It's Not About The Money

This faith and finance podcast is underwritten in part by Christian Healthcare Ministries. Are you finding it increasingly challenging to find affordable healthcare? Christian Healthcare Ministries is a budget-friendly, biblical, and compassionate healthcare cost-sharing alternative that aligns with your Christian values.

And it's available in all 50 states and around the world. Learn more at chministries.org slash faith buy. For every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills. I know all the birds of the hills and all that moves in the field is mine. Psalm 50, 10 and 11.

Hi, I'm Rob West. That passage and many others in the Bible remind us that God owns everything and we're only stewards of what he gives us and that only for a time. But is there a deeper meaning in these verses? We'll talk about that today and then it's onto your calls and questions at 800-525-7000.

That's 800-525-7000. This is faith and finance, biblical wisdom for your financial journey. Now to be sure the message that God owns everything and we don't is something we need to hear over and over again. That's probably why the Bible repeats this teaching several times. Job needed reminding. Job 38, one through five reads, Then the Lord answered Job out of the world when and said, Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?

Dress for action like a man. I will question you and you make it known to me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements?

Surely you know. And Psalm 24 one and two tells us, The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein. For he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers. And of course, Colossians 1 16 reads, For by him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him.

This is a message that we need to hear all the time. It frees us from getting too attached to our money and possessions, because they're not our money and possessions. They belong to God. You may have heard the story about the believer who really took this to heart. He'd saved and saved to buy a new car, but soon after taking possession, he got into a fender bender, but he didn't get that upset.

He just shrugged it off and thought, I wonder why God wanted his car to get in that accident. Now, that would certainly be difficult to do, but it makes things a lot easier if you think of yourself only as a steward and not an owner. Okay, we've got stewardship covered, but what about that deeper meaning in these verses?

For that, we need to consider the larger passage of Psalm 50 verses 10 through 15. For every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills. I know all the birds of the hills and all that moves on the field is mine.

If I were hungry, I would not tell you for the world and its fullness are mine. Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats? Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving and perform your vows to the most high and call upon me in the day of trouble.

I will deliver you and you shall glorify me. The psalmist is really warning Israel that they've become too legalistic with their sacrifices. They had come to put value on the actual sacrifices and by extension themselves. God already owns the beasts of the forest and the cattle on a thousand hills. Indeed, all the cattle on all the hills. He owns all creatures wild and tamed, the fowl in the mountains and the beasts of the fields. That said, how could he possibly be impressed with the burnt offerings of the Israelites?

They were just giving him back a tiny bit of what he already owned and then patting themselves on the back for it. Nonetheless, God did require Israel to make those sacrifices to temporarily cover sin but also something else. Note verse 14 again.

Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving and perform your vows to the most high. This verse gives us the context we need to put things in perspective. That passage and others like it are really about giving and the attitude of our hearts.

They're not about legalism and checking boxes. Galatians 2 16 reads, we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. By works of the law, no one will be justified. When we give purely out of gratitude, expecting nothing and taking no pride in it and certainly not to earn our way into heaven, only then are we giving him the loyalty of our hearts. God is a spiritual being. What use does he have for earthly things?

Well, not of course. He wants our hearts. He wants us to worship him in spirit and truth. Our tithing and gifts must only be tributes of our gratitude for what he has already given us, not just material things but the priceless gift of his son Jesus Christ for our eternal salvation. We must search our hearts to make sure we give for the right reason because he is God most high.

He sees right through us and takes no pleasure in giving that isn't joyful and done out of gratitude. All right, your calls are next. The number to call 800-525-7000. That's 800-525-7000. I'm Rob West and this is Faith and Finance.

Stick around. God has entrusted his finances to you and we at Faithfi have designed our Faithfi app to help you live, give, owe, and grow with that perspective. Our Faithfi app is the leading biblically based finance app. You can manage your money, get top biblical financial resources, and interact with a community of like-minded believers where you can ask questions, get answers, and share what you're learning.

Go to faithfi.com and click the word app to get started. Frustrated by your health insurance? Confused by the network restrictions and increasing premiums?

There's a better way. Christian Healthcare Ministries. CHM is a Christian community delivering a faith-based solution to the high cost of healthcare.

