Strapped – Act Your Wage*
Sycamore Creek Church
November 17/18, 2013
Tom Arthur

Peace friends!

Anyone feeling strapped these days?  Too little money?  Too much debt?  The proverbs say:

Just as the rich rule the poor,
so the borrower is servant to the lender.
~Proverbs 22:7 NLT

The word “servant” is really too weak of a translation here.  It’s more like “slave” or “in bondage” or “strapped.”  Jesus says that you can’t serve both God and money.  What we found out last week is that we don’t serve money.  We serve God.  Money serves us as we serve God.

Here’s an Old School Rule: If you didn’t have the money to buy something you wanted, you weren’t allowed to buy it.  Before the great depression, 2% of houses had a mortgage on them.  Forty years later only 2% don’t have a mortgage.  Then in the last decade we’ve had quite a ride when it comes to houses and mortgages, haven’t we?  According to the New York Times, “More than a third of homeowners who received loan modifications under TARP’s mortgage modification program have since stopped paying” (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/business/new-defaults-trouble-a-mortgage-program.html).  Defaulting on your mortgage is becoming more and more common.

There’s a certain mindset of entitlement in our culture.  We expect that when we graduate college at 22, we deserve the same lifestyle of our parents.  So we keep driving cars like our parents.  We keep eating out like our parents.  We try to live in houses like our parents.  We expect instant middle class status without the hard work of getting there.

We are a generation of pretenders and posers.  There’s a scene in the movie Cinderella Man where Mae Braddock, the wife of James Braddock, the Cinderella Man boxer, goes to see his manager, Joe Gould, who lives in a fancy expensive apartment building.  When she first knocks on the door, he’s home but doesn’t answer it.  She keeps knocking. She yells at him from outside his door, “Don’t hide in your fancy apartment, I want to talk to you.” He ignores her for a while but then finally lets her in. When she comes in, she sees that the apartment is almost empty. There’s a card table and some chairs. She says, “I didn’t know, I mean I thought that…” He says, “That’s the idea. Always keep your hands up.”  That’s how many of us are posing for the rest of the world, with our hands up hiding our real financial situation.  Unfortunately, many of us are using debt and credit cards to pose.

The proverbs say:

One man pretends to be rich, yet has nothing
~Proverbs 13:7 NIV

There are three kinds of people:

1. The Haves
2. The Have-Nots
3. The Have-Not-Paid-for-What-They’ve-Got

Today I want to look at three values essential to becoming unstrapped.  I want to give you some really practical advice for getting your financial house in order.

1. Embrace the Value of Self-control

How’s your self control these days?  How’s your self control when it comes to money?  The proverbs say:

Like a city breached, without walls,
is one who lacks self-control.
~Proverbs 25:28 NRSV

Without self control we’re like an ancient city without a wall, defenseless to attacks.  We’re vulnerable to debt and exorbitant interest of credit cards and pay day loans and pawn shops.  We’re like the little kid in the grocery line screaming, “I want it now!”  Except instead of getting the candy bar or the match box car, the financial stakes are bigger!

This is a generalization, and while it is not always true, I think it has some truth in it.  Women tend to nickel and dime and quarter their way into debt.  They buy shoes and belts to match the shoes and pay hundreds of dollars on hair cuts and dying (one survey found that money spent on hair added up to $50,000 over a lifetime! http://main.stylelist.com/2010/03/29/the-price-of-pretty-women-spend-50-000-on-hair-over-lifetime/).  Then there’s the nails to match it all.  Nickle.  Dime.  Quarter.  Dollar.  Five Dollars.  Ten Dollars.

Men on the other hand do the debt thing in one big purchase.  A new car.  $20,000.  A time share.  $10,000.   A boat.  $30,000.  An ATV.  $10,000.  A new flat screen TV, Blue-ray DVD player, surround sound, leather couch, wall mount, and upgrade of all old DVDs to Blue-ray.  $15,000.  Boom goes the dynamite!  And friends, you’re in debt.

