Anyway, it's great to be able to spend this time. So we're going to break this into two parts. Okay, we're going to talk about God's part as it relates to our money, and then we're going to look at some practical financial principles that I think you'll find Valuable and then next week what we'll do is we'll look at our part and then some financial principles and then the final week We'll look at maybe a little bit about how the stock market works and some of the things that you might want to know in order to be able to grow your capital through chill retirement someday. Although I know none of you think about retirement, right? You're just thinking about getting started. You think about retirement. Okay, so we saw First Chronicles last week, right? With it, God's in charge of everything. Everything happens because of him. There's nothing that doesn't happen that he didn't cause, right? And so, God is the master of all things. And we can see that kind of with Job and Moses. We won't go into their stories exactly, but we know that Job lost everything, and yet he maintained his faith in God. You know, Satan had come to God and said, you know, I can turn this guy. I can make him go against you. And God said, yeah, have at him. Let's see what happens. And of course, Satan was unsuccessful. And then we see the same thing, a different thing, but we see the same thing with Moses losing everything because he left Egypt, you know, had to go off and then, you know, he got married, came back, you know, tried to, you know, build his, you know, the whole relationship with the Egyptians, so, or with the Israelites. So, but they knew who was in control. And there's four aspects of God as master of all things. God's ownership, God's control, God's provision, and God's possession. So we're gonna look at ownership and control tonight. So what is God's part in ownership? You know, God's first responsibility when he created things was his ownership of everything, and he delegated that to who? Who did he delegate that to? Adam and Eve. And of course, they lost that rife, you know, when Satan tempted Eve and said, did God really say? You know, and that's one of those wonderful verses in the Bible that you ought to remember because almost every time people stray from God, it's usually because they got tricked into believing that God did not really say that, when in fact he did. So in Deuteronomy 10, the Lord your God belongs to heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it. So did we leave anything out? Kind of everything, right? In Psalm 24, it says, The earth is the Lord's, everything in it, the world, and all who live in it. Again, we see it repeated. Usually, if the Bible says one thing, you want to take it seriously. If it says it a couple of times, you want to really take it seriously. So, scripture reveals God's sovereign domain. Here's Leviticus twenty-five twenty-three. The land must not be sold permanently because the land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants. So, the the land of Israel, you know, belong to the lord and it was just kind of passed down by generations by bloodline. That guy chewed it. The silver is mine. The gold is mine declares the lord almighty. So, the lord is the still has it, right? So, when we think of the possessions that we have, you know, and you can probably think of the possessions that you have. Are they yours or are they on loan to you? And if they're on loan to you, how do we, how do you want somebody to take care of your things when you loan it to them? If you even do loan it to them, right? But if you do, you kinda want it back like you gave it to him, right? Thank god it's the same one. So the Lord holds everything together by his power. And the key is turning over the ownership of everything to God and recognizing and accepting the fact that you don't own it. So again, it's a mindset. And when you have that mindset, that it's God's, you, act differently, you live differently, you see things differently. When it's yours, how do you do it? It's mine, selfish, control, keep it away from people. There's all sorts of behaviors that go along with that. But when it's God's, you can be generous because God gave it to you to give to others in many cases. So ownership or lordship, true believers and followers of Christ must transfer everything over to him. So it's a volitional decision. We actually make that consciously, that decision consciously. We want God to know that we know it's his. And so that can be done through prayer, it can be done through actions and prayer. I mean, there's all sorts of ways to live your life that way. Luke 14, 33 says, in the same way, any of you who does not give up everything, he cannot be my disciple. So that seems pretty clear to, you know, it's sort of the story of the rich man, right? Well, what was the story of the rich man? You know, he'd done all these things, he had this long resume of wonderful good deeds, and what did Jesus say? You know, sell everything and follow me, and what'd the rich man do? Remember? He walked away because he couldn't believe he had to do that. So sometimes God asks us to give up our dearest possessions. Not because he wants to hurt you, but because he wants to see the extent to which