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Learn more at chministries.org faithbuy. By some estimates, the average household spends an astonishing 40% of its food budget eating out. That's a lot to digest.
Hi, I'm Rob West. After housing and transportation, food is probably the next biggest item in the budget. It's also a place where you can easily make changes that will save you a lot of money. I'll talk about that today and then it's on to your calls at 800-525-7000.
That's 800-525-7000. This is faith and finance, biblical wisdom for your financial decisions. Okay, obviously I'm talking about cutting back on eating out and preparing more of your meals at home. I know that a lot of families have two working parents or maybe mom or dad's busy driving vans full of kids to soccer or baseball practice and that it's difficult to avoid the convenience of fast food.
But there's always a cost for that convenience and not just with money. Fast food tends to pack on the pounds and when you eat out you have less control over nutrition. So those are all good reasons to eat in more often and it starts with planning. In this case, menu planning.
How many times have you looked at something in the cupboard and thought, why did I buy that? You can avoid that by planning out your meals for the week, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks before you go to the store. This also allows you to choose healthier options like fruits, vegetables, and nuts. When you're making up your menu plan, choose meals that you can make ahead of time over the weekend. It takes the guesswork out of what to eat during the week and all that last minute scrambling. Once you have your menu plan, you can list all the items you need to make those meals. Then take an inventory of your fridge and cupboards, crossing off stuff you already have. What's left is your shopping list and when you go to the store, stick to your list and you'll start saving money right away.
That can be hard to do, especially if your stomach is grumbling from all that meal planning. So maybe have a snack or eat a meal before you head out to the grocery store. That's one way to prevent impulse buying.
Here's another one. Try to avoid the middle sections of your grocery store. That's where they put things like cookies, candy, and chips. If you're shopping after work with a low energy level, it's hard to resist those things. But if you concentrate on the outer sections of the store, you'll be able to pick up a lot of the items you need for your menu plan. Things like meats, vegetables, fruits, and yogurt.
Obviously, you'll have to duck into the middle for certain items, but do a quick surgical strike and get back to the safe outer zone. You'll also want to stock up on staples when you can get them at a good price. Cereals, rice, corn meal, and oatmeal are often sold in bulk at bigger stores. You also want to choose lower price options for protein in your meal planning. Hamburger costs less than steak. Chicken costs less than hamburger. And working a meat-free dinner into your weekly menu plan will also save you some hard-earned money. And it almost goes without saying, making coffee at home and taking it to work is a lot cheaper than buying designer coffee.
The same goes for water. Bring a bottle from home instead of buying it out. Another great idea is to take advantage of the free pickup option that many larger grocery chains offer now.
There may be a minimum order required, but it's not difficult to meet. Just go to the store's website, sign up for curbside pickup, and check the items you need. That way, you're not tempted to buy unnecessary items while pushing a cart around the store. And you can keep a running total of what you're spending, making it easier to stay on budget.
Curbside pickup is also a great option if you usually have little ones hanging on the cart yelling, buy me this! Here are some other ways you can avoid overspending on groceries. Be careful where you shop because prices vary. Generally, the bigger the store or chain, the lower the prices. The service may not be as great in warehouse stores, for example, but you can make up for that with savings. Of course, some of the big box grocery stores have membership fees, so that's an added cost. But if you shop there even once a month, it's probably worth it. One thing to consider, though, the packages at those stores tend to be gigantic, so make sure you can use up the item before the expiration date and that you have room in the fridge for that two gallon jar of pickles. Now, there's one more way to save on your grocery shopping, and that's by not leaving home at all. You can buy a lot of household necessities online from sites like Amazon and other online merchants, so try to take advantage of offers for free shipping.
So those are some things that can help you eat more of your meals at home, saving you a ton of your hard-earned money in the process. All right, your calls are next, 800-525-7000. I'm Rob West, and this is Faith and Finance. We'll be right back.
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Helping you make God your ultimate treasure, this is Faith and Finance. All right, it's time to take your calls and questions today. The number to call, 800-525-7000. That's right, the rest of the program is yours with whatever is on your mind today financially speaking. Again, 800-525-7000.
