity after that.
Right?
An eternity. Last time I did the math is
a lot longer than 70 years. But we're so
hyper focused on these 70 years have to be
the best possible.
Right.
Well, what does the best mean? Does that mean
the best car? No. Living your best life isn't
about having a Louis Vuitton. Whatever. Living your best
life is knowing that you're doing what God has
called you to do, that you're providing a way
for more people to end up on the right
side of eternity.
Yeah. And this is not a poverty message or
mentality that we're promoting, but really, can we invest
our lives for eternity? That's a huge return on
investment. The 70, 80 years that we're living on
Earth compared to all of eternity, that's a tremendous
return on investment. That's a harvest that can't be
calculated. And always joke about this. I say we're
going to be in heaven and we're going to
look back and say, what were we doing in
that time? We're going to be laughing at moments,
but then we're going to have a realization like,
what were we doing? What were we believing for?
What were we praying for? What were we pursuing?
I'm just grateful that it says that there's no
crying in heaven because I got a feeling that
brings me comfort. Because I got a feeling if
I were to look back on my life from
heaven, man, I'd be brought to tears on some
of my decisions and some of the things.
So we're not going to cry over our pain
on Earth. We're going to laugh about it. That's
good.
Yeah. I guess there's a principle, too, that we
have to recognize that a portion of every harvest
is supposed to be seed for the next harvest.
When we talk about don't eat the seed, well,
also don't eat 100% of the harvest.
Yes. Right.
Because a farmer that eats 100% of his harvest,
he doesn't have another season.
Absolutely.
He's done.
Yeah. The Bible says the first fruits of your
increase. Well, what's our increase? Our increase is the
harvest. So not only we can't just look at
the first fruits of our increase being, okay, our
paycheck. The next time I get paid, I have
to make sure I pay my tides and my
offering or give tides and offering. We have to
think about any increase, including harvest because harvest is
increase. And so that harvest is more seed to
be planted for the kingdom, for more harvest, so
you can have more seed to plant into the
kingdom. And so I just love the fact that
we are reminded that it's increase. It didn't say
paycheck or salary or earnings. It says increase. What's
increase? Anything that's increase. Yeah.
It's tough, though.
It is tough because we have a mindset that
it's like, oh, God gave me a harvest.
I worked hard, I got a blessing. Use the
blessing and listen, God, I'm going to build a
bigger barn and I'm going to store more stuff.
Wait a minute. I think there's a story in
the Bible about that.
Yes, absolutely. And God's not adverse us having a
comfortable, enjoyable life. I think he has joy when
we are happy and when we have joy, it's
just a matter of changing our perspective of what
our responsibility is to this whole thing. And I
think that's key for anybody sowing a seed and
believing for a harvest.
Absolutely. All right. So we talked about not eating
the seed. Well, one of the dangers of when
you eat the seed, that means you have nothing
to put in the ground and then you end
up in this place of you're praying for blessing
from God, you're praying for rain, but there's no
seed in the ground, right. When there's no seed
in the ground, what do you get?
You get mud, right?
Yeah, you get mud. It's nasty, it's a mess.
And so what do you say to people that
have been praying? And this is where maybe we
can start getting even more practical for people that
have been praying for rain but they don't have
any seed in the ground.
Right.
And they're about to get a messy life.
Yeah. And the mud that you get, sometimes it
leads people into maybe doubting God, right. Their faith
wavers. They start not believing in the process of
seed and harvest because they don't understand God. Why
haven't you given me the harvest? And God's like,
I've laid out an entire process for you. God's
responsibility in this is so much greater than ours.
He's given us the seed, he's given us the
soil, he's going to give us the rain for
the harvest. And when we don't plant seeds, it's
like the mud that we get in our lives
is more financial hardship, mismanagement of the possessions that
we have, bad stewardship. And it's like, God, what's
happening here? What's going on? And then you start
to drift from God because you're like, well, this
process isn't working, but you're doing the process wrong
because there's an element, a role or responsibility that
you have that you need to do.
You're missing the key ingredient.
Yeah, I love it when God's talking to the
Israelites in Malachi, and he's like, they're like, God,
nothing's working for us. We're not prospering. Crops are
dying. Everything's just bad is happening.