Take back control of your healthcare with the ability to choose a provider you trust with no network restrictions and savings of up to 40%. Learn more and enroll today at chministries.org slash faithfi. That's chministries.org slash faithfi. Great to have you with us today on Faith and Finance. All right, it's time to take your calls and questions today. The number 800-525-7000.

That's 800-525-7000. The calls are coming in, but we've got room for you at least at the moment. So our goal as stewards is to be found faithful because once we give our lives to Jesus as Lord and Savior, we trust him for salvation, the free gift of eternal life, then it's about stewardship, managing our time and our relationships and God's word and being stewards of God's money that's been entrusted to us however much or however little, finding contentment, using it to provide and enjoy and also to give away, to be a part of God's activity. We want to do that as a faithful steward being it's long obedience in the same direction as you've heard it said, and that's our goal here on this program. So we'd love to hear from you today.

The number to call again is 800-525-7000. We'll see if we can help you tackle your financial questions today. We know that as you live, give, owe and grow, especially now when things are tighter than ever, we certainly want to help you make those practical decisions. So let's dive in. We'll begin in Indianapolis today. Greg, go ahead, sir.

Yeah, Rob, thanks for taking the call. Just looking to do some little bit of investing kind of my own as a little hobby. I'm already had this in 401ks and different investments at different companies and with advisors and well diversified in that, but just now and said enough financially of looking to maybe just invest around say 100 a month or something, just like say just more for myself and just to kind of pass time. Yeah.

Okay. And in terms of the investing that you want to do, I mean, typically when we're talking about a smaller amount of money, like $100 a month, we would try to get broader diversification through the use of various investment vehicles, like what's called a, an exchange traded fund. Think of that as a basket of stocks or maybe a basket of stocks that represent a broad market index. Like maybe you've heard of the Dow Jones 30 industrial stocks or the S and P 500, the standard and poor.

That's the 500 largest companies here in the U S. So that's one way to get broad diversification by owning a very small percentage of a lot of different companies. Another way to do that is through what's called a mutual fund. It's very similar to an ETF.

It just doesn't trade tick by tick like a stock does in the same way an ETF does you get the net asset value of all of the holdings at the end of every day. So again, a way you could take a small amount of money and buy a large number of investments. Now, in some cases though, if somebody is looking at this like a hobby and they're saying, listen, I want to buy companies with real sales and earnings, taking a longterm perspective and hoping that my money will grow over time, but I'm doing it in part because it's something that I'm thinking I'm going to enjoy. And therefore I actually want to be able to pick the individual companies I'm buying. And so therefore I'd want to buy what are called fractional shares, but where you're actually selecting the companies you're investing in, is that the type of thing you're looking for? Or would you rather buy a basket of investments through an ETF or a mutual fund? I think it's more on the line where you're talking about that would be interested in doing so. Some of these I've never heard about the mutuals or fractional.

Didn't know if I could go to the websites you go to or just how you kind of get started and get out there on the web to searching these out. Yeah, very good. So let's do this. I think you're right in that the education is probably the starting point. And keep in mind, I mean, the Bible talks about the right way to think about investing in terms of something called steady plotting. So we don't want to try to jump in and out and, you know, move, you know, based on the gyrations of the stock market in days or months, you really want to take a decades long approach to this. So you're buying for the long term. And that's really the more prudent way to go.

Let's do this. The first resource I'm going to actually send you in the mail is our gift to you. It's a resource called the sound mind investing handbook.

And I think that will give you a good primer on investing from a biblical worldview and really unpack a lot of the different types of investing tools. And then secondly, I want to give you a website to go to, it's actually the same name, you'll go to soundmindinvesting.org. And you'll find that you can search all kinds of articles and resources there at SMI.

Some of them are going to require that you be an SMI member, others are free. But I think between the book we'll send you and that website, that's going to get you going just in terms of some education that'll be pointing you in the right direction. Okay. Thank you.

All right, very good. Stay on the line. We'll get your information. If you have questions along the way, Greg, don't hesitate to give us a call. Deborah in Florida, how can I help?

Hi, I have a question. I am actually am approaching 65 and I have only a little shy of $70,000 in my 401k, which I'll be able to pull. And I just am looking for some advice on how to invest it in terms of creating wealth. Other than that, I have an annuity that I'll be able to get, but it only yields a couple hundred dollars a month. So I'm not even configuring that into this whole plan. So that's the question I'm trying to see what advice you can give on how I could create wealth with just that little, it's only a little shy of $70,000.