Whether it's living within your means, maybe it's getting out of debt once and for all, maybe it's finally getting around to establishing that emergency fund, or maybe it's giving more wisely, or perhaps it's saving for the future and investing. How do you navigate this market? Well, we'd love to tackle any and all of those when you call 800-525-7000. All right, let's dive into your questions today. The number to call, 800-525-7000. You can call right now. To Wyoming, Sherry, go ahead. Hello, Rob. Thank you so much for taking my call.
Yes, ma'am. My husband and I are retired. He's 69.
I'm 66. We have both our social security checks and he has a pension check. We are comfortable living on that.
Everything is paid for. We have fairly new vehicles and our home is paid for. But we do have $10,000 in a credit union that earns 5% up to $10,000. And then we have about $50,000 that we had in a CD.
It just expired. That was 5%. And now our available rate for 12 months is going to be 4%. And just wondering if maybe we couldn't do something better with that. And also with the bumpy roads, maybe coming up with the election and stuff, we were wondering about investing in gold. Yeah, very good.
This is really helpful. Let me ask, what are your monthly expenses, Sherry, in total, roughly? Oh, probably about $4,000.
All right. So it's $4,000 a month, you know, so if you had six months, I mean, that'd be $25,000. So I think, I mean, you guys are, you know, more than double that. You've got over a year's worth of expenses and liquid savings. That's not a bad thing.
That's a good thing. Yes, in terms of the yield on it, you can do better. I mean, right now, you can get 5% with FDIC-insured high-yield savings, be completely liquid, and, you know, have the backing of the U.S. government at 5%. You'd want to go to bankrate.com. You'd have to use an online bank, but, you know, you can have that FDIC insurance. And if you're willing to link that, perhaps, to your brick-and-mortar checking account, and then you can move the money back and forth.
You could also get a CD, you know, right now, about the best you're going to find is maybe 5.1 for a one-year CD. It's actually going to decline if you go out further than that, just because, you know, we're expecting rates to begin to come down over the next year, for sure. So, you know, I think just maximizing these rates where they are right now is a great opportunity. I mentioned, if you wanted something longer term, you know, you can do pretty well right now on a, you know, if you want to do well right now on a 10-year U.S. Treasury at 4.6%. So you could buy the Treasury bond, you know, from the treasurydirect.gov.
As long as you hold the maturity for the full 10 years, you don't have to worry about interest rates, because they'll give you your coupon back, the original amount you put in after 10 years, and you'll get 4.6% along the way, which, you know, is probably going to look pretty attractive, especially a couple of years down the road. In terms of the gold allocation, I like gold. I wouldn't overweight there. I do think, you know, my best advice is a forever allocation, perhaps in the physical gold, maybe gold coins, or, you know, the one-ounce bars. And, you know, you do that, you know, up to 5% of your investable assets. So you'd want to look at, okay, what are our investable assets?
And I wouldn't overweight there. If you wanted to go from 5 all the way to 10%, which is the max I'd recommend, I'd probably think about doing that in tracker stocks, where they have gold in a vault behind it, but it trades like a stock, so you can buy and sell it whenever the stock market is open, and it just moves in lockstep with the price of gold, but it's just a lot easier to buy and sell, because you don't have to worry about storing it, and using a dealer, and, you know, the markups, and all of that kind of stuff. So I think the bottom line is, yes, I like gold.
I wouldn't overweight there, and I'd keep, in this season of life for you guys, you know, somewhere between 6 and 12 months liquid for the unexpected, and I think looking to maximize that rate right now through an online banking partner, you know, would make a lot of sense. Okay, what about like coins? You mentioned coins. I was talking to a company, and they talked about coins as a good way to go, because it can't be called back by the government if something bad were to happen. Yeah, I like gold coins a lot. I mean, I think that, you know, whether it's a Cougarand or, I mean, there's a number of options out there that you could look at, and so I would just make sure you're, you know, using a trusted source to buy these, and if you need a recommendation on that, we'd be happy to provide one, but I think the key is, again, don't get too highly concentrated there. I like gold. It's a fear trade.
It's a store of value, you know, against a crisis or a major, you know, economic event of some kind, but, you know, it historically doesn't do as well, and it has a little bit more risk and volatility than just a properly diversified stock and bond portfolio. Okay, all right. Thank you very much, Rob. You've been very helpful. Well, thank you, Sheri. Absolutely, and God bless you as well. Thanks for calling today. Let's go to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Hi, Anne.
