faith & finance

Hosted by Nicholas Garofalo

Business Entrepreneurship

Website RSS feed

Episodes

Latest episode

Aug 2026

Language

About the show

The Faith & Finance newsletter, read aloud — weekly reflections on money, stewardship, and the Christian life. faithandfinance.substack.com

Listen to episodes

60 recent

August 17, 202610 min

the purpose of financial peace

If Dave Ramsey helped you get out of debt, start investing, or simply think differently about money, there may come a point where you ask a different question: “Okay, now what?” The debt is gone, or at least moving in the right direction. You have margin again. You are investing. Retirement is getting closer. The 401(k) feels more complicated than it used to. The business is doing well. The kids are getting older. The decisions feel bigger. At some point, a lot of people move from “How do I stop the bleeding?” to “How do I steward this well?” SmartVestor That is the idea behind Ramsey’s SmartVestor program. Ramsey has spent decades helping people take control of their money through budgeting, debt payoff, emergency funds, investing, generosity, and common sense repeated until it finally starts to get into your bones. When someone reaches the point where they need professional investing help, SmartVestor connects them with financial professionals who share that same commitment to teaching and serving. I’m grateful to share that Openhanded Wealth has officially been accepted as a Ramsey SmartVestor Pro here in North Georgia. That means a lot to me. One reason is Ramsey’s emphasis on finding advisors with the “heart of a teacher.” I have never wanted financial planning to feel mysterious enough that people need me forever. I want people to understand what they own, why they own it, what decisions are in front of them, and how those decisions fit into the life they are actually trying to build. early roots The other reason is more personal. I started listening to Dave Ramsey on AM radio while lying on my bedroom floor when I was about eight years old. His show was one of the first things that made me interested in personal finance. Almost 25 years later, someone can now go to Ramsey looking for financial help, raise their hand and say, “I’d like to talk to somebody,” and I may get to be the person on the other end of that phone call. That is really cool. The goal is not just more money. The goal is to use money more faithfully. But the longer I do this work, the more convinced I become that the goal is not merely to help people accumulate more money. The goal is to help people use money more faithfully. margin funds ministry In one of the SmartVestor trainings, Dave shared a story from Financial Peace University. A woman who had been an atheist her whole life was invited by a neighbor to a Ramsey event at a church. The neighbor did not want to go alone, so she went with her. They heard about Financial Peace University that weekend and decided to sign up. During one of the group discussions, people began sharing areas where they were struggling financially. This woman eventually shared that she was a single mom with two kids and had taken a part-time job at night just to make her car payment and insurance. The payment was not just an inconvenience. It was eating her life. After she shared, a man at the table reached into his pocket, took a key off his key ring, and threw it to her. He told her to sell her car, get rid of the payment, and he would bring her the title to his 2013 Nissan Altima the next week. finding different advice That is a very different kind of financial advice. No spreadsheet. No Monte Carlo simulation. No lecture on debt ratios. Just a man with enough margin to see a need and meet it. Dave ended the story by saying that the woman was baptized into Christ that weekend. I do not want to overstate the story or turn generosity into a formula. God saves. God draws people to Himself. God uses means we cannot control and usually do not see coming. But that act of generosity was part of the story, and I think that is worth paying attention to. planning makes it possible This is one of the reasons I care so much about financial planning. Yes, the Baby Steps matter. Getting out of debt matters. Building an emergency fund matters. Investing for the future matters. Paying attention to taxes, insurance, estate planning, and business structure matters. But none of those things are the finish line. They are tools that create margin. And margin gives you the ability to say yes when God puts something in front of you. Sometimes that yes looks like giving more consistently to your church. Sometimes it looks like helping your adult child without enabling foolishness. Sometimes it looks like taking less income from the business so you can hire help. Sometimes it looks like giving away a car because a single mom at your FPU table is drowning under a payment. open hands Money is not the point. But money is one of the tools God often uses to reveal what we love, what we fear, and what we are willing to hold with an open hand. That is the kind of work I want to do with families and business owners. Not just helping people answer, “Can I retire?” Helping them ask better questions. asking better questions What has God entrusted to me? What needs to be simplified? Where am I carrying risk I have not dealt with? What would generosity look like if I planned for it on purpose? What decisions would I make differently if I believed provision was God’s job and stewardship was mine? That is the heart behind Openhanded Wealth. And now, through Ramsey’s SmartVestor program, I get the opportunity to serve more people who have worked hard to win with money and are ready to figure out what comes next. I am grateful for that. And I hope I do it with the heart of a teacher. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit faithandfinance.substack.com

