Your Church Emergency Fund

Only God Sees the Future of Faith and Finance. We'll touch on some of the high points today, but let's start with why a church emergency fund is so important. Just like with your personal finances, churches need a cushion to ensure that routine expenses are paid on time. Without it, they run the risk of getting hit with late fees. If there's a mortgage on the property, churches need at least a few months' worth of payments stored up to avoid foreclosure if giving suddenly drops.

Why would that happen? Well, just one example. It's a sad fact that churches split, and if half the members leave, a church could soon be facing financial calamity. Also, no one wants to have to take a special offering to replace a worn-out heating or cooling unit, or to have to start at zero if the church decides to launch a new ministry. So there are plenty of reasons why a cash reserve is essential for a church. And the same scriptures that apply to individuals also apply to churches. Proverbs 6, Go to the ant, you sluggard, consider its ways and be wise.

It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest. Also, Proverbs 21, The wise store up choice food and olive oil, but fools gulp theirs down. But let's say a church has a healthy cash reserve. The work doesn't stop there.

Planning and wise management of that fund are necessary because there will always be pressures within the church about how it should be used. Should some of it go toward paying down debt early? Or to be more generous with the staff?

Or to start new programs? This leads us back to the original question. How much is enough for a church's cash reserve? And just how do they come up with that number? And here there are two very different schools of thought. One says the church should have almost nothing in reserve, trusting God instead. The other says a church should have an entire year or more's worth of operating expenses in the bank. The correct answer is likely somewhere in the middle, and each church, with its leadership, has to decide what's best.

Now, what guides that process? Well, first, members need to understand that having a cash reserve is simply the faithful administration of God's resources. This honors God, and the church has to make it a priority, because it represents Christ in the world. Next, it's important to build up the reserve during the good times, especially when the church is growing. It should be a part of the budget process, building a cash reserve as giving increases. A church can do that in two ways.

One is to budget next year's revenue at, for example, 90% of this year's, or two, by simply putting a line in the budget for additions to cash reserves. Whichever way a church does this, it's important to separate the reserve money from designated funds. In the event of a revenue shortfall, a church shouldn't be tempted to pay the mortgage with money specifically mandated for something else. And speaking of the mortgage, it's wise to keep mortgage reserves above what the lender might require.

Okay, a few more things. It's also important to be specific with cash reserve goals. Things like servicing debt, capital replacement, and ministry expansion. Also, for any of this to work, leadership needs to communicate the importance of having cash reserves to the congregation. It doesn't show a lack of faith. It's simply good stewardship. Properly communicating clear, specific goals and the progress made toward them might even inspire more faithful giving. And finally, leadership can challenge the congregation along the way to meeting a church's cash reserve goals.

Malachi 3-10 comes to mind. It reads, Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house, and thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need. All right, your calls are next. 800-525-7000. We'll be right back. Great to have you with us on Faith and Finance Live.

I'm Rob West, your host. That's right, a new name here in our new year at the end of our first broadcast week of the year, celebrating the opportunity to reposition this broadcast each day around what's really important. And that is that our faith comes first, and that informs the financial decisions and choices that we make as stewards of God's resources. So we can be faithful managers and generous sowers into God's kingdom and take what God has entrusted to us and live within his provision with contentment and joy and freedom.

That's our ultimate objective. Hey, what's on your mind today? We'd love to hear from you at 800-525-7000, whatever's wrestling in your mind financially speaking. Let's talk about it. We've got two lines open.

800-525-7000. We've got some great calls lined up and we look forward to hearing from you. Before we head to the phones, let me remind you here at the start of the new year, it's a great time for you to set up your spending plan.

Maybe it's something you've always thought about or you've started and maybe it didn't work out for you. Well, in the brand new FaithFi app, that's FaithFI, you can choose from one of three styles of money management, all of them using our beautiful, simple interface that connects securely to all of your banking institutions so you can automatically download your transactions. But you can have a more hands-on approach with the digital envelope system or a more directional approach with track only.

Whatever approach you choose based on your money personality, you'll be able to have the information you need throughout the month and if you're married, you and your spouse together so that you can make course corrections and stay on budget so that your money ends up where you want it to go so you can accomplish your God-given goals and objectives. To learn more about the FaithFi app, head to our brand new website, faithfi.com. That's faithfi.com or search for FaithFi in your app store. All right, let's go to the phones. We're going to begin in Phoenix. Hi, Daniel, you'll be our first caller. Go ahead, sir. Yes.