Yeah, very good. So I would think about rolling it to a traditional IRA that is not going to be a taxable event. So there will be no taxes due. You're going to go from the pre-tax 401k to a pre-tax IRA.

That just gives you a little bit more flexibility over how you manage it. And then at that point you could hire an investment advisor to begin making the buy and sell decisions for you. Typically at 70 years old, we might say that you would put 30 to 40% in stocks and that would provide a growth component to this, but you wouldn't plan on touching it anytime soon. And so you could weather the ups and downs of the market. And then you would put somewhere between 60 and 70% in bonds. These would be high quality corporate or government bonds, things like that with interest rates high right now, you know, you'll get a great yield as the rates come down, the bond prices will actually increase.

They work inversely. And so you'll get some growth out of that. And that would be a fairly conservative portfolio that would allow you to grow this over time. So let's say, you know, in 10 years, this is worth, you know, 110,000 instead of 70 or something like that. And, you know, that would then allow you to convert it to an income stream if you needed to, which we would typically say you should be able to safely pull 4% a year. So let's say this grew to four to $100,000. That would allow you to pull out 4,000 a year, you know, or about $350 a month that you could use to supplement your income. And ideally, if you kept it invested that way, getting a little bit more conservative over time, you would never impact the principal, that would be the goal there. But you know, a lot of this, I think, comes down to you finding somebody that can take over responsibility for managing this for you, you know, so you know, you have wise counsel and somebody looking over this, but give me your thoughts on all that.

Yeah, no, that sounds like a great idea. I did have a friend that actually kind of went that route and did, well, she went through a credit union and their advisor, she lost a lot of money. So my thing is really trying to see or seek financial advisors that will, I'm not saying that they didn't know what they were doing, but I really want to be able to know that the ones that I'm seeking out, I mean, I know the chances are still going to be up and down because everything's based on the market, but she lost a great deal of money.

The market wasn't that bad, but she did lose a great deal. So really I'm looking for the advice of the financial advisors that I may seek. You may have some on your app. Yeah, so what I would do is head to our website at faithfi.com, that's faithfi.com, right there at the top of the page, it'll say, find a CKA, that stands for Certified Kingdom Advisor. And I would just find someone that can serve you there in your area. You can interview two or three and find the one that seems like the best fit. Thanks for your call.

We'll be right back. As the leading advocate for the Christian financial industry, Kingdom Advisors serves the public by promoting the integration of a biblical worldview across every aspect of the financial services industry. And we serve a growing network of thousands of Christian financial professionals, equipping and empowering them to carry biblical financial wisdom to their clients, peers, and community. For more information, visit kingdomadvisors.com. That's kingdomadvisors.com. Hey, great to have you with us today on Faith and Finance.

I'm Rob West. If you're looking for a financial advisor, one that shares your values as a believer, we recommend the Certified Kingdom Advisor designation. You can find one of 1,500 Certified Kingdom Advisors, perhaps one even in your area when you visit faithfi.com. That's faithfi.com. Just click find a professional at the top of the page. All right, let's go back to the phones.

Florence has been waiting patiently in Georgia. Go right ahead. I just have one question for you, and it's a real concern of mine. I had heard on a Christian radio station that they were saying they were going to do away with cash in December 2023.

And how are we to plan for that? Do away, let me make sure I understand the question, do away with what? Cash. Cash. Got it. Yes, ma'am.

Yes. You know, these, there's a lot of claims going out there, Florence, so I can understand your concern that the US government is planning to eliminate cash at various times. Certainly one of those claims is December of this year. But those are false. You can look at any number of sources and find that this stems generally from misunderstandings or misinformation about either digital currency developments or what the Federal Reserve put in place last year, which is called FedNow.

Now, let me explain both of these and the status of them. With regard to a digital currency, President Biden put an executive order out that asked for research to be done into the potential development of a US central bank digital currency, what's often referred to as a CBDC. It doesn't call for the replacement of cash. In fact, it explicitly states that this would be supplementary or supplemental to cash. So you would continue to have your cash, but you'd also have a digital dollar as well in the form of a central bank digital currency.