August 10, 20265 min

the first things in a world of tradeoffs

I’ve been reading A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken, and I have been completely swept up in it. A friend recommended it, and I can see why. Vanauken is a beautiful writer. The kind of writer who makes you lose track of time. More than once, I’ve looked up from my morning reading and realized I was suddenly twenty minutes behind schedule. The coffee appointment was coming fast. The day had already started. But I had been pulled into a story that felt larger than my own. To me, that’s part of what makes a story worthwhile. For a little while, it lifts you into something grand and beautiful. It gives you language for things you already knew, but had not yet been able to say. A Severe Mercy tells the story of Sheldon and his wife, Davy, and their journey toward Christianity. Early in the book, they are at Oxford, reading C. S. Lewis, Augustine, Chesterton, and others. They are not yet Christians, but they are beginning to realize that Christianity is not a small thing to be lightly accepted or rejected. It is not a nice addition to an otherwise respectable life. It is either true, and therefore the most important truth in the world, or it is false. He writes: “It is not possible to be incidentally a Christian. The fact of Christianity must be overwhelmingly first or nothing. This suggests a reason for the dislike of Christians by nominal or non-Christians: their lives contain no overwhelming firsts but many balances.” …“No overwhelming firsts but many balances.” That is a piercing description of modern life. And if we’re honest, it may describe the way many a lot of us handle our finances. We believe in Jesus. We love the Lord. We want to be faithful. We want our lives to reflect the truth we confess. But then we look at our financial lives and find a long list of balances. * A balance between generosity and comfort. * A balance between stewardship and convenience. * A balance between conviction and performance. * A balance between wanting to honor God and not wanting to ask too many questions about what we own. * A balance between “all that I have belongs to the Lord” and “I hope my portfolio does well.” And I say all this as a fellow traveler. I feel the weight of it too. Most of us aren’t trying to be careless with money. We’re not trying to ignore the Lord. We’re certainly not trying to fund things that work against our convictions. But are good intentions really enough? At some point, love compels us to look. Love for the Lord. Love for our neighbor. Love for the people affected by the companies we own, the products we support, the systems we fund, and the businesses we profit from. If Christianity is overwhelmingly first, then it cannot remain sealed off from our investment accounts, our giving, our spending, our estate plans, our insurance decisions, or our cash flow. That does not mean every decision becomes more complicated. In fact, it may mean the opposite. Your next step may be very simple. Look. Look at what you own. Look at what your investments are funding. Look at whether your financial life is shaped more by habit, fear, convenience, or faith. You do not have to figure everything out this week. But you can take one honest step. Go to The Good Investor and use the portfolio screening tool. Or visit Inspire Insight and type in one ticker from your portfolio. Just look. Because once you see, you cannot unsee. And that is not a bad thing. It may be mercy. It may be the beginning of a more integrated life, where faith is not one category among many, but the first thing that rightly orders the rest. Personally, I think ol’ Sheldon was right. It is not possible to be incidentally a Christian. The question is whether we are willing to let that truth reach all the way down into our money. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit faithandfinance.substack.com

August 3, 20268 min

What the world hasn’t given, it can’t take away.