He's like, not us.
And he's like, yeah, of course, right? He's like,
you need to return to me. And they're like,
what? Return to you? We're talking to you now.
And he's like, no, you need to return to
me. And they're like, how do we return to
you? And God doesn't go into, well, you need
to pray. You need to fast. You need to
go to Bible study. You need to join a
life group. You need to go to church. He
says, there's a process in this that you're missing.
There's a role or responsibility that you're missing in
this process. The very next thing he says is
that, shall a man Rob God? You've robbed me
in tides and offering. And then he goes to
tell them what the curse is for not paying
their tithes and offering, and what the blessing is
for giving their tithes and offering. And so it's
like, okay, when we don't do our part in
the process and he gives us an opportunity to
invest, he gives us a seed to invest, and
he's waiting to pour out blessings on our lives,
and we forgot to do the one thing that
we're responsible for doing, and that's investing in his
kingdom. And God's like, there's not going to be
a harvest. As a matter of fact, he said
that he will rebuke the devourer for our sake.
So if we don't participate in this principle, the
devour is going to create hardships in our lives,
and we're not going to be able to stop
the locusts from eating our crops, and we're going
to be complaining to God, like, God, what is
going on? And he's like, we have a responsibility
and a role to play in this, and we're
not.
I told you what to do, and you chose
not to do it.
Absolutely.
Told you what happened if you didn't do what
I told you to do, right?
So when the money's funny, whether it's in our
control or outside of our control. It's a principle
that we're missing. It's a role in the process
that we are missing. And we're asking God give
us more money to fix the hardship that we're
in. And he's like, listen, money is not the
answer. Your heart posture to the process of seed,
time and harvest is the answer.
So you got to invest, starting first. Invest in
the kingdom. I think that's just a biblical principle
of putting God first. Yeah. My wife and I,
we were talking about this on the way home
on Sunday, and we were talking about investing, and
she stopped, and she was just like, I don't
understand what you're talking about. She's like. It's like
you're speaking another language.
Sure.
I don't know what investing is. I don't know
what investment is. What am I supposed to do?
And having that conversation with my wife, I wanted
to sit here and talk with you and just
give you a chance to kind of rapid fire.
Okay, so somebody's got some financial issues. Let's say
this is an average person. They are in debt.
There's not enough paycheck at the end of the
month. Let's lay out not necessarily a timeline, because
there's too many variables to map out a timeline.
Exactly. But what is step one for them? What's
step two for them? What's step three? And finally
get to a place of investing, not just returning
back to God. Natural. So what does that process
look like? So start with a family that says,
I've got a job. We have credit card debt,
we got student loans or whatever.
Absolutely.
And I make $60,000 a year, but it looks
like we're spending $70,000 a year. I don't know.
We're spending more than we make. We're in debt.
It's getting worse.
What do we do? Yeah. And actually, Joe Sango
has a whole plan for this. It's a ladder.
Each ladder has a. That you go up in
order to do these things. And some people look
at the wrongs, like, well, how come I can't
do wrong four first? Like, get out of debt
first before I do anything else. But what happens
is we have to understand that the steps that
we take in getting out of debt and fixing
our lives, there needs to be a prerequisite that
happens before something else happens, because there is a
learning process, an experience process. There's habits that need
to be created for us to get to a
point where we can do something different and so
the first rung is plans and goals like what
are our dreams? What are we living for and
shooting for? Because that's usually the motivator for the
rest of the ladder.
You got to know why.
Absolutely. Without a target, you're not going to even
attempt to aim or throw the dart. And so
you're going to say, well, I'm just living just
so we can pay credit cards. And that's not
motivating enough for people to keep pushing and keep
going in life when it comes to their finances.
So the first thing we have to do is
we have to pray, find out from God. And
usually it's already embedded in us what our desires
are, what the plans are, hopes and our dreams
are. And first you start with the goal. The
second thing you need to do is you need
to do a budget, because in the budget you
need to eliminate the nonsense. Right. The first thing
you need to do is eliminate the nonsense because
when you eliminate the nonsense now you can start
saving. Okay. We like to say we want to
pay ourselves first because we need emergency funds because
emergencies happen. Right. If we paid off our debt,
some people say, well, my available credit is my
emergency fund. No, your available credit is more potential
debt.