Hi, Ron. My question is about tax withholding from each paycheck. So I believe I'm paying the highest percentage of tax withholding from my paycheck. But my question is, what is the percentage that I can lower that to without having to pay too much at the end of the year and being able to have a healthy paycheck? Yeah, exactly right and that should be the objective and it's really about the number of withholdings you put on the W-4 form and these are not dependents, these are withholdings and there is a process to calculate the number of withholdings you claim and that's between you and the IRS. It has nothing to do with anyone else and you can choose whatever withholding level you want and based on that, it would determine how much is withheld from every paycheck and you can change that at any time. You're correct in that you don't want to have a lot more than necessary taken out because you're giving an interest-free loan to Uncle Sam.

On the other hand, if you don't have enough taken out, you could end up with a penalty. So fortunately, there's a number of online tools, Daniel, to help you determine the right amount for the withholding. TurboTax has one, H&R Block, eFile and even the IRS at irs.gov. I would just Google withholding calculators. Any of them will tell you whether you need to make changes to the number of withholdings you are asking for. Here's what you're going to want to have ready when you start that calculator. Your pay stubs for all jobs including your spouse's pay stub if you have a working spouse, any other income information, side jobs and self-employment investments, your most recent tax return and then the number of dependents that you expect to claim. And when you put all of that into the calculator, it will tell you how many withholdings you want to claim and if you need to make a change, you can ask for a W-4 form or print one out yourself and give that to your HR department.

They should have it but if not, irs.gov is where you could download it and then you would just turn that in so they would adjust that withholding to ensure that perhaps if you're taking out too much, we can ratchet that back down. But do it with some rationale and that's where these calculators come into play. Does that make sense? That makes perfect sense, Ron. Thank you very much.

I just wasn't sure how to do that. All right. Very good.

Well, listen, all the best to you. Thanks for calling the program today. Let's head to Florida, Charles. You're next on the program. How can we help? Yes.

Thank you for taking my call. I have a brother that lives in Pennsylvania. I live here in Florida and ever since my dad passed away back in the year 2019, my brother that lives in Pennsylvania has been off and on and I should put all my assets that I have into a trust. And he claims in that way if all my assets is in a trust, I can get extra help should I need help like when it comes to medical issues like I am diabetic and anyways, I just would like to get your opinion on whether if you think I should do as my brother tells me to. Or if I should just go on with as is or if there's anything alternative I can do like beneficiary or T.O.D. I think transfer on to death. I think that's what it is.

I just want to find out what you think I should do. Yeah, I appreciate that question, Charles. And to the T.O.D. question, absolutely you can place a transfer on death on any of your investment or other accounts. You can even do a transfer on death deed for your home. That will just ensure the expediency of the transfer after your death and it will bypass the probate process which is what the trust will also do with assets that are titled in the name of the trust. Perhaps though what your brother was getting at was one of the advantages of a living trust is that in the event that you become incapacitated and can't manage the trust's assets yourself, your successor trustee will manage them on your behalf and that can of course occur or would occur in the case of incapacitation prior to your death whereas your will, your basic last will and testament only goes into effect and instructs the probate court at death. So the trust can go into effect prior to that if you're incapacitated.

That would be one of the reasons to have it. A second would be for the distribution of your assets to occur smoothly, quickly, privately because it's not a part of the public record and without court costs and it just ensures that you go outside of the probate process. It keeps your estate private, it can protect your estate from certain creditors and legal challenges but ultimately its primary use is to allow that successor trustee to step in and manage your assets on your behalf either prior to your death or after your death if you wanted to distribute perhaps not everything automatically at death but you had life long dependents or minuses. That you wanted certain triggering events to occur after your death perhaps even down the road that would allow the distribution of your estate over time.

That's again where a trust can come into effect. If none of those really apply and you just need a living will to dictate your end of life wishes, a healthcare surrogate for somebody to make decisions related to your healthcare if you're incapacitated, durable power of attorney so someone like your brother could make financial transactions on your behalf if you're unable to. Those things could be done with just a basic will but if you feel like a trust would give you a bit more control and you need some of that for any of the reasons I mentioned, that's where it can be helpful. It's going to run you $1500-$2000 instead of $300-$500 for a will. So I'd probably sit with a godly estate planning attorney Charles just to talk through this and see if it's necessary.