you're really committed to him owning everything. And what I've found through the years is that even if I give it up over here, he gives it back to me over here. It's just we can't see the timeline. So what about Abraham and Isaac? You know, here's Abraham. He was given that precious son, finally, that was going to be his heir. And what did God tell him to do? God told him, take him up to Mount Moriah, put him on the rock, on the alder, and I want you to slay him. And what did Abraham do? He was obedient. And even though it was his dearest son, He couldn't believe God was asking him to do that. He went ahead and he did everything that God said, and then right at the last minute, what did God do? He stopped him. And sometimes it's just that volitional willingness to do it is where God takes us. It doesn't necessarily mean it's going to happen, but you can't plan on it, right? So, then God said, take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there. There's a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I will tell you about. By the way, anybody know about Mount Moriah, where that is. That's where they built the temple. That became the Temple Mount, ultimately, with Israel. So Abraham obeyed, demonstrated, and he was willing to give up his dearest possession, God was fond of him. Genesis 22, 12, do not lay a hand on that boy. Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear the Lord. That's what God wants. God wants to know that you fear the Lord because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son. And that seems maybe antithetical to the way we would think about living our life. But the fact of the matter is, you know, that it's that relationship with God, that submission, that pure trust that we give to God, that God wants from us. And that's not something necessarily that's gonna happen instantaneously, it's probably something that will occur over a period of time, but, you know, that's where sanctification comes in. So the Lord's ownership influences how we care for our possessions. We take care of our possessions because they belong to the Lord. Let's look at contentment real quickly here. Accepting the Lord's ownership creates contentment. Now you might say, how does that happen? What does contentment mean? Well, if I don't have to take total and complete responsibility for what God's doing because God is sovereign over all things, I don't have to be agitated. I don't have to live my life in anxiety. I can trust in the Lord. I can be content in the Lord because I know the Lord will take care of me. You know, what did Paul say? He said, I learned to what? To be content. So, it wasn't something that came instantaneously. It wasn't something that was ingrained in his DNA. He learned to be content. We can learn to be content. But learning to be content is understanding fully and unequivocally the sovereignty of God. So, since you don't own a single possession, How should you respond to your circumstances? What's your attitude when something you own, for instance, is damaged? Do you get really angry, or do you just do your best with it, maybe try and fix it? Maybe you end up giving it away the most. God is the God of all things, including disasters and devastating events. That comes as a shock to some people to think that you know, these tremendous hurricanes that we see and earthquakes and what have you, the damage that comes out of it, that that's under God's purview. But if he's the God of everything, it has to be true. So we must fully praise him for being the God of our life. And you know, some of you may know that we lost our oldest daughter in 2016. This was a verse that we lived on during that day. We know that in all things God works for good to those who love him and have been called according to his purpose. So if you've been called to his purpose, what do we trust? We trust that God is going to work all things together for good. That's one of those anchor verses in the Bible that we just cling to. So, the Lord does allow difficult events to occur in our life for three reasons. One is to accomplish whatever intentions he may have that we can't possibly see, to develop our character, and to teach us through on-the-job training, OJT, on-the-job training. accomplish his intention, his intentions, you may recall the story of Joseph. I mean, look at all the things that happened to Joseph. He came out there with his coat in many colors, right? He got thrown into the pit and they were sold to the gypsies. He was taken, you know, to Egypt. You know, he became the servant for Apocrypha. You know, he was then thrown into jail because he was falsely accused and then he ultimately ended up doing what? He ultimately rose up to be the second in control of all of Egypt. And who would have known that the reason for that was that his whole family would be saved from the famine and would be kept there and protected. And of course, then that led to captivity and then that led to the Red Sea and you got that whole story. But the point is that Joseph could not possibly comprehend why God had allowed that to happen to him. but eventually it became clear. And so sometimes you can't see God in real time. You know, sometimes you can only see God in retrospect. In fact, most of