I recently found a new favorite artist. He’s the bombastic, passionate, young, and fiery singer-songwriter who rocketed into spotify charts with his song Dusty Bibles . The song is a modern prophesy: We got dust on our Bibles, brand-new iPhones… No wonder why we feel this way. Good, right? Josiah Queen is his name. And he’s written a small collection of other songs too. Another favorite line came to my ears this week: What the world hasn’t given, it can’t take away. The song is about the treasure God alone can give and nothing and no one can take away: joy. But I’d like to pause and turn the crystal the other way and look at it from the reverse: “What the world has given, it can take away.” Naturally, I’m going to apply this to money. Because so much of our lives orbit around money. It can shape: * the education we pursue * the work we choose * the place we live * the people we know * the possessions we acquire * the lifestyle we maintain * the legacy we leave behind Money is very powerful. And, as such, it’s a terrible place to put our security — so why do we so often do exactly that? I have to confess that my buddy Josiah (I’m sure we could be good buddies) hits the nail on the head - yes and amen - but those words were much easier to sing with passion at 23 than 33. Even though I know full well wealth is unstable. Markets fluctuate. Businesses rise and fall. Careers end. Health changes. Possessions deteriorate. Moth, rust, the whole nine. Even the wealth we carefully preserve will eventually pass into someone else’s hands. And we all must reckon with the fact that everything money buys us is temporary. All the trappings that the world offers to us, it can also take from us. And yet… What the world hasn’t given, it can’t take away. Christ, our treasure that does not fade, our pearl of great price, has given us in Luke 16:9 a rather staggering picture of the lasting treasure we can, in fact, acquire with worldly wealth. And I tell you [learn from this], make friends for yourselves [for eternity] by means of the wealth of unrighteousness [that is, use material resources as a way to further the work of God], so that when it runs out, they will welcome you into the eternal dwellings. Luke 16:9 (AMP) Let’s unpack this briefly: “…Make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth…” what a brilliant opener. Be friendly. Use money to make friends. It’s very easy to do. Prov. 19:6 reminds us of this: “everyone is a friend to a man who gives gifts”. Do you want lots of friends? Give gifts. Lots of them. Great use of wealth, right there. “…so that when it [fails/runs out/is all gone]…” the failure is inevitable here — it’s a given. The wealth will fail. In fact, many translations say “when you fail”. It’s almost implied that, at some point, your wealth-accumulating abilities will dry up and evaporate. Certainly few aged men and women find themselves in their peak earning years. “…they will welcome you into eternal dwellings…” The implication here is that these friends were not heading for heaven prior to encountering you and your clever (shrewd) use of worldly wealth. You leveraged your money to build Gospel-seasoned friendships thereby leading to the salvation of your friends. Someday when you and your wealth fail, and you finally lay down to your final rest, your eyes will open in the age to come and you’ll be met face-to-face, eye-to-eye, and embraced by your friends - for all eternity - who will join you in the fully-restored, fully-redeemed work of the kingdom. All because you dared to trust, not in riches, but in God. And you leveraged these failing riches to “win friends and influence people” unto glory. Wealth is not our refuge. It is a temporary tool entrusted to us for providing our needs, loving our families, serving our neighbors, and building relationships that will long-outlast the wealth itself. That’s kingdom work. And it’s yours for the taking. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit faithandfinance.substack.com

July 27, 202611 min

the prize we’re all longing for

Last week, we talked about embarrassment. The kind that shows up when you feel behind. When you feel like everyone else got a memo you missed. When you weren’t taught something, didn’t know what questions to ask, and now asking feels weirdly exposing. And the basic idea was that embarrassment makes us hide (ourselves, our talents, our contributions, etc.). But it doesn’t always say, “I’m scared.” Sometimes it says… “no no, I’m just waiting on the Lord” Now before I call out my own fear-based excuses, let me acknowledge that waiting on the Lord is never a bad decision. “Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him; fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way […] wait for the LORD and keep his way […]” Psalm 37:7, 34 Yes. Amen. But this is not that. How often have I called it “waiting on the Lord” when really I’m worrying, impatiently fretting, neglecting prayer, and waiting for a written-in-the-sky-style sign from God? So am I really waiting? Or is it a nice-sounding excuse for inaction? I’ve found that when I seek the face of God, either He answers me, or He gives me peace to wait in silence. But anxious fretting ≠ patient waiting. It’s pre-embarrassment avoidance, isn’t it? It’s the fear of doing the wrong thing, so I’ll do nothing — no thing. Zero. The fear of looking foolish — or at least the chance of looking like …I don’t have it all figured out? I don’t even know. But even writing “foolish” feels too strong here. The fear of choosing a path and later wishing you chose the other one? The fear of realizing you don’t have control (actually wait, that’s a really good thing!) the prize we’re all longing for At some point in the conversation, I found myself thinking about the parable of the talents. Different starting lines. Different dollar amounts. Same finish line, for the faithful. As far as I can tell, Jesus doesn’t hand out any extra praise because somebody started with more. The praise isn’t “Well done, brilliant investor.” It’s not “Well done, impressive strategist.” It’s: Well done, good and faithful servant. Let’s break that down piece-by-piece: Well done — you did well. You did . You did something . Which means you didn’t do nothing. And the thing you did was done well. Good and faithful — Profound. So much here.He didn’t say “desperately wicked” (see Jer 17:9 for more context—no, dear Christian, your heart is not still sick and wicked). He didn’t say “well-educated and wealthy”Or “efficient and profit-maximizing”Or “productive and busy”He said good and faithful Servant — What an honor and joy it is to serve at the pleasure of the King. We are not professionals. We are not machines. We are not accidents. the next right thing The kingdom of God is here—now. Jesus has come and is coming again. So let us not shrink back to inaction out of fear of misstepping. Let allow our faith and trust to fuel our action. So the shift I want to make (and I think we all need to make) is this: you need a better scorecard, and I’ll write more about this next week. But for today, start with this simple question: “What would faithfulness look like with what I actually have, today?” What does “one faithful step” look like in money when I feel behind? Because a lot of the time, the path forward isn’t blocked by lack of information. It’s blocked by the fear of looking stupid. And the grace of God is not just forgiveness for sin. It’s also joy and strength to move, even when you feel behind. Is it a budget? Is it a net worth statement? Is it finally asking the “dumb” question? Is it setting up one automated transfer? Is it naming your finish line? You can do this. I’m cheering you on. P.S. I snuck two Frozen references into this newsletter — did you catch them?? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit faithandfinance.substack.com