If not, a will should serve you just fine. Thanks for your call and we'll be right back. Great to have you with us today on a Friday afternoon as we tackle the questions that you're thinking about bringing God's Word to bear as we talk about the principles that we can apply to your decisions today. So what's on your mind today? We'd love to hear from you 800-525-7000. By the way, if you get a busy signal, perhaps you can drive back in just a bit. Back to the phones, we have a full lineup of questions today.

To Sandusky, Ohio. Tim, you're next on the program, sir. Go ahead.

Hi, Rob. Yeah, yesterday you talked about doing the online banks for CDs that they had better rates and I looked into that last night and did find that indeed they were like up to 4.6% and I called my hometown bank and asked them why such a disparity because their rates, they couldn't offer anything near that. And they said, well, it's just because it's a big bank and I just wanted to make sure before I put a chunk of change in one of those online banks that there's no gimmicks or anything I need to be worried about.

No, I wouldn't. However, I think it's always good to go with one of the online banks that has a little more staying power just in terms of the size of the institution and how long they've been around. The primary reason, Tim, that they're able to do this is just because they don't have all of the overhead. They don't have the brick and mortar operations. They have much smaller staff because they're just transacting business online and they have a much smaller support staff because most of the interactions are electronic, more so than even over the phone. And when you don't have to lease or own a lot of those big buildings that all have to be staffed, you can pass that along in the form of no fees and much higher interest rates. But I would use the ratings that are provided at like bankrate.com.

That would be a great place for you to go. You'd click on the banking product you're looking for. In this case, it'd be CDs and then you can refine your search by the number of months you're looking for, a one-year CD, an 18-month CD. I probably wouldn't go much further than that because you should be able to roll it over to higher rates when those come due. And interestingly, you're going to get the same yield on a five-year today as you will 18 months. But I would look at those ratings because here's the reality.

If your account was ever compromised, if you had something in savings and somebody turned in a fraudulent check and was able to take something out. I mean, you want a reputable institution who's going to quickly resolve the matter and advocate for you and get you made whole quickly. And I think a lot of that has to do with just the strength of the institution. But if you choose something that has maybe four stars, four or five stars or better, you should absolutely be able to take advantage of a 12-month CD right now at about four and a quarter and a 15 or 18 month at about 4.5, even 4.6. So I wouldn't have any problem with that and it's not a gimmick.

I mean, these are the real rates and they're able to do it for the reasons I mentioned. Okay. Thank you very much. All right. Again, bankrate.com or nerdwallet.com would be two great resources for you to evaluate who has the best rate programs right now for CDs, but also who's a highly rated institution.

Now, with regard to the failure of the institution, not just the service, but the failure, as long as it has FDIC insurance, then you have the backing of the U.S. government to make you whole if for some reason that particular institution were to go under. So that gives you some peace of mind there. Appreciate your call today, sir. To Michigan. Hey, Joel, thanks for calling. Go ahead. Thank you, Rob.

I just wanted to give our sovereign father praise for his faithfulness to us. I never really made a whole lot of money. I retired four years ago and that was the first time I even made $60,000 a year. We've got two retirement accounts.

We got a SEP through Schwab and I have a Roth through Vanguard. And I just wanted to say, being out of debt, we've been able to do so much. Just give a couple examples here in 2021, the market is really good. And we lived on $45,000 a year for us, but we were able to give away over $120,000 to ministry, to the Lord's work because of his faithfulness to us, which is like about 73 percent of our budget. And last year, even though the market didn't do as well, we lived at $46,000, but we were able to give away $44,000 and God's just been so good to us. I mean, when you're out of debt, you can do a lot of things that we couldn't have if we were in debt. And I didn't even start putting away for retirement until I was in my early 40s because I really felt the Lord would be back before then. But I was wrong, like I usually am.

And so start putting away for retirement. So God's just been so good. We just want to praise him for his goodness to us.

Oh, I love that. Well, thank you, Joel. Man, just hearing your testimony, the joy in your voice, the excitement of what God's allowed you to do and your ability to participate with him in this significant giving is just so contagious.