the time you can only see God in retrospect. But sometimes when you're in the heart of it, you can actually see Him in real time. God uses our circumstances to develop our character. So he develops it through refining fire. By trying times, we discover exactly how much we love God and how much we trust God. Like for instance, when I was mentioning my daughter to you, she had four children. Three of those four gave up on their relationship with God. And to this day, which is what, five years later, They still are struggling with their relationship with God because they didn't see God in that entire situation. Hopefully one day they'll come back. But if you allow your circumstances to impact your faith, then that may be part of the reason why God allowed it in the first place was to build you up and bring you back. So we see God's love when we watch him unfold his plan. Romans 5, 3, and 4 are critical verses to understand. So he says, you know, we are to rejoice in our sufferings because we know that suffering, and another rendition of that, which I think is the English Standard Version that we like, that God uses it, okay, to produce perseverance, perseverance, character, and character, hope. So the three things that come out of this, perseverance, character, and hope, and we are to rejoice in our circumstances, rejoice in our suffering. Now, that's not easy to do, and I wouldn't expect all of you to be really jumping up and down in joy, with joy for that. But the fact of the matter is, is that if God's sovereign, if God's in total control, if whatever's happening is causing anxiety and despair, depression, whatever it is, if we can turn to God and trust that He's using that, and that He has not abandoned us, then he's going to build perseverance. He's going to build our character and he's going to build hope. And sometimes it's the disciplines. Sometimes we just need to be straightened out a little bit. And so our loving father would not allow us to be undisciplined. That's what the word says. And so this is how we know he loves us. Hebrews 12. And you have forgotten there's a word of encouragement that addresses you as sons. My son, do not make light of the Lord's discipline. Do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those he hates, those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as his son. It's probably, you can kind of think back on your parents, and times maybe you got punished and you were thinking, Do they really love me? When in reality, what they were doing is they were training you and disciplining you as well as disciplining you. So you can gain great peace knowing your Heavenly Father controls every situation. All things do work together for good. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. So, what I'd like to do now is jump to some financial principles. But before we do that, any questions that anybody wants to, comments anybody wants to make on that? All right, speak now or forever. So, four major concerns that I see a lot with money is, you know, how much is gonna be paid in taxes, How do I have income security? What do I do about healthcare? What do I do about inflation? So, you know, these are money concerns that we have to think about and plan for as we live our lives. And there's four main sources of income. You know, there's government programs, for instance. You know, if you become disabled or social security or when you retire. Company retirement plans. They call them 401Ks, they used to call them pensions. Personal investments, money that you set aside and invest for the long run, and earned income. So there's five stages that we go through typically in our life. We start at birth, so how much money do we have when we're born, unless we happen to inherit from our grandparents or great-grandparents some foundation or something, right? Then we go through our teens. Again, you're just starting to work, you're learning how to make money and how to save it. Then you become young marrieds, start having children, how much money do you have then, right? Life's pretty tough at that point in time. And then you get to middle age and the kids start going to college, you gotta pay college education or not, trade school. And then you get to seniors. So seniors is about the time, between middle age and seniors is about the time you can really start to save money, unfortunately. and I'll show you why, I say unfortunately, in a minute. And then you get to old age, you know, and then obviously life is eventually over. And heaven, we hope, for all of us. So, you know, this is a progression. This is just the life cycle. And so it's in that life cycle that we have to learn how to manage our money in order to be able to survive and thrive in each one of those time frames. So, you know, like, you've got the taxes, income, health care, and inflation that we were talking about there. And so, you know, taxes have a different impact. Taxes usually aren't as critical when you're younger and not making much. It becomes a bigger issue as you get older. Your income starts to grow and then, you know, eventually you come to a place where, you know, you won't be able to earn any more money. Healthcare, you know, the major issues are at the end of life. And inflation is one