July 6, 202613 min

Is dying with zero really good for you?

When it comes to how we handle money, it’s pretty safe to say we could all learn a thing or two from John Wesley. He’s the co-founder of the methodist church and the passionate advocate of radical, Gospel-saturated working, saving, and giving. He famously exhorted his churchmembers to “earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can.” (You may remember I mentioned this a few months back.) But what does it look like for us to pursue earning all we can, saving all we can, and giving all we can? Let’s start with earning. To earn all we can is to become shrewd as serpents in how we handle our finances and our investments, our purchase decisions, our real estate deals, our businesses. It means taking seriously our desire to turn a profit. That instinct is a good one. We need to be profiteering, and profiteering is not sinful in itself. The desire to make a profit, to earn a living, to work and create value — these are all deeply good things. In fact, the lack of these impulses is a real problem (1 Tim 5:8). On saving, I want to be clear: the Bible praises saving in almost every instance. Saving up money means margin. It means breathing room. It means options. It means the freedom to meet the needs of others, to invest in God-honoring businesses, to leave a nest egg for your grandkids, to store up now for the future needs you or your loved ones may face. It is prudent, responsible, and wise. The only time saving is not praised is when the use behind it violates God’s natural order of the work-money connection, or when the wealth itself becomes the god who is supposed to save us. The foolish man who built bigger barns let his wealth corrupt his natural inclination to work. His wiring shifted from “I need to eat this winter, so I’d better get up and work my field today” to “I’ve got ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” His gaze turned toward self-indulgence and away from productivity and contribution. He walked away from Paul’s ethic in Ephesians 4:28 — to labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. In many ways that cautionary tale exposes how badly we need to fight the modern notion of retirement. The idea goes like this: once you hit 55, 65, even 75, your contributions to society are essentially complete. Now you can enjoy your remaining years on the pickleball court, the beach, or the local library as you fade away into the company of your fellow septua- and octogenarians. The very notion is a disgrace. And it makes complete sense, given the world we’ve built. Our society runs on the self-defined, curated life. We worship at the altar of achievement and success. Our offerings are workaholism and the loss of personal connection. Our sacraments are a full calendar, where the honest answer to “how are you?” is a perpetual “busy.” We measure ourselves by job title and operational capacity, income level and wealth accumulation, business growth and the price tags on our status symbols. It is so pervasive that I’m not sure most of us even see how stark the contrast really is. So we fight — as if we were fighting the very powers of hell — against the current we’re swimming in. Be a salmon. Swim. For your very life. How? By giving. All we can. And then some. Every financial decision has to be weighed and measured carefully: the car, the house, the subscriptions, the bills, the gifts, the personal items. We have real power in our pocketbooks. But it is not our power, and it is not power within our control. It is a mighty magnetism. Its desire is for us, and it wants to consume us. That is why I wrote about “the snake in your bed” a few months back. We have to respect the power of the snake and its ability to overpower us. Satan uses money to ruin people all the time, and he is seldom in a hurry to do it. But that same magnetic power can pull others into the kingdom through courageous acts of generosity. How? Jesus said so in Luke 16:9. And why? Because we have first received. What do you have that you did not first receive (1 Cor 4:7)? Your giving should hinder your lifestyle creep. It should probably even outpace your income a little — enough to keep you dependent on the one from whom all provision comes. So give. Give as if your life depended on it. Perhaps it does, and perhaps that is the whole point. We love because he first loved us. We give because what do we have that we did not first receive? And when He loved, he gave — and we, too, can be like him in our giving. What we received from the Father we hand back with arms wide open, knowing that in our acts of generosity God has hidden gospel dynamite to destroy the strongholds of the enemy. So who has God put in your proximity, and how has he blessed you to be a blessing to them? Earn all you can. Save all you can. Give all you can. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit faithandfinance.substack.com