And I'm confident you've encouraged a lot of folks that are listening today. I have a couple of questions for you that I'd love for you just to reflect on. Number one is, did you ever imagine 10 or 20 or 30 years ago that you'd be able to give away this kind of money?

No. I was holding onto it as tight as I could. I mean, we went through that little blue and white book back in the 1980s with Larry Burkett as far as getting out of debt, because I never thought I'd retire.

I might actually get my house paid off, but we got paid off when I was only 36. Wow. Incredible. That was the start of great things.

Yeah, well, I can imagine. I mean, I think one of the common denominators, other than you just recognizing that this provision is from the Lord and that you want to be a good steward because he owns everything. Apart from that, it sounds like what was key here is that you all have limited your lifestyle. As your income has grown, you've capped your living expenses and your ability to live modestly and continue at that level, even as God provides more, has allowed you to accelerate your debt pay off beyond what you could have ever imagined and then to give lavishly well beyond what you could have ever imagined.

Talk about just that piece of it and how you decided where you should cap your lifestyle and how that has played into this. To what you just said, I think being able to go to foreign cultures, and I won't say which countries we've been to, we've been into several, but seeing people that have nothing, when we come back to our country and see how much we have, it's like, my goodness, I have so much. I feel almost guilty of what I have because of what people don't have in Muslim countries or in places we've been in South America where they just don't have much. So we just feel that we're comfortable with what we have. I mean, we look at our neighbors that have a whole lot more than us. I mean, there is a house just built down the road from those 14,000 square feet. It's like, it's a cottage.

It's like, you've got to be kidding me. Wow, Joel, thank you for calling. Thank you for your testimony. Thank you for your faithfulness to the Lord. God bless you, my friend. We're going to take a quick break.

We'll be right back with much more. Thanks for joining us today on Faith and Finance Live. I'm Rob West, your host. We're taking your calls and questions today at 800-525-7000. We'd love to hear from you. Let's head right back to the phones.

Largo, Florida. Hey, Paul, thanks for calling. Go ahead. Hey, Rob. First of all, I want to thank you.

About four, maybe five years ago, I started listening to the Moody radio station. I listened to your newscast and I had no idea that one was biblically for me to be debt free. So I made it a priority to pay my house up. I'm a single dad of three and I paid my house up 17 years early. As of a year ago, I'm totally debt free.

I followed your plan. I do have an emergency fund that I could survive for at least a year on it. I could survive on my check-in account for two years.

I have a savings account that I can survive for a year. A week ago yesterday, a week ago, I just retired from the government. I actually was three days short of 39 years of government service. I haven't applied. I'm 64 and eight months, so I haven't applied for Social Security. I'm going to wait two years at full retirement age.

At this point, I don't need it. I can live on my FERS, my Federal Employee Retirement, just comfortably. But my big question to you is that I have a TSP, which is Thrift Savings Program, where last year I was losing a lot of money in it. So I put it to a safe account called the G Fund. I'm not losing money, but I'm only making, I think, 1.65%. I don't need that money at this point in my life, but I believe I can keep it in there at the government until I'm 70. My big question is, I would like to see what other options would there be for me to warehouse that money that would be better than 1.65%.

I don't want to do stocks or things because I get very nervous. Okay, very good. Yes, sir. Well, Paul, first of all, thank you for that testimony that you gave to the Lord. You applied His wisdom from the Bible to your situation, and you followed these principles that we need to live within our means. Well, first, we need to recognize God owns it all and that we're a steward and money is a tool. But then we want to live within our means and avoid debt, which means we should seek to get out of debt over time, not because it's a sin, but because there's warnings and it changes the relationship and it can cause us to presume upon the future. We should have some margin, we should set long-term goals, we should give generously, and we do that. We put ourselves in a position to experience God's best. It doesn't mean we're not going to be without challenges along the way.

We will in a fallen world, but it puts us in a position to at least say our economy is something we can control and we want to have an eternal perspective and follow God's heart. And you're experiencing the fruit of doing that over a long period of time. And so thanks for sharing that testimony today. Also, it sounds like you're living modestly, like our previous caller. And because of that, you've got this asset, this Thrift Savings Plan that you've built up that you don't need to touch. And that's a good thing because you can allow that to continue to grow.