What we need to do is show a little self control.  We need to practice saying, “No.”  Say it with me now:

Ladies – Do you really need to get your nails done twice a month? NO!
Men – Do you really need to play golf twice a month?  NO!
Do you really need a $4 cup of coffee each day? NO!
Do you really need your kid to have an iPhone 5abc-xyz?  NO!
Do you really need a brand new car?  NO!

Say NO! for a little while so we can say YES for the rest of our lives!

2. Embrace the Value of Sacrifice

Are you willing to make a sacrifice to attain something better?  The author of Hebrews says:

Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross…
Hebrews 12:2 NIV

So we’re to focus on Jesus who was willing to sacrifice his own life for something bigger.  Sacrifice means giving up something you love for something you love even more.  Give it up to gain.  Give up the belts to gain.  Give up the shoes to gain.  Give up the fancy hair and nails to gain.  Give up the new car to gain.  Give up the boat to gain.  Give up the fancy house in the fancy neighborhood to gain.  Give it up, sacrifice, to gain.

Let me give you just one example.  The average person eats out a lot!  If you brought your own lunch every day to work, brown-bagging it daily saves you $100,000 over a life time!  $100,000!

The other night a Kirby salesman came by the door around 8PM.  It was a college student.  He used a nice line on me to pull at my heart strings.  He said, “I just need one more demonstration to go home tonight.  You don’t have to buy anything.  Just let me show you it for about ten or fifteen minutes.”  The poor guy was obviously tired, and I let him in.  Then after way more than ten or fifteen minutes, some other guy came to the door and did the sales job.  I was getting really annoyed at this point.  I told him he had two minutes to make his pitch.  He gave me the price: $1600.  $1600 for a vacuum cleaner!  Now it was a nice machine.  It really was.  It was the Porsche of vacuum cleaners, and I have no doubt that you get what you pay for.  But I don’t have $1600 for a vacuum cleaner.  He said to me, “What’s keeping you from buying it today?  The down payment?  The monthly payment?  What?’’  I said, “The cost.  I’ll give you $100.”  That was the end of the conversation.  The salesman left my house while the poor college student was there another twenty minutes packing back up the Porsche of vacuum cleaners.

We’re all asking the wrong question.  We’re asking:   How much down?  Or how much each month?  What we really need to ask is what’s the real cost?

Let’s go back to our credit cards.  The average credit card balance is $14,517.  You wracked up that 18% debt on your credit card with a trip to Disney World, the surround sound system, the flat screen TV, video games, new clothes, shoes, etc.  Now you’ve got to pay back $14,517, assuming you don’t add any more debt to it!  If you pay $291 per month (the minimum payment) on $14,517 at 18% it will take 52 years to pay off the debt and you will have paid a total interest of $41,414 (http://www.federalreserve.gov/creditcardcalculator/Default.aspx)!  You’re paying almost three times what it cost you to buy that stuff just in interest alone!  But that’s not all its costing you.

Let’s say that instead of buying all that stuff you saved the money and invested it.  Many say that historically the stock market makes 10%.  I found data that showed a 50 year average stock market return at 9.2% (http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/perfi/columnist/krantz/story/2011-10-17/rate-of-return-for-stocks/50807868/1).  But let’s use some real investment numbers.  When Sarah had a best seller and she made more than I did that year, we invested the maximum we could that year in a Roth IRA in a socially screen mutual fund called Pax World Growth.  We like the socially screened aspect of the fund because it means we’re not making money off of companies that pollute or discriminate or make money off of weapons, etc.  You get the point.  This year that fund is making 17%.  It’s a good year.  Since inception in the 1970s, Pax World Growth has made 8.46%.  We also opened a 529 college savings plan for Micah.  We decided to go again with a socially screened fund through the DC College Savings Plan.  Year to date that fund is making 22.44%.  Since inception in the 80s it’s making 7.45%.

