From a purely financial perspective, these years I’ve taken off work probably look like one of the stupidest decisions a person could make: take a sizeable nest egg in the low hundred thousands and quit your job for almost 4+ years, foregoing an almost six figure income the whole time, while studying for an industry that is largely oversaturated and only pays marginally better than your previous industry.
Among my finance bro friends and acquaintances, this is what losing with money looks like.
However, this has actually been answering a calling on easy mode. I’ve heard stories of people walking away from very lucrative tech jobs to take their families to dangerous, remote island nations to be missionaries. I’ve had friends who took several years off work with no savings and only a tiny stipend. I’ve seen others whose lives have been torn apart by circumstances outside of their control (and maybe a few others by circumstances inside their control). I don’t think anybody really escapes the chaos of uncertainty, but we do have a God who provides a light in the dark.
And see, that’s what gets me. The world financial system is built on fear and paranoia. It is also built on ego. I’ve lost track of how many – predominantly young – men do something that earns them good money, just for them to take that and think they must be the smartest people in the world. I’ve seen more than a few guys try to call shots on the future when it comes to things like house prices and cryptocurrency valuations, or even various stocks (or fucking gold *eye roll*).
The highest returns often come with the greatest of risks, and there is no shortage of ego-prone dudes who really should seek lower returns because it is the only thing keeping them from becoming monsters.
And it’s worth understanding the tax code of your appropriate country, but the tax code alone won’t make you rich. Be very cautious taking financial advice from people who are not subject to the same financial risks that you are.
It kind of kills me, because if I had kept working, I could probably have accumulated well over half a million by now (shed a tear for me if you get the chance). And yet, I haven’t found any verse in the Bible saying that my purpose in life is to hoard money. Maybe it’s in there somewhere, though, maybe I just have to keep looking. /s
(and that’s nothing against having money, there is just nothing about that being our purpose)
All of these finance books, all of these self-help lift-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps books, all of these online pep-talks about building wealth…are full of shit. And there’s nothing wrong about understanding different strategies and all that, but man, if you think it’s your purpose to gain-maxx your life, you’re already going down the wrong road.
Over the years I’ve tried to sus out what it means to be good with your money. There is no easy answer. It is all super complicated. I like to think I’ve hit upon some key findings (1. always observe the true cost of things, some of which have expenses well beyond their sticker price, 2. having an excess of things that do not actively produce value in your life is a pretty good sign that your money habits are not working in your favor, 3. there are 4 general ways in which your financial position affects your relationship to potential homeownership, and you ignore these to your peril, etc.). But none of this can tell you what God has specifically called you to in your life.
One thing I would never have learned (the easy way) without going down this road, was how to let go. In the past, if I had had a $2k emergency expense, I would likely have felt extremely anxious over it, hilarious since that would have been a fraction of what I otherwise owned. Which is kind of pathetic, but also very human. With each (rather comfortable) month costing me roughly $3k, I think I’m long past that. [bare bones I could probably do closer to $2k, but every month is always something: vehicle registration, car insurance, taxes, a few car parts, flour mill, built-up need for normal everyday stuff, etc. and holy shit is it easy to drop $100 these days]. It hasn’t necessarily been easy, but again, I haven’t been called to quit a lucrative job to take a family to a remote island nation, or been asked to trust to the extreme, just a “Hey, here’s this calling. I’ll give you 3 dozen dreams pointing you in the right direction, which you will actually enjoy, and all you have to do is use your previously saved money, put in the time and effort to study, and wait to find out what comes next”. Yeah, ultimately pretty easy on the scale of weird things God can call people to do. I still have some money, too, though yes, I’m hoping I can at least keep some of it going into a new job, once I get one.
I’ve tried to write more for this blog, but I’m often out of stuff to say, or I’ll start writing something only to realize it’s crap or there isn’t enough to really make a full post about it. I feel good about the things I’ve tried to figure out, but I think there’s an entirely new dimension when you start looking at how specifically God wants you to use your money and/or resources. Again, the danger of some of these secular books on investing and money management is that they often approach things from the perspective that God either doesn’t exist or he simply doesn’t factor into any of the relevant subjects, but he absolutely does.
However, I once read a Christian book on money management and it was actually pretty well done, but it kind of slipped into this realm of “we give as much as we can”, which is fine if that’s what you’re called to, but it felt as if it came from the spirit of Liberalism, as in, “giving makes us good people, therefore we give as much as we can”. But of course, theologically, giving doesn’t make you a good person. It was maybe a little narrow-minded in that giving money can be very different from giving resources, and there are times when you need to cut back on your giving to invest in other things, so to speak. There are also things to be said about actually relying on a community: due to pride, sometimes it really is easier to give than to receive. You can see how this gets really complicated, really fast.
Anyway, there will likely be much more to say about this in future posts.
[It dawned on me after posting that the second to last paragraph could be controversial. There is a lot to say about it that I won’t include here, but one thought to add is that I can very easily see someone saying, “You’re a horrible person for using all that money to selfishly take time off; you should have given that money to the poor instead!” but that would have negated what God wanted me to do with the money: use it to buy time, during which I developed the skills that he wanted me to develop. Also, didn’t Judas ask something like that? Anyway. Whereas a huge flaw of the political Right is their tendency to be very stingy and have a peculiar hatred of the poor, the flaw of the political Left is to think that every ounce of human endeavor ought to exclusively be given to solving poverty, which they often think can be done with money alone. Both are wrong, on so many levels, but without the intention of getting overtly political, what I was trying to say is that people sometimes let their politics guide their financial decisions as a philosophical foundation, rather than getting into the supposed weeds of, “What is God specifically calling me to do, regardless of my philosophy about money?” In a lot of ways, ideology is the antithesis of connection to God, since it relies purely on abstractions, rather than the specific directions of a God speaking to us, and us being capable of hearing. But again, I think this is a huge subject, one worth mulling over well into the future]