June 29, 202612 min

the case for buying less house

home-buying as mission work You know the feeling. You’re scrolling Zillow, you’ve set your price range, and the search results are mostly disappointing. So you do what almost everyone does: you drag the slider up a little. Not a lot. Just enough to see what opens up. It makes sense. You’re not moving to save $200 a month. You’re moving to be close to the people you love, the schools you want, the part of town that feels like home. Price is almost beside the point. Proximity is everything. I get that. But I want to pressure-test it for a minute, because the house is not like other financial decisions. For most families, it’s 20 to 40 percent of take-home pay — the single biggest lever in the entire financial/life picture. It’s where you relax. It’s usually directive of your church home, your close-proximity friendships, and, in many ways, your lifestyle. Every dollar above what you need to live well in a house that fits your family is a dollar that isn’t going somewhere else. And “somewhere else” is worth thinking hard about. running the other direction What would it look like to run the housing calculation from the other direction? Most of us start with what we want and work backward to what we can afford. What if you started with what you want to give — locked that number in first — and then figured out what house you can actually buy on what’s left? For a lot of people, that calculation produces a very different address than the one they were planning on. Paul’s uncomfortable ethic Paul has an ethic that Western evangelicalism has largely figured out how to ignore. He’s writing to early churches navigating a world of real economic stratification, and his instinct is not to maximize his standard of living up to whatever the budget allows. His instinct is to make himself smaller — it’s the uncomfortable Christian necessity of self-denial, because a conspicuous lifestyle in a community of mixed means causes envy in others. And envy, in Paul’s framework, is not a minor inconvenience. It’s idolatry. It’s a stumbling block. If my house is the thing someone drives past and resents, I have participated in something I didn’t intend to participate in. Now, I’m not saying you’re sinning if you live in a nice neighborhood. The monk-under-a-tree version of this argument isn’t the argument. But I do think we’ve gotten very good at treating “heart posture” as an escape hatch — as a way to say “it’s not about the house, it’s about where your heart is” without ever actually asking whether the house decision needs to change—or the car, clothes, accessories, vacations, etc. I heard recently that a study found simply driving a Mercedes-Benz—even a completely depreciated, $3,000 used model—signals a higher economic status to the public than driving a brand-new, $25,000 Honda Civic. Sociologists and researchers tracking consumer behavior have long noted this perception paradox: the luxury emblem carries a psychological weight that completely overrides the actual math. The badge broadcasts wealth, regardless of what you actually paid for it. And that perception paradox is exactly where the rubber meets the road for Paul’s ethic. We might look at our budget, score a great deal on a used luxury vehicle, and genuinely feel our “heart posture” is clean because we were just being financially prudent. But the community around us doesn’t see it that way. Instead, they see the badge. They see the cultural shorthand for elite status and economic supremacy. If the visual symbols we surround ourselves with broadcast an ostentatious standard of living—even if we got them on clearance—we are still actively participating in the environment of envy and division Paul warns against. Our internal intentions do not automatically neutralize the external reality of the stumbling blocks we set up. True Christian self-denial might mean choosing the Honda, not because we can’t afford the Mercedes, but because love calls us to self-denial for the sake of others. all this margin I’m often eager to talk about the heart side of money — and rightly so. But sometimes we need to get all the way down to the checkbook. Because there’s also a very practical, dollars-and-cents case for buying less house. When you buy less house, the money you didn’t spend doesn’t necessarily just disappear into spending. It can become margin. And margin is one of the most underrated assets in a financial life. Housing is the fixed cost that sets the floor for a ton of other budget line items: Property taxes.Maintenance.Renovations.HOA dues.Insurance.Furniture.Utilities.Repairs. So when you buy less house, you’re saving more than just the difference in the mortgage payment. You’re lowering all of those other peripheral costs. Maybe the comfortable payment is $3000/mo, but you’d stretch to $4000/mo — ya know, for the right house . That $1000 may sound like it’s no big deal, but it becomes real money. More importantly, it becomes real flexibility (or the lack thereof). That extra payment isn’t just money. It’s a claim on your future cash flow. It’s money that can’t go to the family vacation fund, surviving a slow season at work, or jumping to meet a last-minute need at church. There’s another gift in it too: Lifestyle creep is sticky. Once you scale up, scaling back almost always feels like loss. And the house has a sneaky way of setting the baseline for everything else — the neighbors you compare yourself to, the cars in the driveways, the renovations everyone seems to be doing, the standard of living that starts to feel “normal.” But when you buy at or below what you can comfortably afford, you make one decision that keeps making future decisions easier. You just lowered the gravity you’re fighting against. So is buying less house an exercise in self-denial? I’d argue it’s pursuing real freedom. the field What if some of your budgetary constraints are actually a kind of mercy? What if the house you can wisely afford — the one 10 or 15 minutes farther out, in the neighborhood you might normally scroll past — is not merely the house you have to settle for, but part of the field God is giving you to work? Maybe there are people there you’re supposed to know. Families you’re supposed to befriend. Needs you’re supposed to notice. And maybe the reason you’re able to notice them is because you didn’t max out every dollar getting into the nicest house you could technically afford. You left room. Room to slow down. Room to be present. Room to give. Room to invite people in. Room to say yes when saying yes actually costs something. God’s financial blessings were never meant to terminate on us. They were meant to move through us. And sometimes the smaller house is what keeps that door open. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit faithandfinance.substack.com

