At Faithfi, our vision is to redeem God's design for money so that people would come to see God as their ultimate treasure. When you prioritize God above all else, your financial decisions reflect your identity in Christ. We're here to provide biblical wisdom and practical tools to help you on this journey. By becoming a monthly Faithfi partner, you're supporting us and actively participating in our vision to help people integrate their faith and financial decisions for the glory of God. You can make a difference right now at faithfi.com slash give.
That's faithfi.com slash give. Now let's dive into the podcast. Are you tired of feeling overwhelmed and anxious about your finances?
You're not alone. Hi, I'm Rob West. For many, money is the number one source of stress. But what if you could transform your relationship with money from one of fear and dread to one of trust and joy? Dr. Shane Enoch joins us today to discuss how we can do that. 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 journey. Well, we're excited to have Shane Enoch with us today. Shane is an associate professor of finance at Biola University and the author of the brand new book Whole Heart Finances, a Jesus-centered guide to managing your money with joy. Shane, great to have you with us.
Thanks so much for having me. Shane, your book is about taking your commitment to Jesus to the next level, including the area of finance. And I know you have a great story about how a game of Monopoly got you thinking along those lines.
So why don't we start there? So the game of Monopoly is usually a game that I dread playing, partly because it just doesn't end. I don't know if you've had that experience.
I have. And I don't like it when I lose. And it's so often it just, you know, you get handed money and then you have to try and do well and you have to kind of accumulate as much as you can. And so we were in the process with my friends, you know, we're in community, but we're getting competitive. It's just not fun. And all of a sudden I notice out of the corner of my eye, someone takes some money from the center pile.
And, you know, you build up some money in this free parking kind of pile in the center. And then I kind of let it go. And then I saw it again. And then I immediately stood up and said, you know, you're cheating. And he turned super red, my friend.
And he said, I'm not cheating. I'm actually tithing. And we couldn't believe what we just heard. And he had been trying to secretly put some of his money back into this pile. And we thought it was such an amazingly fun type of way to engage the game that we all started to try and secretly tithe. And it transformed the game in the same way Jesus, you know, when he gets entered in and we get a heart to do something different than the traditional way of managing money, it becomes more of a delight to play.
Oh, that's so good. Well, let's continue to unpack the book because there's so much to cover here. Now, you write that the most dangerous question to ask is, should I give away all of my money?
Now, why is that so dangerous? It's kind of a hidden presumption that Jesus doesn't really approve of us having money, that he's mostly spiritual, you know, this Gnostic view that what's good is what's spiritual, what's bad is what's physical. And because Jesus, you know, answered to the rich young ruler that you should give away everything, and we're already assuming Jesus disapproves of the material world, we just assume, hey, if I'm actually honest and I approach Jesus with a question about my bank account, he's just going to kind of shake his head and say, what are you doing with that money? How about you just get rid of it? And so if we actually are honest with Jesus with money, it feels very dangerous because he feels like an untrustworthy person that just wants to get rid of our money.
Yes. So help us navigate that. What then is the answer to that question? I think there's two things to consider. The first is that Jesus actually has a physical body, and you know, when he came to earth, he came word-made flesh, and that flesh had to eat, and that flesh had to drink, that flesh had to consider finances, and then he didn't just abandon that flesh, you know, when he died and was resurrected. He actually ascended into heaven and merged the physical world and the spiritual world together, making our financial needs, our physical needs, something that is real and legitimate. So we can kind of own that and understand that Jesus doesn't despise our physical needs, despise our need for financial planning, and that really takes out so much of the fear. And the other thing we need to consider is that we're in Christ as a Christian. We're in his physical body in a spiritual way, and so there's no dangerous question anymore. It's all grace. There's no way we can earn his love. There's no way we can lose his love if we don't give away everything, and there's no way we can gain his love if we do. That's so helpful, Shane.
That's an important question to answer, and I think you've given us some handles there to think about it. Well, when we come back, folks, we'll continue our conversation with Shane Enoch today. He's the author of Whole Heart Finances, a Jesus-centered guide to managing your money with joy. We'll talk about what does it look like and what happens when we separate Christ from our finances. We'll also talk about some exercises you can do to experience joy in managing money more fully. Back with more on faith and finance right after this.
Stick around. When you hear the phrase rich toward God, what comes to mind? Surely it doesn't mean making God rich. Is it about us becoming rich so we can give?
