NRB Chronicals 2022 - Wise Women Managing Money

Ever felt like you were born in the wrong decade?

Or maybe it was the wrong dimension altogether. If you can relate, welcome home. We're Emily Estefan and Gemini Hernandez, your resident weirdos, artists of all trades, and multicultural couple. And this is your official invitation to join us on our new planet, I mean podcast, called In Our Own World. We'll navigate conversations about anything under the stars and maybe even pick up a few passengers along the way.

Listen to In Our Own World on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Coca-Cola. There's magic when we eat together. Well, it's always just a pleasure above pleasure to be here at the NRB, and this is like NRB Chronicles 2022. I hardly believe that we're back here again, but I get to often see friends and see how God continues to grow their ministries and grow their influence, especially those that seem to just want to serve in unique niches of people that need help, and just for the sense of serving. And that's what I get a sense always from my friend Miriam Neff, who I've known for years and years.

He's a Christian car guy, has been ministering to widows for years, but then she brought in her daughter Valerie, and they've been on this, wise women managing money. And so now you've written a book. We have. It's been a great adventure together. And so, Valerie, from your perspective, maybe we'll just start with one of my fun questions. Like, man, there's a chapter in this book, like you're thinking, I can hardly wait till they read this. And so, like, without, you know, making it so they don't ever want to read the book, but by nonetheless, I mean, how cool is it that God's given you insight to help folks, or maybe you need to talk about who you're helping?

Yeah. So, my mom has had a widow's ministry for 14 years. And so when she would speak with a lot of these ladies, right on the heels of grief would come financial issues.

Questions about, boy, I never knew we were $80,000 in debt, or boy, I'm half owner of a manufacturing facility now. Women who are kind of being thrown into doing the finances, men who are being thrown into doing the finances. Many have been doing it over a lifetime, but some are just suddenly thrown in.

And this would happen with ladies that are widows, or maybe have been divorced, or maybe they're single and just are starting out. So, they're maybe a little bit intimidated by the financial world. But what we really want to see is for them to step into it with biblical confidence that they can be good stewards.

And my favorite chapter, so spoiler alert, but it's really going to be at the end, end game is giving to kingdom purposes, is stepping into the service that the Lord has for us with confidence. And we can do that once we kind of get our arms around, well, we need to have the lights on and have water and food and those kinds of things. And we're going to need to manage money well to do that and to really enable us to come from a position of strength into service.

You just gave me a great idea. My daughter, Mariah, graduates this spring from Sanford University. She's going to be a teacher, but she wants to work in a real low-income position because that's the kind of work she wants to do, right? And she's working at a Christian school, right? And so, but immediately she's like, Dad, how am I going to make it? We want to talk to her. And the third chapter, Val gave you the bookend at the end. We talk about, first of all, it's all God's entrusted you.

It's not ours. But now she was going to love the third chapter when it talks about how you create your spending plan. And she wants to do that early and young. Not everyone does that. Even, I mean, Bob and I did finances together, probably a little bit at the first, but more so all the time. But I didn't do anything in investing until after he went to heaven. So it's kind of like, I'm the vintage person here, and Valerie's the lawyer, and the CFP, and next generation. And we want women to early on get into the recognition that God's on loan. And he wants us to be a Matthew 25 Stewart. He wants us to grow it. So your daughter is going to be uniquely positioned to value every daughter.

I'm proud of you, Dad. Yeah. And don't tell her it. We'll give her a free book, and you can give that to her for a grad gift.

She can come right out of the gate. I'm going to get a tour before that because, you know, in almost every phone call, you know how it is when I guess you're in college, and life is never really coming at you. Mom and Dad have helped you through this, that, and the other. And all of a sudden you're like, oh, I'm going to have to pay my own insurance.

And oh, I'm going to have to pay this bill and that bill that I've never paid before. And I can just sense this panic in her. And so I really want to give it to her, like, soon, like the next time I see her. So because she, we live in Winston-Salem, where I actually live in Stokesville, North Carolina.

She's in Birmingham. So, but fun. And I know how critical it is because, like, oh my goodness, if I'd have known then what I know now about savings, and I have friends, you know, that did from the time that they were, like, you know, when they got out of college and began that program. But it's never too late, is it? Right. And we have gained a lot of biblical wisdom over the years. We have heroes in this area. We've got Larry Burkett.

We've got Ron Blue. We wanted to write from a women's perspective for women, kind of standing on their shoulders. They've given a lot of biblical truth over the years. And we just wanted to take some of that and say, and here's some of the specific interests that women might have around it, or some of the studies are showing us a lot of times it's a lack of confidence.

They have all the ability. But even in your daughter's situation, and with many women, we would say, learning early on, when you want to go into ministry or do something, we always make decisions. Money can go over here or over there. So she'll give up some things to gain some things. And in our faith, we know all about that, right? We give up a little to gain the great prize, right? The pearl of great price.