June 22, 202613 min

the glide path problem: the slow drift toward self-sufficiency

If you’ve ever sat across from a financial planner, you’ve probably heard about the glide path. It looks something like this. When you’re in Phase 1 (early-career, young accumulator), we’ll invest you pretty heavily in equities — stocks, growth assets, things that can lose value in a bad year but have a long runway to recover. By the time you’re 65, you’ve likely shifted most of that into fixed income. Bonds. Stability. Capital preservation. The goal isn’t growth anymore. The goal is not losing what you’ve built. The equity-to-fixed-income ratio traces a long, slow arc downward over a lifetime. It’s rational, prudent, and what any good advisor would recommend. as our kingdoms grow Is it possible that our dependence on God follows the same curve? When you’re in your 20s and 30s, you are genuinely desperate in ways that drive you toward God. You’re fighting for direction. You don’t know if the business is going to work. You’re raising kids and watching your marriage get tested in ways you didn’t anticipate. You’re not sure where the money is coming from next month. Those are equity years in every sense — high volatility, high stakes, and a daily awareness that you are not in control of much. Then the kingdom grows. Morgan Snyder and John Eldredge write about this — the season of life where God has entrusted you with real domain: a thriving career, a stable income, a home that’s paid down, kids who are starting to find their footing. And it’s genuinely good. But a kingdom, if you’re not careful, becomes its own kind of insulation. The bubble wrap of security thickens a layer at a time, and one day you realize you haven’t prayed about money in years because you don’t have to. You know where the next meal is coming from. You know where the next ten years of meals are coming from. staying hungry I can’t find many examples in scripture where God presents a problem to someone and expects them to figure it out without seeking Him. When that happens, it tends to be a story of consequence. The stories we return to — David and the Urim and Thummim, the Israelites daily manna, the disciples in the storm-tossed boat — are all stories of people who had no choice but to be dependent, and found God faithful in that place. The fixed-income years of life can close that door one layer at a time. a faith-stretching alternative to CoastFI Let me be clear: I’m not suggesting we manufacture financial desperation. I’m not recommending that we all give away our retirement savings to stay poor enough to need God. But I’m also not willing to rule it out entirely. I know a handful of people who have lived at the edge of what makes financial sense by almost any conventional measure — giving in amounts that genuinely cost them, turning away lavish gifts of generosity to force their souls to find contentment in God, and seek provision from Him alone — and they’ve got the stories to prove it. The more practical version is simpler: what if you planned to give sacrificially throughout your entire working life, not just after you’ve secured enough to be comfortable? Most financial planning is structured around a CoastFI logic — accumulate until you hit the number, then relax and be generous with the excess. But what if you spread the generosity across the whole career? What if the windfalls that come your way aren’t primarily meant to be stacked — but to be moved? There’s a real difference between giving from surplus and giving from a place that actually costs you something. Surplus giving doesn’t require much faith — it just requires margin. The other kind keeps you dependent—hungry. Giving should hurt a little …if my fists are wrapping tightly around my treasures. Giving should hurt a little …if it’s delivering a blow to my pride and self-sufficiency. Giving should hurt a little …just like a good workout. Because that kind of “pain” produces real, lasting joy, “the joy of the Lord”—the joy that David calls “my strength”—and that is the point of giving. two parables, one question The rich fool in Luke 12 built bigger barns. He looked at what he had, looked at the future, and made what seemed to him to be a prudent decision. It just never occurred to him that the barns weren’t the point. The man in Matthew 13 found treasure in a field and sold everything he owned to buy it — in joy. He wasn’t impoverished by the transaction. He got the treasure. What would it look like to plan your financial life around increasing your need for the God who put the treasure there in the first place? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit faithandfinance.substack.com

June 15, 20268 min

What Are You Actually Buying?