Right.
So you need a savings first. And the practice
of paying yourself and putting money in a savings
is an actual exercise that can be embedded in
you as a habit. So once you've reached a
savings goal, you've already made a practice of using
that money for something, and now you can use
that money for something different, like debt and investing.
So we have a goal.
So you start with your goal. You got to
know your why. Because when things get hard, it's
the why that keeps you going. Right. Then you
got to get your budget. And the budget should
have an item for savings.
Yeah, absolutely.
What would be like an average or a good
target for this scenario? Family, what dollar amount should
they be saving?
Absolutely. So you have to look at your expenses.
And this is why the budget is important, because
you have to look at, okay, how much savings
do I need to cover? One month of my
fixed and some of my variable expenses. And I
say some of your variable expenses because if you're
really down and out, you're cutting off the cable.
Right.
Okay, but you still got to eat. You still
got to eat. Yeah. So that's a variable expense,
but your fixed expense could be your mortgage or
your rent or your car note, things like that.
But we usually start with one month of expenses.
And once we have determined, okay, and like you
said, the timeline varies. That could take you a
year, it could take you six months, it could
take you two years. But the goal is to
get you to one month of savings. The next
rung after savings is eliminating non house, non business
debt. So credit card debt, basic consumer debt. One
of the best ways to eliminate debt is to
stop accumulating debt. And I hear people say, well,
I put my credit card in a bucket of
ice. It's like, well, how long does it take
you to unthall bucket of ice? You could chip
away at it.
And these days you've got that card stored online.
That's what a lot of people, you.
Don'T pull the card out.
Virtual card.
You got that thing stored on.
Capital One will give you a card that afternoon
if you really want it. So eliminate debt by
stop accumulating debt. So close your accounts if you
have to. If you're not a credit card person,
certainly close your credit card accounts. And then there's
different ways that you can pay off debt that
we go through in the class. But the key
is once I get to a savings goal now,
I can start using some of that savings to
start paying off debt. I can put more onto
the principal to start bringing that down.
That turns into the debt snowball, right?
Yeah, the debt snowball. Right. Because what the debt
snowball does is that you start paying off the
smaller debt and you give yourself wins. And for
your site motivating, that's fantastic. It's like, yes, I
got rid of that target credit card, six credit
cards.
Now I have five credit cards.
Yes. And it's like, well, wait a minute, should
I be trying to pay off the larger credit
card first because it's accumulating the most interest? We're
human. We need wins. So let's eliminate the small
ones first and get those out of the way.
And then we'll snowball to the bigger ones. We're
still going to use that payment to pay the
next one.
Yeah. So that other method is what, the debt
avalanche?
Yeah, the debt avalanche.
Technically, you're going to pay things off slightly faster
because of interest rates, percentages.
Right. But you're not getting any wins.
And it's just like average person isn't going to
make it.
Right.
You need that debt snowball. And so you've got
a minimum payment of $100 on this credit card.
You found 50 extra bucks from doing your budget
the right way.
Exactly.
So now you're paying $150 on this one until
it's paid off. And then you take that plus
the next credit card payment. And now you're making
a new payment.
Right.
Same thing. Last month, we paid off our van,
my family. And so right now, I'm just transferring
the same amount of money that I was paying
for the van.
That's perfect.
Is now just going into a savings account.
That's perfect. Yeah. And so what happens is that
we think that paying off debt should be a
sprint. And it's not a sprint, it's a marathon.
And we got to treat it like a marathon.
Unless you win the lottery, and then you can
pay.
There you go. Then it's a sprint. Right. But
the debt snowball kind of helps. You have small
sprints along the course of the marathon. And I
think for us, for our psyche, I think that's
helpful. I like it. And once you pay off
your debt, or it's not once you pay off,
but some of these things can happen at the
same time. If you got a job like this
imaginary family we're talking about, nine out of ten,
you're getting a company match from your job for
your 401K, for an investment, and that's free money.
And so it's like, okay, let me automate that.