Back to the credit card debt of $14,517.  If you didn’t spend that money and instead saved it.  What would happen?  Let’s take the lower of our investment returns and assume a 7% return on your investment.  If you saved $14,517 at 7% for 52 years (the same time it would take you to pay it off with minimum payments), you’d end up making $489,590.  But let’s take this a step further.  Let’s add the minimum payment of $291/month to your investment.  So every month you’re also putting $291 into that same investment account.  At the end of 52 years, you’d have $2,236,395 in the bank!

(These calculations come from Dave Ramsey’s website: (http://www.daveramsey.com/article/investing-calculator/lifeandmoney_investing/#/entry_form)

So what’s the real cost of going into debt on your credit card for $14,517?  The real cost is over $2,000,000!  How much of a difference could you make in this world if you had money like that?

3. Embrace the Value of Planning

Most of us fly by the seat of our pants when it comes to money.  Going back to the wisdom of the Proverbs:

The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty.
~Proverbs 21:5 NIV

You can wander into debt but you can’t wander out.  There are three basic planning tools you need to get unstrapped.

1. A Budget: Budgeting is fairly simple.  It just takes some time and effort and focus.  If you don’t know how to budget, sign up for a FinancialPeaceUniversity class in the area.  There are eleven Churches in the Lansing Region that are hosting them right now.  I also want to take budgeting a step further.  In our culture, finances are taboo.  What you make and how you spend it are “private.”  That may be our culture’s value, but it’s not a Jesus value.  Share your budget with someone else outside of your family.  Ask them for input on what you make and what you spend.  Ask someone who manages their money better than you manage yours.
2. An emergency fund:  Save $1000 for emergencies.  You’ll never get ahead if you are always in crisis mode.  You’ve got to have a cushion so that when you hit a crisis, it doesn’t sink you.  To build this emergency fund you may need to sell stuff, go heavy on the coupons, or even get an extra job.  Many of you know that over the last two and a half years Tabitha Martin has been living with us getting back on her feet after being at Maplewood.  She’s just moved out into her own place this past week.  I asked her if I could share what’s happened to her recently.  Over the two and a half years she’s lived with us she’s saved $3000.  About two weeks ago she was in a car accident and totaled her car.  Because she had $3000 on hand, she was able to buy a car with cash.  But she didn’t spend it all because she also needed money for a down payment on her apartment and a future emergency fund.  So in the last week she bought a new car, made a down payment on her apartment, and retained an emergency fund for the future all because she had a big emergency fund to begin with.  If she hadn’t had it, she’d be back to square one.  But because she had the emergency fund, she was able to continue moving forward with her life.  Thank you God!
3. The debt snowball: The basic idea here is to pay off your smallest debt first.  Then take the payment of that debt and add it to your payment on your second smallest debt.  Once you’ve got those two debts paid off, then add those two payments to your third smallest debt.  And on and on until you’ve snowballed your way out of debt.  To get a really great picture of what this can look like on the ground, check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyF4mZFtfZs.

So why are you talking about this in church?  Because nobody teaches you this in school.  And unfortunately, most of our parents don’t talk about it.  Maybe they don’t talk about it because they’re so deep in debt and strapped that they don’t have any wisdom to share with their kids except, “Don’t do as I do.”  So we talk about money in the church because money is spiritual.  Money and things are the number one competitor with God for our hearts.  The Bible says more about money than just about anything else.

What do you think you do for the glory of God if you had no school loans?  If you had no car loans?  If you had no credit card debt?  If you had no home equity loans?  If you had no mortgage?  What kind of impact could make on this world?  How could you help bring the kingdom of God here on earth as it is in heaven?

God, help us have some self-control. Help us sacrifice something good for something better.  Help us live by a plan with our money so that our money can bring you glory and honor.  In Jesus’ name and by the power of your Spirit, amen!

*This sermon was adapted from a sermon by Craig Groeschel