Or maybe it's an invitation to something much bigger. In the new Rich Toward God Study, FaithFi has created a way for you to explore and reflect on a well-known biblical parable about a very rich man with a very big problem. Request a copy of the Rich Toward God Study today with your gift of $25 or more by going to faithfi.com slash give. We are grateful for support from Sound Mind Investing in the faith and finance program. If you have money in a retirement account or just a general investing account, you know the stock market can sometimes seem like a roller coaster.
But it is possible to enjoy both profit and peace of mind in investing no matter what's happening in the market. You can see a short video webinar on that topic at soundmindinvesting.org. Since 1990, Sound Mind Investing has sought to offer financial wisdom for living well. Soundmindinvesting.org. Great to have you with us today on Faith and Finance.
I'm Rob West. Today we're talking whole heart finances. Our guest today is my good friend, Dr. Shane Enett. Shane is associate professor of finance at Biola University and the author of the brand new book, Whole Heart Finances, a Jesus-centered guide to managing your money with joy. Shane, before the break, we were talking about what it looks like to take the fear out of our money management and lean into Jesus' instruction for us with regard to whole heart finances. But what happens when we separate Christ from our finances?
It's really what we're seeing in culture is we're seeing anxiety and we're seeing alienation. So we're sensing people feel alone with money, and we also see that people feel this great burden of financial responsibility. And we weren't meant to bear all financial responsibility. It's too big of a burden. Christ has promised to be there for us, and the Father has promised to be a good Father. And so essentially when we try and bear full financial responsibility because we don't trust Jesus, we think He's kind of a wild card with money, then we're fracturing our hearts and we're not living with a whole heart.
Yeah, and that's really challenging, right? Because so often we can try to bear the burden of that, Shane, and we put on top of that just the circumstances that we all face, which can be really challenging. And so what would you say to somebody today who finds themselves in that desperate position financially where they just don't know where that next paycheck is going to come from?
How might you encourage them? You know, I'd say first to meditate on what it means to have God be a good Father and how if we truly believe He's a good Father, then there's a certain sense of comfort that comes from that. And, you know, and the second thing I'd say is try to bring that heart of worry and despair to the Lord. You know, He wants all of us, and too often we'd say, all right, Jesus, you can have all of me except this whole world of money.
I don't want you to be a part of it because I don't trust you. And money is so intertwined with our heart and our feelings that it's very, very important to bring those anxieties to the Lord, to bring them as a part of the relationship so that you can grow together in that. Yeah, no question about it. And what an opportunity for those who have more than they need to lean into being the hands and feet of Jesus and helping those on their path. Now, Shane, as we talk about whole heart finances, I love that you use some illustrations that can help us understand this in the book. And one in particular, you write that we should be like the Sea of Galilee, not the Dead Sea.
Share that with us. So a nature analogy I feel like is just a great teaching tool. It helps you see a deeper truth by looking at something that's evident to us. And Paul in 2 Corinthians, he's trying to help the church and the Christians in the Church of Corinth understand how they're supposed to manage money. And what he tells them to do is to excel in the grace of giving.
And he says that this benefits you. And so I wanted to help provide an analogy for that kind of big concept, a big cerebral concept. And what I saw a good analogy was to look to Israel and to look to the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea, which are both fed by the Jordan River. So you have these two seas and they're really lakes, but the Hebrew didn't have a word for lake, so they just have sea. And I've learned the Sea of Galilee has been renamed to a certain lake. But anyway, so you have this kind of water source of the Jordan River feeding both bodies of water, but one is alive and thriving and the other is dead.
And the only reason for the difference is that the Sea of Galilee has an outlet, whereas the Dead Sea just accumulates and accumulates, and then the salt builds up and kills whatever's in it. So this is basically an analogy for we're in a posture of receiving God's gracious provision. And if we just close our hand to it, then there's a certain toxicity that develops and grows in our hearts that kind of kills our ability to do mission. Oh, I love that. So we want to be a pipeline allowing God's provision to flow through us and not a bucket, if you will, where it stops with us. That's powerful. Let's get practical here, Shane. At the end of each chapter, you recommend doing some what you call whole heart exercises to experience joy in managing money more fully.
So share some of those examples. You know, one of the coolest ones, and this is actually based on research, is to create a financial gratitude journal. So a basic good money practice is to track your expenses in an app like the FaithFi app.
And if you do that regularly, you're treating your role as steward seriously. But I think you can take it to the next level and treat it like a gratitude journal, where you're seeing how God is providing His daily bread as you track your expenses and income. And then that becomes a formative liturgy. And so I like to embed my tracking in my quiet time, and I just enter into a space of such gratitude because I'm seeing it, you know, with this, you know, car fee or with a mechanic or groceries or utility bill. I'm just overwhelmed with how God is providing His daily bread for me. And so that's a really neat way of doing something that's practical and formative for our walk with Jesus.