Let me get that taken out of my check
automatically, like taxes. So just tell yourself, our income
tax went up 3% and then invested 3% in
your four hundred and one K and receive the
company match of the same, which is free money.
And for those who are entrepreneurs, you can put
away 3% of your earnings into a Roth IRA
or some kind of brokerage account. So we say
either take 3% match or $100 a month to
put away for investing, because with compound interest, the
money grows. And before you know it, the $100
turns into a large number. And for every month
that you don't do that, you're decreasing the end
number by thousands of dollars. It looks like $100
now, but with time value money and compound interest,
it's thousands of dollars that you're sacrificing by not
doing it. And so that's the part of investing.
And that can happen right away. It's the wrong
after paying debt, but you can automate that immediately.
And then once you get into a habit of
investing that and receiving the free money from the
company, now you can say, okay, let me look
at my savings. Now I can go back to
my savings, and now I can invest. I can
put three months of expenses into my savings.
You're growing that savings account, right?
Because you are paying off your debt. You have
at least your company match, which is free money
for investing. And now you can grow your savings
to have more of a foundation under you if
Anything were to happen. And the one thing we
talk about our savings is, and this is a
question I asked on Monday night, do we save
money forever? And it was a mixed response, and
the answer is no. Once we have a savings
goal, right, stop putting money in the savings. And
then this is the next wrong. Now we can
look at. Now I can invest 15% of my
income into a 401K or a Roth IRA or
some kind of brokerage account because I paid off
my debt. Hopefully by this point. And the wrongs
have timelines. So you put in dates of when
you think that this can happen for you in
your life. You paid off your debt, you are
receiving your company match. Now and then you have
met your savings goal. So the amount of money
that you were put in savings each month and
the amount of money that you were paying on
your credit cards, those two things now is 15%
of your income that can be saved. Because people
look at that as like, well, I don't have
15% of my income to save. I was like,
well, let's add up your debt payments and your
savings. Once you've reached a savings goal now, that
money can now grow for you.
And I think one of the mistakes that people
make in that scenario is they treat it like
they just got a 15% pay raise.
Absolutely. Now they have more.
Now I got more.
They can go.
When we paid off the van, it was like
the first gut reaction was, man, we got an
extra. No, there's no extra. The extra doesn't exist.
You lived without that, continue living without that. Let's
use it for something better, right?
Yeah, absolutely. And that's where we can grow our
savings and we can grow our investing if we
maintain our standard of living. And a lot of
times with the money, it's like, as soon as
we get money, we want to increase our standards
of living, which increases our expenses, which ultimately increases
our debt. The moment that we decide to take
that money and not invest it or not save
it, we say, okay, well, I can get this
thing. And usually that thing is 100 and 2150
percent of what you've budgeted for. And so not
only do you have the added expense, but you've
also increased debt because now you've acquired this thing.
Name that thing. You want to buy a newer
car. Okay, well, if you go out and buy
a luxury car, your oil change is no longer
$100. Now your oil change is $500 or something
to that effect. And usually we say, okay. Wow.
I paid off debt. Now I can go get
this thing or do this thing, and it's usually
more expensive than what we realize.
Absolutely.
So we went from setting goals, creating a budget
so we can know what to put in savings
debt. Snowball or avalanche depends on what discipline you
have and what you need for your psyche. Then
we talked about investing at least the company match,
getting the company match, which is free money. And
then we talked about increasing your savings to about
three months of your expenses or whatever you think
your goal is, right? Because there's also emergency savings,
more than just like your household expenses. When are
your tires going to expire? Does anybody know that?
They told me yesterday that I was at half
the life cycle of my tire, that I should
get new ones. And all I could think was,
if.
It'S half, half the life cycle, why am I
giving you, why am I.
Giving you money right now? I got some time
then, right?
What's the life?
My kid needs braces.
There you go. What's the life of your roof,
man? Right? What's the life of your furnace? These
things have a life. Your water tank. So it's
like, do we know that? Are we ready for
it? Do we have a savings for it? And
so your savings could be three months of your
basic household expenses plus emergency funds for these things
that you don't realize you're going to need to
replace one day. And then once we tackle those
things and we reach our goals, we've paid off
our consumer debt. We've reached our goal with savings.