of those things. Anybody know what inflation is? Yeah? A few of you. Well, inflation, so like when I was a kid, I could buy gasoline in my car for 10 cents. That same gasoline today is what? Four dollars. So that's inflation. You know, same gasoline, same gas tank, basically, but it costs $4 now to get the same thing that I got for $0.10. So let's assume that you could earn $24,000 a year, $2,000 a month, all right? Your taxes, when you take into consideration your federal income taxes, your social security taxes, which is FICA, state income taxes, and if there's any local taxes, we don't have any around here, unfortunately. You know, in this case, that that would amount to about 13% of the total income. So $3,000 leaving you $20,000. So you can see what happens here is that the higher the tax rate, the less you have spendable, and then in order to be able to pay your rent, buy your food, pay for your car, your gasoline, all of those types of things. So net income of $20,000. This was a study that showed that in 2020, the average was about 5,500 for most people in the United States. Now, what if your income was 100,000? Now the tax would be 32%. So they would take more. That's called a graduated income tax or a progressing tax. And the way the tax policy in the United States is the more you earn, the more you pay. And if you kept it flat, they would call it regressing tax. And tax policy in the United States is never about putting a larger percentage of the burden on the people at the lower end. They want to put the larger percentage of the burden at the higher end. So what is a 401k or an IRA? You'll hear this term a lot as you get older. So this is a way to be able to take money off the top and set it aside for retirement before you pay taxes, before you pay most of your taxes. You still have to pay payroll taxes, the FICA. So you have taxable income with your taxes there. Then you have money that you put into your IRA, okay? And then over here, you've got less taxable income because you put it into the IRA, but you also pay less taxes. And let's do that again. So anyway, your IRA is sitting up on top. You need sound effects too. Yeah, well, I could probably do that. Next time. I had a microphone. But anyway, so you guys get the hang of this? So you take that money out of your paycheck, you put it into your 401k or your IRA, and that money sits on top and grows, and it's not taxed. So this doesn't have the burden of tax until you retire and you start to take it out. And then it's just like a paycheck that continues on. So here's our person that was paying $3,000 There are 3,300 in taxes. If they had a 401k or an IRA, they could put away, where is that? Right on here. $2,400, let's say, into their IRA. And so now their tax would go from 33 down to 2,700. So in reality, part of that 2,400 was their money, but part of it was what? Where did the other part come from? came from the government. It came from savings and taxes. So you can save a lot of money under that arrangement. Hello, New York. Anyway, so with no IRA, we were $20,000 with the IRA. We had $323 more in our pocket. So it's all a balance between what you need for consumables. And so the trick here. is not to allow your standard of living to get so big that you don't have any margin at the end in order to be able to save money. Because if you put yourself, a lot of people do that. They have way too much money at the end of their money. They get up to the 30th of the month and they're underwater. So what do they do? They go to their credit card or they borrow against their home equity line of credit or something like that. And so then they dig a deeper and deeper and deeper hole in debt. Death is probably the single biggest way that we can totally disregard God's sovereignty. If we look at the parable of the talents, God gave five to one, gave two to another, gave one to another, and he gave those, I think I mentioned that last week, according to what? their ability, okay? So the five-talent person, the two-talent person isn't gonna get five talents because they don't have the ability to manage five talents yet. But the two-talent person can learn to be a good steward, can learn to manage money, and can become a five-talent person. So part of the resources that we have available are based on God's blessings on us for the way we manage money, the way we steward the resources he gave us. So why do people have trouble saving money? Well, basically, they have no goal or vision, it's difficult for them to think long term, and they don't have a savings ethic. They don't have a mindset for savings. I may have mentioned to you last week, when I was a kid, I used to save half of everything I earned. I just didn't allow myself to live off of that other half, and we maintained that for a number of years. So principle number one is to save a consistent savings program, set up a consistent savings program. So you need vision, you've gotta have a goal, right? And you've gotta hold yourself accountable. You can't put money in and then say, oh, I need to do something and then take it out and spend it. You've gotta have money that you're gonna save and keep it safe for a long time, hopefully for many, many years, and the money that you know you're gonna