Am I a fan of a CBDC? Absolutely not. I don't like that option simply because it would give the Treasury too much insight and potential control into our financial transactions. And therefore, they could impose social controls over the use of money.

Now, again, the only thing the executive order did was called for research. Secondly, the Federal Reserve has said, if there ever was a CBDC, and doesn't mean they couldn't change their mind, but at least at this point, they're saying it would not replace, but it would be in addition to cash. But keep in mind, it literally and I mean that it literally will take an act of Congress for this to happen for this to be put into place, because coinage is a congressional function. And so, you know, this wouldn't happen until Congress voted on it. And there's a lot of division for good reason in Congress right now about a CBDC.

So I don't think we're anywhere near a place where even if the President was really pushing for it, we would ever see it come to pass because I can't imagine Congress would gain consensus around this. Now, what about the second part of that? And it's something called FedNow. What is that? Well, FedNow is a payment system that allows for faster bank transfers. It's not a new currency.

It's not a move toward, you know, replacing the dollar. It's simply a payment system that's more modern. So today, you can make payments initiated by your bank through a payment system, but there are certain hours of operation. It also doesn't work on the weekends. The idea by the FedNow platform is that banks could subscribe to it and create 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year payment processing so that somebody could pay their bill and know that it's paid immediately regardless of the time of day or weekend so that somebody can have confidence their payment is handled. That's not available directly to the public.

It's only available to the banks and about 9,000 banks now are using it and that number is growing. So I think you can put those concerns aside for now. It doesn't mean we shouldn't stay vigilant and aware of what's happening with CBDCs, but there's nothing on the table today that's anywhere close to a CBDC coming into existence and certainly not a replacement of cash. Can I explain why I even had that concern?

Sure. Because I know that when I read my Bible, I know that this is like the signs of the times are coming. There's no doubt and that's what made me more concerned was knowing that, you know, what part are we in at that time, you know? And I just wanted a biblical word to just give me confirmation. That's all I wanted.

Yes. Well, what we know from God's word is that no one knows the day or the time, not even the angels in heaven nor the Son, but only the Father is what we read in Matthew 24 36. We do read the end times and understand there's plenty of prophecy. We know there will come a time where Jesus will return, but we also so we need to be people of understanding and we need to be biblically minded and literate about what God's word says. But I also think we don't need to get caught up in a lot of the fear-mongering that's happening with regard to misinformation. And so specifically as it relates to what we know today, there is no replacement or end in sight to cash.

And so any insinuation otherwise would just not be factual. But I certainly appreciate the question. It's a great one, Florence, and it's one, you know, we need to continue to monitor. Thank you for calling today. We appreciate it. Let's go to Oregon.

To Betty, go right ahead. I am calling on behalf of a friend in Colorado and she is in desperate need of of cash flow and she has equity equity in a home. She's single and my thought was why can't she get a reverse mortgage and she's telling me that in Colorado that's not an option for her because she's a senior and so I'm just I'd like more information about a reverse mortgage and is it different between the states and whether or not you're a senior and who can I contact on her behalf?

Yeah, very good question there. You're eligible for a reverse mortgage, you know, as long as you're 62 years old, generally speaking, you live in the home as your primary residence and you have sufficient equity in the house which would typically be 50 percent equity or more. No reason there in Colorado she shouldn't be able to get that and so there's a variety of reverse mortgages. What I would recommend is that she look for what's called a HECM which is a home equity conversion mortgage. It's another name for a reverse mortgage but what's important here is that the home is the only collateral for the reverse mortgage so if she converts that equity to an income stream and lives to 150 and the house declines in value, let's take the worst case scenario, and she ends up, you know, borrowing more than the home will satisfy the federal housing administration. The FHA will step in and cover the difference so this is a great option for her as a planning tool to increase cash flow. Here's where you go. Go to our friends at Movement Mortgage at movement.com faith movement.com faith.

She can put in her information and somebody will give her a call. Thanks for your call, Betty. That's going to do it for us today. I hope you found something encouraging and helpful today. A big thanks to my team. I certainly couldn't do it without them. Amy, Dan, Taylor, and Jim. May the Lord bless you and I hope you'll come back and join us next time on Faith and Finance. We'll see you then. Faith and Finance is provided by FaithFi and listeners like you.