Now we can really fund our investment. We can
really move that money to fund our investment. And
once we get there, funding our investment and things
are happening with us, we can now pay off
our mortgage. We can start putting extra payments towards
our mortgage. And then once we've made extra payments
towards our mortgage, I think it's like one payment
a year knocks off six to eight years of
your mortgage, depending on your interest rate. How much
money is that? Right. Six years of your mortgage
is tremendous. So now you can pay off your
mortgage. Now the question is, how much do I
need to live on if I don't have any
debt? If my savings is capped, I have my
money automatically going to my investing and I don't
have a mortgage. If you're making the same amount
of money now, you can give more money into
the kingdom. Now opportunities of investing in the kingdom
will increase for you, or your time is now
different. Okay. I don't need to make as much
money as I did before. And now you've freed
up time to do things that God really wants
you to do.
Yes. And you get to a place where you
can say, hey, you know what? Instead of spending
$3,000 to go on a missions trip, I'm going
to spend $30,000 and buy an orphanage.
Exactly right.
You can take what you've done in missions or
what you've done for others, for the kingdom, and
you can just blow that thing up.
Absolutely. Because if your mortgage is $2,000 a month
and that car note is $500 a month, that's
$2,500. That's $30,000. That can go to an orphanage
in Kenya. That can change the lives of dozens
of children. It's pretty cool. And it's like, if
I have a plan for my life and I
have a timeline for that plan, I can get
to the place where I can change lives. And
that's the whole goal of it.
And I think that it all comes back down
to that plan. I think there's too many Americans
that their plan is just to get through the
month.
Absolutely.
And that it's so short sighted and it's out
of a place of desperation. I get it. But
that desperation, for me, I think it's rarely caused
by too little income. It's usually caused by too
much expense.
Right.
And, yeah. Hey, look, you may be underpaid, but
I would still guarantee that you're overspending on something.
Absolutely.
And if you are severely underpaid, look for another
job. Look for an additional. Sometimes we got to
work hard.
Yes. Sometimes we have to work. We talk about.
I say, listen, if it ever goes south, I'm
going to be at Mariano stocking shelves at night.
If anything ever happens, you know where you're going
to find me? At Walmart, working. I'm going to
find a construction site. I'm going to do something
to provide because I can't be immune to work.
I've got pretty much one marketable skill. I can
work hard. Yeah, that's my marketable.
Got a body with all my limbs. I could
do something.
I can work hard. Yeah, this is good, man.
Absolutely.
This is a lot of practical help. People can
get more information by going to a Joe Sangle
class, getting the materials or any of that stuff.
But I think that this gives at least somebody,
if I'm just starting out, if I'm just trying
to figure this thing out, it gives you some
goals, some starting points.
Absolutely.
It's good stuff.
Yeah. We could talk about this all day, but
I know we can't we got.
A prayer meeting to go to?
We do.
We got to pray from money to prayer. It's
going to be awesome. But, hey, thanks for hanging
out with us. Thanks, Carlton, for being with us.
And we got one more of these on finance.
So some of you are like, can they stop
talking about money? The church always talks about money.
We got one more. But I promise you it's
going to be more on the spiritual side of
things. Because we're going to be talking about no
prayer, no miracle next week, and it's going to
be good. So we'll see you there. Take it
easy.
Popular Podcasts
True Crime Tonight
If you eat, sleep, and breathe true crime, TRUE CRIME TONIGHT is serving up your nightly fix. Five nights a week, KT STUDIOS & iHEART RADIO invite listeners to pull up a seat for an unfiltered look at the biggest cases making headlines, celebrity scandals, and the trials everyone is watching. With a mix of expert analysis, hot takes, and listener call-ins, TRUE CRIME TONIGHT goes beyond the headlines to uncover the twists, turns, and unanswered questions that keep us all obsessed—because, at TRUE CRIME TONIGHT, there’s a seat for everyone. Whether breaking down crime scene forensics, scrutinizing serial killers, or debating the most binge-worthy true crime docs, True Crime Tonight is the fresh, fast-paced, and slightly addictive home for true crime lovers.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.