need to save, put that into a separate savings account that's like a put-and-take. You put the money in, you take it out, put it in, take it out, but don't make that your long-term savings. So there's two ways to make money. Man in the biblical way, with man and woman at work, or money at work. And so man at work can do many different types of jobs, and that's why you go to school, you get trained, figure out what it is you really wanna do. The money machine, however, is a little bit different. You gotta deposit it in, so that's where the savings comes in, okay? So you can, that money can either go in taxed off the tax, top, like the IRA and the 401K, or it can come off the bottom after you pay taxes on it. And then it has to accumulate, and it can accumulate taxable, so that you pay taxes on the accumulation, or you can have it grow tax-free, or tax-deferred. So an IRUN 401k is a tax-deferred accumulator, because you're gonna ultimately pay taxes on it. And then you've got the distributor, and the distributor is when you take that money out, it's either gonna come out taxable, tax-free, tax-deferred, or tax-exempt, depending on where you invested it. So the point is, is that there's a lot to learn here and you don't want to take it for granted. So as you get older and older and you start to get into a position where you've got money to save, you want to make sure you either get educated or you find somebody to educate you. So why is it so hard to save? Well, here's our dollar, right? The taxes come off the top, then our fixed expenses. What's our fixed expenses? Our rent, utilities, you know, Car payment, you know, all those types of things. And then we've got our discretionary spending, going out to dinner, movies, you know, all those types of things, right? And so, like I said, there's two types of savings, long-term and put in place. So Benjamin Franklin kind of put it best. He said, money is of a prolific generating nature. Money can beget money and its offspring can beget more. What did he just describe there? Anybody know? Well, that's exactly right, that's compound interest. So how does compound interest work? Well, compound interest starts, you start with a dollar, and let's say we're gonna earn 6% on it. So that means if you put it in the bank and the bank paid you 6 cents, 6%, at the end of the year you would have a dollar. Because they would have paid you six cents. And then the next year, if you left it in there, they would pay you 6% on $1.06. So that wouldn't be another six cents, that'd be like six and a half cents or something. Because they would have to pay you on the six cents that was in there. And so that creates a curve that goes like this. As it grows, it grows over time. So if we look at this curve, how long does it take a dollar to double? And the answer is 12 years. Okay, well how do I know that? Does it memorize it? No. If we take, this is called the rule of 72. If you take 72 and you divide the interest six in it, what's six into 72? It's 12. So if the interest rate is 10, what's into 72, what's the answer? So at 10% money grows, doubles every seven years, at 6% it doubles every 12 years. So let's assume we've got a long period of time here. So we go through one double at 6%, so how many years is that? 12 years, right? And then we double it again, so the $2 becomes what, $4, and now we're at 24 years. The four dollars becomes eight. So we're going to add 12 more to that. So that's 36 years if we go to 16 All right. So now we're going to be at 48. So Each one of those periods is called interval and what's interesting is it takes in the first and second interval it takes half the same amount of time, okay, and to go one more dollar. So it took 12 years to go from $1 to $2. It only takes six years to go from $2 to $3. And when we go into the next one, it only takes a quarter of an interval to add another dollar. So the benefits of compound interest is that the more intervals you can create, then the faster your money's going to grow over a period of time. Now this may be really boring to you. But I'll tell you, this is the heart of wealth. If you wanna grow your money, being able to put your money into a compounding machine and keep it there over a long period of time and minimize the taxes is the way that you can build capital over a long period of time. So $1 goes to two, goes to four, goes to eight, goes to 16, goes to 32. So if money's growing at 10%, then it takes seven years, right? So seven, 14, 21, 28, and so on, right? It's gonna grow a lot faster than it's gonna grow at 12, 24, 36, and so on. So the more compound interest that you can earn, the better rate of return that you can get on it, the faster that money will grow. So how many intervals do you have until retirement? So let's assume you could earn 7%, so money's gonna double every how many years? If you divide seven into 72, it's 10, right? So every 10 years, money's gonna double. So if you're 20 years old and you're gonna go out to 70, how many intervals do you have? You got five intervals, right? So that means $1 is gonna go two, four, eight, 16, 32. So $1, remember this, Ryan? We had this conversation. So, one dollar down here is really worth 32. So, when you spend a dollar down there, how much did