And because you're the steward, you need to decide how much risk do you want to take, if any at all. And try to grow that so that it's there either to provide additional resources for you if you needed long-term care down the road. You had major medical expenses to give away to ministry that is on your heart or maybe to leave as an inheritance. What I would probably do, Paul, that G Fund is just the G stands for government securities. I mean, basically you're in government bills, bonds, and notes, paying very little. I'd probably roll it out to an IRA, an individual retirement account, and see about an advisor working with you.

Now, you don't have to invest in stocks and bonds. You could leave it in fixed investments. You could even roll it out to an IRA at a bank if you wanted to and look to build like a CD ladder. You know, maybe you put a portion of it in a six-month CD, a portion in a 12-month, and a portion in 18 months. And then every six months, you're rolling it over to take advantage of higher interest rates as they're available. And then maybe once the Fed stops raising rates, maybe you lock it in for a longer period of time.

That would allow you to get up that 1.6 up to, well, right now with a 15-month CD, you can earn 4.6% in an online bank. And that would be in an IRA that would not create a taxable event when you rolled that out. The other benefit of the IRA is that you're going to have required minimum distributions down the road. And when you reach age 72, and if you don't need that money, perhaps you're in the same position then that you are right now, you would be able to do out of the IRA what's called a qualified charitable distribution, which would allow you to satisfy that required minimum that the IRS is going to ask you to take out each year.

But do it by giving to your church or other ministries that you're passionate about. They get the full amount. There's not any tax paid. It's not added to your adjusted gross income.

But it's also going to satisfy that required minimum. You won't be able to do that out of the TSP. You'd have to be in an IRA. So I think that's perhaps you certainly could leave it there and stay in the G Fund.

But I think getting it into the IRA gives you a bit more flexibility because now you can look at other options, including things like CDs that might take advantage of the higher rates that are being paid right now. Does all that make sense? It makes perfect sense. And that helps me quite a bit. And I'm pretty sure that's most likely what I'm going to do.

Very good. And if I could ask the staff to pray for me. I worked on the mercy ship in 1996 and 1998. I've been in the health care profession for 40 years. I'm not a doctor. I'm not a nurse.

I'm a physician's assistant. And I put an application in for the go back and work on the mercy ship because I feel God was calling me to do some better work than what I'm doing here. So if I can have your staff pray for me, I'd really appreciate that.

Well, let's do that now, Paul, if you don't mind. Father, we just lift Paul up to you. Thank you for his testimony today, just to give you glory and to acknowledge your provision in his life over a long period of time. Thank you that he's been able to apply your wisdom and he's now experiencing the blessing that comes from that. Lord, with regard to his desire to continue to serve you, whether it's on the mercy ships or somewhere else, I pray that you would just open that door that you have for him to use his gifts and talents and abilities in service to you. And this next season of life, we'll trust you wherever that might be, that you would lead clearly and open the doors that you would have him to follow. And we'll just look forward to celebrating as to how he can continue to be in service to you in the days ahead. And so we ask all this in Jesus name.

Amen. Paul, thank you for calling today, my friend. We appreciate it very, very much.

800-525-7000 is the number to call. We're going to head back to the phones in our next segment. Plus, we'll be talking to Jerry Boyer. Jerry's going to give us a bit of a year in review as we take this opportunity here now in a new year to look back, but then also look forward and just perhaps think about where we're headed economically in the days ahead.

Jerry Boyer joins us right around the corner. A quick email that came in from Dave. Dave writes, I don't want my credit to get scammed. Should I pay for a company to guard my credit or just freeze my credit report? You know, I'm not a big fan of paying for a credit guard because you can do it yourself.

So I would say, Dave, if you're pulling your credit reports every quarter at annualcreditreport.com, which is free, and monitoring those reports, and if you go and freeze your credit, which is also free at each of the three bureaus, that's going to prevent anybody from opening a new account in your name fraudulently because the lender extending credit won't be able to access your credit file without the PIN number. Thanks for writing to us. We'll be right back. Thanks for joining us today on Faith and Finance Live.

I'm Rob West. Have you ever thought about the economic commentary of the Bible, how the setting and the audience when Jesus was interacting with various people, the economic backdrop really said a lot about what Jesus was getting at. Well, the book The Maker vs. The Taker is what Jesus really said about social justice and economics.