How can I help? Hello! I'm so very excited that I have the opportunity to ask you a very important question to me. Now, I've been studying the Bible for just a little over a year, and I do now have the understanding that, with respect of tithing, I must recognize its holiness and return it to God. And Rob, I'm embarrassed to admit that I just started to tithe, but I want to ensure that I'm doing it right.
Who, according to the Bible, should be the recipient of my tithe? Yeah, it's a good question. So here's my perspective on that, Anne.
First of all, I appreciate the diligence with which you're thinking through this. Clearly, you want to be found as a faithful steward of God's resources. I think that's the heart posture that God certainly wants. What we see in the New Testament, because we're under the law of Christ, not the law of Moses, we see giving that Jesus references many times. That's, I think, sacrificial. We see that with the, you know, his recognition, if you will, of the widow that gave out of her poverty, the widow's might. We see that we're to give proportionately. It says, to whom much is given, much is required. We see that we're to give freely and cheerfully. The Bible says we should give cheerfully, not under compulsion. And so we shouldn't do it out of a sense of obligation, but really, I believe, an overflow of our gratitude to God for what he's already provided for us before even the financial resources he's entrusted to us.
He's given us the free gift of eternal life through the shed blood of Jesus and his death and resurrection. And when we place our trust in him now, we're then reconciled to the Father and a right relationship with him. Well, just out of gratitude for that, I think we should look to be giving to support the work of the Lord. And as we think about being a manager of what's God's, not 90% is ours and 10% is God's, 100% is God's. So with that understanding, I like the idea of using the guideline of the tithe from the Old Testament and referenced in the New on our increase as a starting point. And I think that's what it should be.
We should give beyond that, but using that as a starting point. Now, we see reference to the storehouse. The Israelites had a storehouse in the temple where they kept the tithes of food for the priests and Levites.
We see that the storehouse was part of God's provision for the priests who served in the temple and the Levites who had no land of their own in Deuteronomy. So I think the best representation of that today is our local church. And I would say at the end of all of this, that's where we ought to give our tithe and then look to give beyond that other places on the heart of God. Folks, we're going to take a quick break. By the way, if you want to support our work here at Faith and Finance, just go to faithfind.com and click Give.
We'll be right back. available at joinchristiancommunity.com. That's joinchristiancommunity.com. The credit union is an underwriter of this ministry.
Membership eligibility required. If the heavy burden of debt is robbing you of freedom and peace of mind, Christian credit counselors can help. We're a nationwide nonprofit credit counseling organization that has helped over 300,000 individuals in the last 27 years get out of credit card debt 80% faster while honoring that debt in full. To learn how Christian credit counselors can help you, visit christiancreditcounselors.org. That's christiancreditcounselors.org or call 800-557-1985. Hey, great to have you with us today on Faith and Finance.
I'm Rob West. Hey, as we head toward the end of June, what's so important about that? Well, it's vacation season.
The kids are out of school, sun's out, it's a little warmer. It's also the end of our fiscal year here at Faith by, which just means that at the end of our year, we true up our budgets and we get ready for another year of ministry. And boy, God has been so good to us.
We've seen so much life change as people are applying these principles and being freed up from debt and going on the mission field and giving generously and just enjoying the blessing of living according to God's principles. And we only do that each day because of your generous support. And this is a really important time for us to hear from you. And so if you would be interested in making a gift to Faith by between now and June the 30th, that would be an incredible blessing to us. We are working toward our year-end goal.
So starting April 1st, we said our goal was to see $175,000 in listener support come in. So if you would give a gift of any amount, whether you give one time or monthly, we'd certainly be grateful. You could just head to our website at faithfi.com and click Give.
That's faithfi.com and click Give. And thanks in advance. Let's head back to the phones. To Chicago we go. Hi Bob, thanks for calling, sir.
Go ahead. Thanks, Rob. Hey, I'm in Chicago helping my mom go through my dad's stuff. And she was showing me some of her financials. And she has a John Hancock Safe Access account.
I think this was my dad's life insurance policy that they paid out when he passed away. And it's in the amount of $116,500. And what it looks like is they're paying her 1% interest.
It's like a checking account. They gave her checkbooks to use. And she only uses it to pay the tax and the mortgage at this point. I was wondering, can she move that money somewhere else to get a better interest rate? I mean, she's collecting Social Security. She gets like $32,000 with Social Security and her pension or my dad's pension.