it really cost you to do it if you were able to keep it long-term in 7%? How much did it cost you $32 to do it? So, you know, when you pull money out of your money machine, All right, and spend it, what you're doing is you're not just spending the dollar that you're pulling out, you're spending all the dollars it could have grown to if you left it in there. And that is the principle of compound interest, and it's something most people do not understand. So here's age 40, age 65, how many animals, okay. So at 6%, it was 12, 10, nine, so this is all over 72, okay. So how much do I need to retire? So if I'm gonna retire at 67 and I need that much capital, then I've got that long to grow it in order to make it last this long in old age. So I call that the retirement game and I actually have an app on Android that does this, that does the math for you. So it's called the retirement game if any of you have Androids. We're putting it on iPhone, but it's not done yet. So what do I have? What do I need? And how long will it last? Those are three critical questions that most everybody cannot answer, especially about retirement. So what you want is you want your income to stay like this or maybe grow with inflation if that's at all possible. You certainly don't want this because then you run out of money maybe before you run out of life and that could be a problem. So how much do I need to retire? You know if I have 2.6 intervals, and that's my time horizon in retirement $25,000 a year I've got to say $3,600 a year at seven and a half percent to be able to solve that problem So it's just math. That's all it is. It's just math I'm gonna move through this here, so So again, the three questions no one can answer. The first one is, how much do I need to retire? And again, point out to you the fact that at your age, you're not thinking about retirement. I certainly wasn't at your age. But what is your greatest financial weapon today? Isn't it your age? And the number of intervals you have? So the more money you can get saved and solved in a way that can grow through the compound interest curve, the easier it is when you're in middle age and you've got through buying your house and paying that off and you've got your kids off to school and you're able to now start compounding and growing money when you only have maybe two intervals left. At least you have a head start. So the second one is, how much more do I have to save? So what do I need to retire? How much more do I have to save? And then finally, how should I invest? Like I said, that's what we'll look at in the last session. So what do I have? What do I need? And how do I fill the gap? And how do you fill the gap? Well, you make more money, right? You become more efficient with the way you spend money so that you can create margin in order to be able to save. So remember the curve? You saw the curve a little bit ago? So there's only two ways that you can make that curve grow faster, right? You can either take more risk, which means you run the possibility of losing some of that money, which is really a bad thing, right? Or you invest more capital. So those are the two ways you get to a better outcome. So my background, by the way, is economics. That was what I did my college degree, and then I got a master's degree in finance. And I found that everything has a name. They've got terms for everything. And so if you think back, how long did it take for $1 to grow to 2? At 6%, it was 12 years, wasn't it? That's a long time to see a dollar grow to $2. At least it grows a little faster in the second interval, and the third interval, and so on. So why do savings programs fail? And the reason is because it takes so long to get going and people give up. And so we call that first phase boring. But here's the trick. You can't get to the second interval or the third interval or the fourth interval unless you get through the first interval. And if you put it in, take it out, put it in, take it out, what happens? end up starting all over again. So every time you get started and then quit and give up and have to start all over again, you're going to go right back to the first interval. You can't get through the first interval without making it all the way through. So two factors affect the curve, risk and money. So the second principle is to control your wants and your needs. And so there's always a competition between our needs and our entertainment and fun stuff. And that's not to say we shouldn't have entertainment and fun, I'm not suggesting that at all, but what I'm saying is budget for it and don't overspend there just because you feel like you deserve it. And that's what happens with a lot of people is they, unfortunately, they build up overhead that they can't afford and then they spend whatever little extra they have on themselves in order to feel better and they have nothing left at the end of the month. And we see that a lot. What is it? I think it's something like 85% of Americans, that was the last number I saw, are going to have only social security retirement. So the only thing they're going to have to live on is the government program. And if you've read anything about the government program, they're predicting that they'll be out of money here in probably