Somebody told a young sales guy early in his career: if you want to close deals, go buy the most expensive suit you can’t afford and strap on a Rolex. Walk into any room looking the part and people will assume the rest. There’s something almost right about that advice. And something completely rotten at its core. The almost-right part: we all want to look presentable, we care about quality, and we want our homes to feel warm and our cars to feel like ours. Those aren’t corrupt desires — they’re human ones. Good desires become a problem when they start doing a different job than the one they were hired for. Randy Alcorn writes that wealth is like the sun — not neutral, drawing everything toward it. Get too close and you burn; go too far and you freeze. There’s an orbit, a right relationship, where you can enjoy the good things God has given you without losing yourself to the gravitational pull. Most people don’t think about the orbit — they just drift. The real question, when I make a purchase, is what I’m actually trying to accomplish. “Is this a sin?” is too blunt an instrument. The more uncomfortable diagnostic: is this decision primarily about sustaining myself and the people I’m responsible for, or about elevating how I appear to the people around me? Those two motivations can wear the same clothes from the outside, but they don’t feel the same from the inside — sustaining doesn’t need an audience, elevating always does. The iconography problem is real. A used Mercedes is still a Mercedes. A Tesla is still a Tesla. It doesn’t matter what you paid for it — the person driving behind you in a 2012 Honda doesn’t know what you paid, and wouldn’t care if they did. What they see is the logo. And the logo communicates something whether you intend it to or not. That’s why knockoff brands exist — the whole appeal is that you can look like the thing without actually being it, which tells you something about what we’ve decided the logo is really for. If I want this car to look a certain way, I should be honest with myself about whether that matters because it genuinely matters to me, or because of who I think it makes me look like. Knowing what you’re trading before you trade it is the whole exercise. There’s a man in Matthew 13 who stumbles onto treasure buried in a field. He goes and sells everything he has — and he does it in joy. Not duty. Not guilt. Not reluctant obedience. Joy. Because he knew what he was trading up for. That’s the picture. There’s a freer, lighter, more joyful way to move through the world than one organized around what people think when they see you pull into the parking lot — and it starts with noticing what you’re actually buying when you buy something. The aim, as Paul puts it, is love from a pure heart — a harder question than “is this purchase too expensive?” but the right one. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit faithandfinance.substack.com

June 8, 20267 min

fear with better branding

I sat across from a client couple a few years ago who was walking into a business sale. The income from the sale was significant and was causing some tax problems. Their CPA’s solutions were pretty straightforward: defer the income thru a variety of retirement-funding vehicles, delay the tax bill, let the money compound. It was a solid idea and one that many professionals would’ve seconded. But when they looked at the numbers, to my surprise, they said no. Instead, they wanted to just pay the taxes now. I’ll spare you the details, but we were talking about six-figure tax implications over multiple years. So why would they do this? They had Kingdom initiatives they wanted to fund while they still could, and they didn’t want that flexibility locked up for years waiting for a better tax-optimal moment—that might never come anyway. They may be some of the clearest-eyed people with whom I’ve ever had the privilege of working. They looked at a perfectly good financial strategy and recognized it for what it also was: a sophisticated way to postpone obeying what God had put on their hearts to do. That is what I mean by fear with better branding. The hard part is that fear and wisdom can look identical on paper. Most financial planning is genuinely useful. I want to say that before anything else, because what follows is not an argument against planning carefully. It is an argument for telling ourselves the truth about why we sometimes plan the way we do. Because a lot of the tools we use — trusts, diversified investing, tax planning — can become clean, respectable ways to manage fear. And when you get honest, the fear usually sounds like this: * I’m scared I’m going to run out. * I’m scared one bad season will erase years of work. * I’m scared that if I obey God with money now , He won’t come through. * I’m scared I’m not even hearing Him clearly. Nobody says it like that, of course. We call it being a good steward—and we truly want to be. Oftentimes we are. But what if sometimes we are just scared, and the financial plan is the distraction? And financial services is where this can get especially elaborate. You can build layers of strategy that reduce uncertainty, lock in outcomes, and keep everything “safe.” Some of that is genuinely necessary. But the danger is you can end up with a technically excellent plan and a posture that requires almost no faith at all. Let me say that again: You can have a technically excellent financial plan and a functionally godless posture toward your money. Think about Joseph in the Genesis story. Seven years of plenty, seven years of famine. He stored up grain in the good years. He planned. He built the systems. And when the famine came, the grain was not a hedge against God — it was the means God used to feed nations. Joseph wasn’t agnosticizing his future or mitigating his future need for God’s provision. Quite the contrary. His preparations were the means by which God’s provisions were channeled through a nation to a hungry world. That is the line. Preparation is seldom the problem. Preparation disguised as self-protection leveraged to reduce our dependence on God, is the problem — and it’s the problem Jesus illustrated in the parable of the rich fool (see Luke 12). The clients who paid more in taxes earlier than advised were not being reckless. They had plenty. Their retirement was not at risk. Their family was not going to suffer. They simply looked at a strategy that would have deferred flexibility for many years, decided that was not in alignment with the Kingdom work God had put before them, and they felt to choose that path would be disobedient. So they chose obedience over optimization, over maximization, and over fear with better branding. If I ever face that choice, I hope I have the courage to do the same. What about you? Is there an area of your financial life you’ve sensed clear direction from God but have held off? Why? What’s one step you can take today toward obedience and away from fear? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit faithandfinance.substack.com