Shane, that is so good. Do you have another example for us? Sure.
Yeah. You know, when you think about building, so a retirement fund, I like to use the word elder years reservoir and try and treat it. So borrowing from the Sea of Galilee analogy, you know, we want to have as big of a flow going out of us sustainably over our whole life. And reservoirs, you know, or marshes are tools for a river or body of water to help sustain a flow from the inevitable droughts that may occur or shut off of our water supply. And so we can meditate on our elder years reservoir to figure out what's the amount that will create the greatest sustainable flow over our whole life. And so that is a mathematical question, but it's also a heart question.
And so that's another type of exercise you can engage. Shane, for somebody who wants to take that a step further, because I love that idea, we talk about it often and set a financial finish line. As you said, there's both a financial side to that equation and a non-financial side.
How might you encourage them to think about that either on their own or with their advisor in terms of defining enough? You know, I think most people approach, you know, with every dollar given, you spend it, you save it, or you give it. And they're all three can be done well.
All three can be done poorly. But really, Paul in 2 Corinthians, I think he gives us the answer. He says, of those three, excel in the grace of giving. And so you start by saying, what's the max amount I can give and get away with? And with saving, you think, what's the minimum amount I can save and get away with? Whereas for most people, it's a flipped equation. They say, what's the max amount I can save and get away with?
And what's the minimum amount I can give and get away with? And so as a Christian, just because we're in a posture of receiving everything from the Son, the Spirit, and provision, we've been transformed and we're in Christ. And so now we have a different maximizing quest, if you will. Yeah, and that requires that we start with the why, right? That below the waterline of the iceberg is really the values that should inform the decisions we make each day.
Isn't that true? Yeah. And so I'm kind of obsessed with, let me calculate savings and try and figure out, I think it's proper to have a bit of a reservoir, but I don't want it to be my all.
I want the whole purpose of the reservoir to sustain a greater level of generosity. Incredible. Well, Shane, we've just scratched the surface. We'll have to have you back, but thanks for stopping by my friend. Thanks so much for having me.
That was Shane Enad. He is Associate Professor of Finance at Biola University and the author of the brand new book, Whole Heart Finances. We'll be back with your questions after this break. So call right now, 800-525-7000. That's 800-525-7000. Or if you'd prefer to email your questions, send it to us at askrobatfaithfi.com.
Stick around. We are grateful for support from the Eventide Center for Faith and Investing. ECFI is an educational initiative of Eventide Asset Management that seeks to help Christians understand and practice biblically faithful investing. They do this through their podcast and online journal featuring articles from industry thought leaders and their course called Discover God's Story for Investing. More information is available at faithandinvesting.com.
That's faithandinvesting.com. Great to have you with us today on Faith and Finance. We've got lines open today. We're taking your calls and questions. 800-525-7000. You can call right now. You'll get right through 800-525-7000. Let's go to the phones to Indiana. Hi, Julie. How can I help?
Thank you for your program and thank you for your advice that you can give. My children, when they were about eight and nine years old, the neighbor lady died and left her small farm in her house to the children. It's titled in their name. It has been for they're in their 40s. Well, she left their father like a proprietorship.
I think you call it. I don't know, but they didn't get any control over it until just recently where he passed away. So now they're trying to figure out, do they have to pay capital gains? Do they have to pay inheritance tax?
I mean, their name has been on the property for years, but we're just kind of wanting to know where to go from here. Yeah. So essentially the way this would work, Julie, is that if there was any taxes owed by the estate, when was this? When did she pass away? Early nineties and the taxes and all were paid back then. Yeah.
Okay. So her estate would have paid any estate taxes. There wouldn't have been any capital gains taxes unless the property was sold, which obviously it wasn't. So all of that with regard to the estate tax would have been taken care of back then. So your kids cost basis from the inheritance is the market value of that small farm as of the date of her death back in the early nineties. And they're going to have capital gains on all of the gain between the market value as of the date of death and what they sell it for today or whenever they sell it. And the difference between those two, the selling price minus the cost basis, minus any improvements that they made, not maintenance, but improvements would be the gain that would be taxable. And that would be a long-term capital gain. And that would either be at zero, 15% or 20% of the gain based on their income. So what determines whether you're at zero, 15 or 20% for the capital gains tax is your taxable income for the year in which it was sold. And that would be for each of your children based on, you know, the percentage of their ownership. Oh, okay. So, and you said it was 15 to 20% of the gain part. Yeah.