another 10 years. So how secure is that? What does Ronald Reagan said? A government that's big enough to give you everything is big enough to take it all away. So you don't want your savings program to look like that. Because then you're always doing what? You're always starting the compound interest curve again. And you've got to get through that first interval to get to the second. Look at what $2,000 can do if you start early enough. So if you start at age 21 and you invest $2,000 for five years, that's $10,000. At age 65, you would have almost a half a million bucks if you left it there and you grew it over that period of time. I can guarantee you there aren't a lot of people who reach age 65 that have $462,000 in their account. And $2,000, $10,000 over that five-year period from 21 to 26 may seem like a lot, but once you get started on it, it's $160 a month or something like that. So if you're starting to earn money and you're in You know, 1,100, 1,200, 1,000, whatever it is, yeah. Wait, so how does 2,000 turn into 462,000? Through the compound interest. Through the 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 that I just showed you. Yeah, but how does that happen? Well, we'd have to show, we don't have time to do it, but if, put it in a calculator and run it, you know, 2,000, gets up to 10, and then you grow 10,000. So 10 goes to 20, goes to 40, goes to 80, goes to 160, goes to 320. So start at age 30, that same 2,000, it's gonna be worth 372. And if I did 40, it would probably have been worth about 180. So what you're cutting off is the steep part of that curve. Every time you defer and you don't do it, you're not losing down here in the first interval, you're losing the steep part of the curve. So one final thing we'll look at and then we'll be done. A lot of people have asked me, how do I think about accumulating money? I'm willing to be the saver. I'm willing to manage my expenses. I'm willing to be in control of my pocketbook. And so there's three factors that impact savings, as I said, taxes, fixed expenses, and discretionary. So if you can save that and get a few dollars going into the bucket here for savings, what do you do with it? Well, the first thing you want to do is make sure you haven't got any debt. And the best way to get rid of debt is pay the largest one off first. but pay a little bit down on the rest. And when you pay that one off, take the money you're paying on these, and then add the money that you were paying on that one to the next one, and then just keep going down the line. And you'd be surprised how fast you can pay off that. But you can pay it off a lot faster if you don't have it. So I would just strongly urge you When they send you the credit card in the mail and you go, Mom, Dad, look what I got. I got my own credit card. Cut it up. Don't use it. If you're gonna have a credit card, pay it off every month. It's okay to do that, like a gas card. You buy gas and you pay it off at the end of the month. If you have a credit card for expenditures, make sure you stay within your budget and you don't put more on it than you can pay off. Well, with credit card you pay more than you actually pay for the item and you buy items that you buy because of interest. Well, that's true if you don't pay it off. But if you do pay it off at the end of the month, they don't tag you with any interest. They hate people who pay it off every month. They're not real keen on those people. So pay off your credit. Minimize interest rates on your mortgage if you can. This is a great period of time to be refinancing homes, for instance. Pay cash for large expenditures if you can do it. So the fourth principle is guarantee your family's security. You know, that's usually looking at the right types of insurance, you know, having enough savings if you lose your job, or if you become disabled, or if you die too soon, and if you live too long. That's obviously where your savings come in. So, I'm going to scoot through this here. We don't have time for all that. Hold on. Sorry. This is for a longer seminar. So I showed you the money going into the bucket, right? So think of this like a bucket of sand at the beach. So if you take that bucket and fill it up with sand, what happens when the sand gets too full? It flows over, right? So if you've got a stack of buckets and you fill up the first one, when the first one fills up, it's gonna fill up the one right below it, and then when that one's filled up, it's gonna fill up the one below that. And so that's really a great way to think about wealth accumulation. So the first bucket is liquid cash. It's emergency money. It's dollars in the bank account. They sometimes recommend depending on your job and income and expenses and everything, three to six months of income to just having this first bucket. Then the money flows from the first bucket to the second bucket. The second bucket would be lower risk types of investments. It might be a good investment portfolio, stock portfolio you might have. You could have bonds in it, for instance, if you want to, and there's a number of ways of doing that. And then when you fill up that second bucket, then now you start filling up the third bucket. And when you've filled up the third bucket, then you