June 1, 202612 min

“enough” and all its implications

Do you need more money? Honestly. Sit with question for a minute. Do you think you need more money? Would more money be helpful in fulfilling God’s calling on your life right now? Would more money be catalytic to making you more like Jesus? Would it enhance your prayer life? Or your relationships with others? (Spoiler alert: You don’t need more money.) You’ve probably heard the famous Rockefeller response to the question, “how much is enough?” Just one more dollar. Oof. That’s rough, John. Talk about a hamster wheel. Not me! No siree. I’ve found contentment in Jesus and never struggle with loving money. …right? Contrary to what you might expect, this is not a math problem. It’s a lack-of-clarity (i.e. fog) problem. If you don’t know what “enough” is, every dollar becomes a question: “do I need you? should I keep you? or can I deploy you to someone else?” fog is expensive Last week, we talked about the questions under the question and how most money questions are really questions of the heart disguised as questions of the mind. This is the first place that fog shows up in real life: an undefined finish line. If you’ve never taken the time to define “enough”: * Every expense feels stressful * Every market dip throws your future into uncertainty * Every generous impulse runs through a panic filter * Your spouse’s “can we afford this?” feels more like an accusation than a question. It’s like flying through clouds without instruments. At least you know you’re still in the air, but for how much longer? You feel unsafe. What “enough” is, and isn’t Let me be clear, because this gets misunderstood in both directions. “Enough” is not: * A guarantee that life won’t get hard. * A magic number that removes the need for daily trust in God. * A retirement fantasy copied from a Fidelity commercial. * Set in stone, never to be reevaluated. “Enough” is: * A reference point that makes small decisions easier. * A tool for honesty between you and your spouse. * A starting place, not necessarily a finish line. * A working definition of what your family actually needs, plus what you’d love to be free to do. In a word, enough is choosing contentment . contentment …and discontentment Speaking of which, let’s talk about that for a minute. “Be content” is often a scold that’s really just demanding desire-management or hunger-mitigation. Want less, ask less, expect less. But contentment isn’t passivity. Or resignation. Or the compression or elimination of desire. In fact, it’s not necessarily holy — or holi er than discontentment. It just depends on where your longings reside and where they lead you. There’s a kind of holy desire that saturates the Psalms. And that desire sits deeply rooted in God’s abundant plenty. And that’s the secret sauce—the ability to sit with what God has given right now without scrambling to control tomorrow. Content with what you have, but discontent this side of heaven. That discontentment is desire. Longing. Ache. It’s yearning that’s ultimately aimed at the Kingdom to come: for your kids, your church, your work, your future, your legacy. It’s what makes you earn and save and give — and dream, for that matter. Defining “enough” is where—in the context of your financial life—these two finally stop fighting. You name what’s actually needed for a reasonable lifestyle. You name what you’d love to be capable of (in work, philanthropy, legacy, etc.). And you stop treating every desire as suspicious or every limit as a threat. Simultaneously, you start to flex your “no” muscle as an active defiance against the culture of Vanity Fair in which we all live. A small next step If this is hitting close, you don’t need to overhaul anything this week. Try this: Sit down with your spouse (or by yourself, if you’re single) and answer three questions in pencil: * What does our household actually need each year to be okay? * What would “good” look like: generosity, margin, real rest? * What’s one number we’re currently guessing about that we could actually define this month? That’s it. Just tugging on one string at a time. Next week We’ve named the fear. We’ve started clearing the fog. Next week, we go underneath both: trust, control, and what generosity actually has to do with your view of God. Because once “enough” is on the table, the next question shows up almost immediately. If we have enough, what’s it for? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit faithandfinance.substack.com