Yeah, absolutely, Bob. And I'm glad you're asking this question because this is essentially when you have proceeds from a policy at John Hancock, you know, they essentially take those either the claim or the surrender request and they deposit that money into that Safe Access account. That's just their name for it. And it's essentially a personal checking account that earns interest but not very much interest because as you said, it's only paying 1%. And she's got checkwriting privileges on it. She can take that money out at any time. Are there places she could put that money with just as much safety, but getting a better rate of return?
Absolutely. Now, do you handle her finances, Bob? Or does she do everything herself? She does everything herself with my sister's help who lives with her.
Okay. Well, would she be open to using an online savings account with FDIC Insurance if your sister set it up and linked it to her checking account? Or would she rather only do business with kind of brick and mortar credit unions and banks that she can walk into? No, she's okay with doing that online. She has a bank, Chase, that she uses as well that has money in there. And she goes to the bank from time to time to take cash out. Yeah, great. You know, what I would probably do, I mean, you could check and see whether Chase has a high yield savings account that is competitive.
I'm not sure if they do or not. But you could probably or what I would recommend is your sister goes to bankrate.com and just click on high yield savings, see who's paying the highest yields right now with FDIC Insurance and a five star rating or something close to it. And what you're going to find is that she can do a lot better than that.
I mean, there are high yield savings accounts paying 5% right now, you know, so somewhere between four and a half and 5% with the full FDIC Insurance, no minimums, no fees. And once she picked one, she'd open that account online. Once it's set up, she could then write a check, you know, out of her safe access account and mail it in or connected electronically and move the money electronically. And then once it hits that account, I mean, she's going to earn 5% on her money.
So instead of making $1,100 over the next year, you know, she's going to get about, well, with the $115,000, she's going to get $5,700, which would be great. So yeah, there's no reason not to do that. Okay, appreciate it.
Thank you so much. Yeah. Did you have a second question? No, no, no, I know she has an IRA that is being paid down as well with R&D. And I'm not worried about that. That seems to be going fine.
So okay. Yeah, the only thing I would say on that, Bob, is if she's doing any giving any charitable giving out of cash, so out of her checking or savings account, and she wants to replace that same giving with charitable distribution out of her IRA, she can satisfy that required minimum, get it all to the ministry or charity, and not have it added to her taxable income for the year. So she could save a little bit on taxes and get more into the kingdom. And again, not give any more if she doesn't want to because she could just replace the giving she's doing out of cash.
Does that make sense? Yes, I appreciate it. Thank you. Absolutely, Bob. Thanks for calling today.
We're going to finish today in central Illinois. Hi, Carl, go ahead. Yes, I want to thank you for the job you do.
It's a wonderful service. My question is, I have a government pension from a police department, and I was not married. The day I retired, I am now married. So the day I pass, my pension ends. And because I have a government pension, my Social Security is cut in half from what it normally would be. So my question is, if I was to pass before my wife, would that Social Security go back up to the normal rate?
No, it wouldn't. And I would check with the Social Security because this gets pretty complicated. But basically, you get spousal benefits if you're married to the spouse for at least one continuous year prior to applying for benefits. And then with the government pension offset, essentially, my understanding is, your spouse would likely be eligible to receive benefits. If you have that GPO, which you do, then the government pension offset reduces the Social Security benefits of spouses, widows and widowers with pensions from a federal state or local government like you have where you didn't pay the Social Security. And it would be reduced by two-thirds of the government pension offset amount.
So whatever that government pension was, two-thirds of that would be reduced by what would otherwise be eligible spousal benefits. Does that make sense? Yes, yes. Okay.
Okay. That's typically the way it works. But again, I think that's never a replacement for you scheduling a visit with the Social Security administration, having them pull up your actual work record and giving you the specific numbers so you can build a budget around it. Because I think you're wise in thinking about, hey, what are those income sources going to be for my wife?
If you and I pass away, like on average, we will, before our wives do, we want to be able to build a budget around that. And so having that information is a great starting point. Listen, all the best to you, Carl. Thanks for calling today. Well, folks, that's going to do it for us today. A big thanks to my team today, Mr. Jim Henry, Devin Patrick, and Robert Youngblood. And for everybody here at Faithfi, thanks for tuning in. May the Lord bless you. And we'll see you tomorrow. Bye-bye. Faith and Finance is provided by Faithfi and listeners like you.
