This morning my girls scanned the newspaper ads. My five year old identified coupons and with great glee declared, “Mommy is going to love this ad, it has coupons!”
We’re definitely a coupon oriented family now. Its because it comes part and parcel with personal finance obsessions 
There’s a slight chance that you’ll watch the video and laugh. Or be jealous that the Estes Park area is beautiful - pay cash and go visit Estes Park, CO.
This podcast is about how credit cards are not a great choice for most people most of the time.
My wife and I were both approached by people in need in the same week. People who appeared to be genuinely in need instead of folks simply pan-handling to be lazy (which is a bit of a generalization, and I apologize). One of the things that we wrestle with this is that we want to be generous, we want to look for opportunities to help others, and we really like the idea of serving people as Christians. However, we’re paying off debt because as a moron (instead of a Christian) I allowed the family finances to get way out of whack. That being said, we’re considering pulling $40.00 aside from somewhere to setup someone else’s emergency fund. That is $20.00 for each of us to help others in an emergency.
We don’t anticipate tapping into it regularly, but the opportunity to serve is great, and sometimes we may have the ability to use our finances when others are in a teachable moment. Of course, in those same moments we need to remain teachable, but we’re glad to have learned to live on less than we make. What do you think? Would you create an OPEF category in your budget?
I’m reminded of Bob at ChristianPF and his story of compassion. God uses us, others needs are met, and we can learn something. That’s worth more than $20.00 to me.
If you want to be successful in life then there is one principle you must learn first: Learn principles. What makes a chef great? They know the principles of cooking and flavors and how they balance and then they can take unlikely ingredients and mesh them together into a signature dish. What makes an engineer great? They learn principles and then take those principles and apply them systematically to their work. What makes money managers great? They learn principles, apply them and keep their finances in order and grow their net worth.
Elementary school and primary school, and unfortunately some college classes tend to be about rote memorization. The best teachers I ever had were the ones who took the principles behind the things I was memorizing and taught me those instead of merely cramming data into my head. As a web developer/programmer I have memorized a lot of coding things, but I didn’t begin to think as a programmer until I learned the principles behind smart programming (sometimes called ‘patterns’). My finances were a mess even though I had heard good personal finance bits and pieces, but it wasn’t until I learned the principles behind sound personal finance (influenced by blogs like the Simple Dollar, NCN, and Dave Ramsey’s “The Total Money Makeover“).
Smart, successful people will be able to think with abstraction. They’ll be able to identify the principles that make up great process and then merge those principles, where they apply, to their different areas of expertise. Recently I read a book called, “Critical Chain” and it had lots of good principles in it. It is how I run my budget (which I posted a bit about before, but I’m going to write a further detailed article later), but it wasn’t how I ran my budget before reading it because I hadn’t clearly seen the principle. Once I learned it, I was able to see how it could apply to other areas in my life.
Learn principles, learn how they can be applied across broad scopes of your life, and then forget about rote memorization. It could save you thousands of dollars, millions of dollars, your life, or a few minutes time here and there, but get past the short term rules and start thinking bigger.
Genesis three is the most intense of the chapters of Genesis except for the other 49 chapters in the book. It is intense, it has an impact on all of humanity, and its also the earliest prophecy of a Messiah [Genesis 3:15]. This chapter brings out the problem of greed. Greed is the downfall of slow, methodical personal finance. It destroys a paced approach by eroding away at the planned approach of acquisition and instead offers you the easy out: I want it now.When the serpent, being used by Satan, approaches Eve he pulls the deceptive maneuver that is not directly lying, but instead a slippery slope of questioning authority.
“Did God really say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?”
Are you really sure you want to wait for that large screen TV, new car, new house or Apple Mac Book Air [I had to put in the Apple reference - fruit jokes fit into this chapter well]? Its not that the question is a straight out lie, its mostly that it appeals to the emotions and disengages the brain. Eve falls for the fruit because of the plying of the serpent. She pulls the fruit from the tree because it looks good for food and because she is uncertain of God’s actual response. Adam, standing with Eve, buys in, too and bites the big one.Debt based purchasing is less than ideal. Greed based purchasing through debt is even more catastrophic. Instead, as a steward of God’s money the believer should evaluate the cost, evaluate the consequence, and evaluate the usefulness of the purchase. The consequences of the bad choice of Adam & Eve eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil have impacted all of humanity [That's called federal headship, and it took Christ's starting a new federal headship to break the relationship of mankind to sin]. Eve was the first woman to eat her family out of house and home, but there have been others. Others who have gambled, spent, destroyed or otherwise damaged their financial life due to bad choices and others watched by glibly, but without the confidence to correct the problem and intervene.The consequences for Adam & Eve were multiple, but you and I work for financial stability as a direct result of his failure to lead his wife into purity! The dominion that Adam had over creation was removed from him, the ground became difficult to work with in producing fruit (Adam did work before the fall, he tended the garden, but the labor was easy), and the cost of reproduction was significant and comes with pain now. Of course death (which means separation from God, and not annihilation) is also a consequence of this poor choice and greedy maneuver.As we make choices with our finances the long term impact should be in our scope of evaluation. We know that money doesn’t transfer to our heavenly life, but we need to make sure that our heavenly life (Colossians 3:1-3) is impacting our transfers and transactions here on earth.