It's, you know, going to come down to, yes, 15 to 20% of the gain, or it could be zero. It really depends upon what their taxable income is. So are they all single or are they married?
No, they're married. Okay. And so for, if you're married filing jointly, just for example, for 2024, if your capital gains rate is 0% until you get above $94,000 in taxable income.
And so if their income is between $94,051 and $583,000, then they'd be at the 15% capital gain rate below $94,000 in taxable income, they'd be at zero. So it'd probably be one of the two. Okay. Thank you so much. All right. We appreciate your call today.
Absolutely. 800-525-7000 is the number to call. Let's go to Missouri. Hi, Brad.
How can I help? Yes, sir. I'm a truck driver. And for the first couple of years, I was doing LTL and I was getting paid by the hour, $30 an hour. I was bringing home $1,500 a week. And now I'm over the road as a self-employment. I'm on a 1099. I haven't done my first quarter yet on my taxes. I'm keeping all my receipts, but my question is, am I digging myself a hole or do you perceive that this could be a benefit to me?
Yeah. I mean, it can really go either way. I mean, there's, there are some benefits. The upside is you have the possibility as an independent contractor of getting a lot more deductions by being self-employed because you have the ability to claim your expenses against your income. The downside is you have to pay both ends of the FICA taxes so that the half of your FICA taxes that would normally be paid around 7% by your employer, if you're a W-2 employee, you have to cover.
So that's one downside. Now, the flip side of that is from a tax standpoint is one of the upsides is you could pay yourself a salary and then take distributions for a part of the profits. And you'd have to work with the CPA to figure out how much is salary, how much is distributions, but by separating those, you'd have to pay both sides of the FICA on the salary, but not necessarily on the distribution. So there are some ways to structure that.
I would say just kind of at a minimum, you probably need to be taken about 30% of your income and keeping it separate and then making quarterly estimated payments, you know, in order to make sure that you don't have a big tax liability at the end of the year that you're paying penalties and interest on. But again, you know, it can go both ways. I think you just need to be really intentional about keeping receipts, probably getting a CPA to help you think through all the deductions you can take advantage of. And as long as you're on top of it, I think this can be a good thing.
You know, the biggest downside is what I mentioned about the FICA taxes. Right. I talked to some nationwide block people and they, they emphasize keep track of your miles because see, I don't get, I don't get paid for detention time, but I'm writing it down. So I didn't know if I could file that as a deduction or not because some of these places I go to, I might sit an hour, I might sit five hours. So I'm writing that time down to see where I stand as far as getting reimbursed for that. Yeah. And so you're, you're talking about getting reimbursed for the time that you're stationary? Yes, sir. Yeah.
I don't think you can do that. I'm not a CPA, so that would be a good question. I think, you know, you're only, in terms of your mileage expense, it's only going to be for those miles driven unless there's some element. I'm not aware of there, but this is a good time, especially as you're making this transition for you to have a CPA, even if in the future you do it yourself, you just want to make sure you're, you're taking full advantage of everything that's available to you.
So I like the way you're thinking, but giving some, getting some professional assistance on this, I think will go a long way. One other question. If I owe, if I owe a portion of taxes on my first quarter, first quarter, do they do the deductions? You know, food, showers, is the deductions done first and I'll pay the remainder?
Or how does that work? Yeah. So you need to try, I mean, if you can, you would estimate how much, you know, what portion of your income for that quarter is actually going to be taxable to you after the expenses that you're taking against it.
Yeah. So that would, that would be the portion, because what you're trying to do is figure out, okay, at the end of the year, how much total income am I going to have? And that's after expenses. And that's what you're paying tax on.
And then you're just paying that early, you know, each quarter. Hey, God bless you, Brad, thanks for calling today. All the best. Hey, before I let you go, let me remind you, if you're looking for an advisor that shares your values, we recommend the Certified Kingdom Advisor designation. 1,500 men and women across the country have met the high standards in character and competence, but they've also been trained to bring a biblical worldview of financial decision-making to their professional advice. They've also had pastor and client references. You can find a CKA in your city when you head to faithfi.com and click find a professional. That's faithfi.com and click find a professional. I hope you'll come back and join us next time on Faith and Finance, when we go back to God's Word and look for biblical wisdom for your financial decisions. Faith and Finance is provided by FaithFi and listeners like you.