It's a phenomenal read that will give you a look into the scriptures, perhaps in a way that you've never seen it before. The author of that book is our good friend Jerry Boyer. He joins us now. He's also the president of Boyer Research and a columnist at The Christian Post.

And he joins us each Friday with his market commentary and analysis. And Jerry, well, happy New Year, my friend. Happy New Year to you. And hey, thank you for the little book endorsement there. That was quite nice. I appreciate that. It's an incredible resource, as you know, I think very highly of it.

So I'd love for as many people as possible to pick up a copy. Jerry, here in a new year, it's a great time for us to just stop, reflect, look back. I think there's something very biblical about that.

And maybe we'll do that now as we look at 2022 related to our economy and the markets. Yeah, I think there is something biblical about it. There are seasons in the Bible, you know, for instance, in the Torah, where you stop and you have a day of atonement and you have New Year's, you have times when you kind of stop and take stock of things. I don't think that's just for moral inventory.

I think that's life in general and for nations. And since you and I work in finance, since you and I both work in faith and finance in particular, I think the end of the year is a great time to do that or beginning of the new year to look back and say, all right, for the past year, you and I have been talking every week about kind of which way things were zigging and zagging as the central bank, which is the main actor in markets, you know, was kind of going back and forth between its dual mandates like a double minded man. What are going to fight inflation and slow the economy? Oh, no, no, we need to fight the recession and cause more inflation back and forth to zoom out and say, OK, what was the trend of the year? And the trend of the year was inflation became undeniable. The Fed, when it was printing all that money, said we're not going to get inflation. And we did. And then they said, well, it's not going to get very high, but it did.

And then they said, well, it's going to be transient, which is a fancy way of saying it's not going to be around for long. But it did stay around for long. So last year is the year that that became undeniable. And the Fed finally got serious about it. And they started contracting the money supply, intentionally slowing down the economy, because in their world view, growth causes inflation rather than their own debasement of the currency, because I guess it's better, easier to blame somebody else than yourself.

And so this is the year where the Fed kept contracting the economy. It kept selling assets, pulling money out of markets, and that gave us a really bad year for markets. But just looking at markets being down in general doesn't tell us the whole story. You have to look at which markets are down. Right. So if growth sensitive markets are down more than non growth sensitive, like, for instance, you know, if you're afraid of the economy, you're probably not going to buy a boat.

I mean, you might or, you know, expensive jewelry. Right. So consumer cyclicals and consumer discretionary, those went down a lot more than the companies that sell toothpaste or baby powder. Right. Or toilet paper.

You're probably not going to forego toilet paper, but you might forego an expensive vacation. So that indicated that markets were registering this signal that growth is slowing down. So pretty much across the board, everything growth sensitive did more poorly than things that were recession hedges, things that don't go down as much. And so the market favored recession hedges, inflation hedges and mutual, excuse me, municipal bonds are non taxable.

So those are tax shelters. So it favored things that protect you from recession, from inflation and from higher taxes. And when that happens, that means that the market, which is all of us combined making decisions, believe that growth is going to be lower. Inflation is going to stay around and we're going to get tax hikes.

And they're probably right. Yeah, that's probably what we might expect as we move into a new year. So give us your take then on where we go from here in light of everything you just said. Well, where we go from here is we don't really go from here in terms of making I wouldn't make investment changes based on this.

And I want to make clear that when we talk about these things, what we're really doing is we're helping people process news through a biblical lens. But sometimes people, when they follow politics really closely or markets really closely, what they do is they start zigzagging around. They become unstable.

You know, they become double minded, fear, greed, fear, greed, as opposed to just sticking to your plan. So when I'm talking about these things, what I'm really saying is, look, there's a design to the universe, including to the markets and economy. And so when we follow God's teachings, markets reflect that and do well. When we violate those teachings, markets reflect that and do poorly over the long run. So it's almost more doxology.

It's worship to see God's plan, how God's plan works when we follow it and how God's plan kind of works when we don't follow it and that things don't go well. But I don't think I wouldn't change the portfolio based on this. I think you have a plan and you stick to it with your financial adviser. So sometimes when people do this, they say, what should I change?