Genesis Chapter 2 talks about God’s order. God’s system is in place and there is very little left to Adam other maintaining the garden (Gen. 2:15) and than naming the animals (Gen. 2:19). God knows that no suitable helper is available for Adam in the animals, but shows Adam this through the animal naming process. Adam can identify the male and female of the various animals, but there is a distinct hole where his helper is lacking. Genesis 2 ends with the fulfillment of that need as well as a look into man’s need for a completing partner (some of the best material I’ve heard on the subject can be listened to in MP3 format here check out lessons 6, 7, and 8).I’ve written before and even had guest posts about the relationship of a man and wife and how that impacts personal finance (see: 10 Ways to Use Personal Finance to Strengthen A Marriage, A Deeper Look At Marriage and Finance Issues: Unity, A Deeper Look At Marriage and Finance Issues: Priorities, and Ten Tips To Prepare for Getting Married). God had set Adam in charge of cultivating, or growing, the things in the garden. Adam’s dominion was the garden, his job (for lack of a better word) was working for God and his goal was cultivation. There were no weeds and the vegetation was fruitful. Adam did not value the things of the garden in chapter three, but we’re not there yet, so we’ll save that for next week.What we do see in Adam’s tasks in chapter two are clearly some details of valuation: God gives Adam the task of naming the animals and evaluating them. Adam orders the animals with God’s help. Vocabulary is created on the fly, the animals are given order. Imagine, if you will, that when Eve is created she’s a blank slate (though it is clear she has intellect) , and she gets introduced to Adam and she learns Adam has named all of the animals. That would be quite a thing to explain and go over! Adam’s job as a gardener is given some time to be interrupted and he is a namer of beasts. To take dominion over something, you have to have names, you have to have valuations of things.Consider your own life: you have names for places, names for things, names for certain jobs, names for actions. Your world comes with a sense of order, and yet as humans we desire to be creative and create new things to name to show our dominion over them. We really do wish to be like Adam. Our finances are really a valuable lesson in learning about dominion because with our finances we can bring things into our household, we can send things away from our household, and we can gain wealth and increase the potential of our dominion by virtue of buying more property, more stuff, or newer things to replace the things we have that are of better quality.God sets up order in the universe, puts Adam in charge of the Earth, and then Adam gets to participate in further defining a small part of that order. What a dramatic role that was! As you contemplate your ordering of things, consider your finances, consider your possessions, and consider how you can respect God’s ordering of things as you go about your life. It is pretty cool stuff to be given the privilege of ordering things - don’t take it for granted.
In this third (and long delayed installment) of the Watch My Money Maker Podcast we’ll cover the issues of your nest egg. The end is a super sped up version of a song my band played in high school
The Nest Egg File is 12 MB and requires iTunes or Quicktime.
Name: NPR’s The Color of Money
Host(s): Michelle Singletary, various interviewers of Michelle
Podcast file type(s): MP3
Average File Size(s): 2.1MB
Average Length: 4 minutes
Format (single concept, multiple concepts, multi-format): Single Concept
Production Quality (excellent, good, acceptable, bad): Excellent
Type of Content (practical content, philosophical content): practical content
Site URL: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?columnId=4465062
Feed URL(s): http://www.npr.org/rss/rss.php?id=4465062
Subjective Review:
I really dig this podcast. Its long enough to feel like more than a sound bite, but short enough to not feel like a commitment of a half hour or more. Michelle’s passion for personal finance and dynamic in her voice make the podcast engaging. The content is relatively practical for many home owning people, and if you have older parents or are considering getting older (I kid), the podcasts I listened to specifically would be useful. This one is going to remain subscribed to.
Context: I listened to four podcast episodes on 1/31/2008: 1/8/2008, 1/15/2008, 1/22/2008, 1/29/2008.
I have been tracking statistics with Google Analytics for the last six months now (August 2007 through the present) and have some interesting data to share:
| homepage | 1,489 | 28.92% |
|
ten things to do with your economic stimulus check that the government won’t like |
505 | 9.81% |
|
Ten Tips to Prepare for Getting Married |
298 | 5.79% |
You’ll note that several of those posts are from the last month, and a few are older. I find it interesting that the economic stimulus check has gotten nearly 10% of all hits on this site for all time. The credit rate reduction rally is still getting hits, but they’ve been trickling in for months.
Top search terms were
I can also say that at least one person from all fifty United States and the District of Columbia hit this site. As if this site represented the nation’s interest in personal finance you’d find that Colorado (where I have family and friends who read this blog) beat out California, Texas and New York for first place in readers… and Vermont had one person find this site on accident 
I need another guest poster for this month if anyone is available to do so. I’ll gladly write a post in return, last month’s post exchange with Brooke at the FrugalDollar.com was a success and I really enjoyed her writing. Please send a message to randy@watchmymoneymaker.com if you’re interested.
Name: Money Minute
Host(s): Lindsay Davis, Betsy Stark, others
podcast file type(s): MP3
Average File Size(s): 460kb
Average Length: one minute, eight seconds
Format (single concept, multiple concepts, multi-format): Single Concept
Production Quality (excellent, good, acceptable, bad): good
Type of Content (practical content, philosophical content): mixed
Site URL: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/
Feed URL(s): http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=85744881 [again, ABC's entire podcasting section makes no mention of this, so this link works for iTunes only]
Subjective Review:
I hate it when news sources create ‘practical advice’. It just falls short and ends up being sensationalist. What I really want is practical advice and don’t wrap it in ‘end of the world’ sound bites. I listened to these four short podcast bits and am determined to keep moving on to find other podcasts worth my time and your time. This one just lacks content quality. There is some good advice in this podcast, but you have to put on your rubber boots, rain slicker, and heavy gloves to battle the acid rain of generalizations and extreme statements that come with this little podcast. I would not recommend it for the average person.
Context: I listened to the following dated podcasts on 1/30/2008: 1/24/2008, 1/25/2008, 1/28/2008, 1/29/2008.