We shouldn't change anything. If you're following basic principles when it comes to investing and you have a day of discipline and you have a plan and you have an adviser who follows those principles, do what the adviser says. That's what they're there for. But yes, follow the news. But don't get jerked around by the news because the news's job is not to inform you. The news's job is to emotionally manipulate you.

Don't let that affect your financial decisions. Well said, Jerry. Well, I'm excited for you to join us each week as we take a moment to say, let's look at the created order. Let's look at God's handiwork through the news of the day so that we can be informed and educated when we show up on our adviser's office. But to your point, it's not about making quick turns left or right. It's about understanding the times and sticking with our long-range plans, making minor tweaks along the way, right?

The sons of Issachar who understood the times and knew what Israel ought to do. That's right. That's what that's about. When I said the news, I didn't mean you. I know that you're about biblical wisdom, but pretty much anything else on cable, it's about plucking your emotions. So come here and get biblical wisdom. Well said. Thank you, Jerry. Well, great to have that look back, and we'll look forward to having you back next week as we plow into 2003 and see what God has for us in the days ahead. God bless you, my friend.

God bless you. All right, Jerry Boyer, president of Boyer Research and our resident economist who joins us each Friday on this broadcast. All right, to the phones we go here in our final moments of the broadcast today. We'll take as many questions as we can get to. Kansas City, Evie, thank you for your question today.

Go right ahead. Thank you so much, Rob, and I want to thank you for your program. I listen to you regularly and really appreciate the information that you've given.

Thank you. I am going to be—I'm selling some land. I'm going to be getting a substantial sum of money for it.

I'm 75. I only have about $15,000 right now in savings because I used up all of my 401K taking care of my mom, the keeper at home. So I am still working right now, but I hope to retire soon after I sell this land. Questions for you are, number one, it is a substantial sum of money. Of course, I'm going to be tithing it. Am I better off to create an annuity, not paying to me but paying to the church where the money continues then to keep going to the church? And how can I best—I certainly expect to pay my taxes, plan to pay my taxes, but I would prefer to not have to overpay.

Yes, of course. We don't want you to pay anymore, and I love that you want to be generous with a portion of this. If you don't mind me asking, Evie, what do you expect in the way of proceeds? It's going to be close, I think, to $500,000.

Okay, yeah, so a significant sum of money, no doubt. Have you already sold the property? No, we have an agreement we haven't closed, but we expect to close. I had already sold some property a couple of years ago to this same person who is now buying the rest at the farm. I'm keeping my home and several acres around it. I don't have a mortgage. I do have debt right now that I have basically been covering through my work. I'm trying to get that down. So one of the things that I will immediately do with a portion of the money is pay off the debt, so I'm 100% debt-free.

Yeah, very good. Are you going to pay quite a bit in capital gains, do you know? I'm concerned that I will have to pay a lot in capital gain, yes, because if I were selling the house with it, it would be my primary residence, but I'm not.

I'm just selling acreage. Well, the reason I ask, Evie, is you certainly could consider a charitable gift annuity, but one other tool that you may not have thought of, it would require you to transfer a portion of this property into what's called a donor-advised fund before the sale, but essentially you'd give it away to your donor-advised fund before you sell it. That's just a name for a fund that would basically be the recipient of your charitable gifts. In this case, it would take it in in the form of a percentage of this real estate, and then when it's sold, the portion that was given to your donor-advised fund would then be converted to cash, and then you could give it away as you saw fit, but that portion wouldn't be subject to capital gains tax, and so you would not pay any tax on that, which would mean more money to be given away to the kingdom. Does that sound like something you might be interested in? I think so, because I think the buyer would have to be party to this, right, because they would be paying the donor-advised fund as well as me. Yeah, well, at closing, they would just show up at the closing table and basically fund the deal the same way they would have previously.

It's just that a portion of the property is owned by your donor-advised fund, so that portion of it, the proceeds are going to go to what's called your DAF, and the other portion will come directly to you, but you could only do the percentage that's equal to what you were going to be giving away anyway. Stay on the line. I'll give you some more information on how you can at least check that out.

Just understand if it's something that makes sense. We appreciate your call today. Faith and Finance Live is a partnership between Moody Radio and FaithFi. Thank you to Dan, Charles, Amy, and Jim. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye-bye.