can make all the buckets a little bit bigger and kind of keep cascading the money down. But the point is, is that you don't wanna take this third bucket, which is your risk bucket. This might be money that you start a business with, or you might invest in real estate, things that are illiquid, that you can't get your money out right away. You wanna have enough money in the upper buckets to protect you, because the way most people lose money, well, let's back up a second. If you're dealing with people who are relatively smart and analytical, how many of them do you think invested their money in something where they thought they were going to lose money? No, no, right? Can you see I'm writing out the check to invest in something saying, boy, this money's gone, goodbye. I mean, they're not going to do that. When they write that check out to invest in something, they think that money's going to go to the moon or whatever has been promised them or whatever they're expecting. So nobody loses money deliberately. People lose money because they either made a bad investment, All right, something bad went on with it. Or they run out of time. And what I mean by running out of time is they don't, they're not able to have enough staying power to hold on to it during the ups and downs. Like for instance, we bought a building, anybody know where Pomona is? So it's out near the mountains, right? We bought a building that was on the freeway, and it was a see-through, right? When you drove by it, you saw through it. There were no tenants. We couldn't get a tenant in it for two years. But we had enough staying power to hold on to it to be ultimately able to get a tenant, to be able to sell it, and to at least get our money back. So we didn't lose our money, but it took two years to be able to do that. That is not an unusual story for some people for some investments. It can happen. So you want to always make sure that when you're investing in that third bucket, you've got enough staying power to hang on if you've made a good investment. And you do that by building up buckets one and buckets two. So there's all our buckets again. So, bucket one, low risk, high liquidity, low yield. Bucket two, moderate risk. And bucket three is, you know, where you hope you're gonna get a home on that. I tried to get a picture of one of your skateboarders, but my camera wouldn't take it fast enough. So, you start small and you let it grow. So the key to being successful financially is to be patient. Don't quit, okay? Don't take unnecessary risks. Seek counsel from somebody who's had experience with this, okay? And be wise. Don't get tricked into doing something just because it sounds like it's a good thing. So that's pretty much what I had in mind. I didn't know if I could get through all those slides. What time is it? 8.03. 8.03? That's pretty good. So questions? Do you have any questions? On the paying off that thing. While me and Luke have been doing the curriculum, Dave Ramsey's curriculum at school for finance. Good. He's just snowballing it, going with the smallest one to the biggest. You can do it either way. The most important thing to do is to start getting rid of it. I like both methods. It just depends on how much money you have to throw at it. That's good. Get rid of the smaller ones first and then work your way to the bigger ones. That's a good way to do it. Yep. So what do you have to do for the bank to give you smaller intervals of how often your money compounds over time? Well, the problem with that, Tyler, is that banks don't do that. They don't? No. What's a bank? A bank is a place that holds your money and loans it out to other people. So they're making money loaning it out, and they're paying you for the use of your money to be able to loan it out. So where all the money's being made, And the risk is, is they're loaning it out to others. So they're going to pay you as little as they have to in order to be able to get the money in. So generally speaking, the banks are going to pay the least amount of earnings on almost anything that you can find out there to invest. And that's not to say you didn't want to have money in the bank. I'm not saying that, but I'm just saying that's not going to help you grow the compound interest curve. Okay, well rule of 72 right so divide 6 into 72 and you got 12 if you want that 12 to be a smaller number then the interest has to be a bigger number, right? So if you go to 7 That 12 became 10. If you go to 8, that 12 became 9. If you go to 9, that 12 became 8, and so on. But the point you've got to remember is the more interest that you expect to earn on something, the more risk you have. And we're going to look at that much more closely. Well, I don't know if it's next week or two weeks. I'll have to decide. I'll have to look at what my material is. We're going to go like eight weeks now. Yeah, eight weeks. This was three weeks right here that we went through this. Any other questions? Do you have a question? No, no questions. All right, so sum it up. Anybody learn anything tonight? Anybody want to share what they learned, what they think is the most important thing they learned? before I call on you. Yes, sir. Yeah, that's good. I appreciate that. The key to what you just said is if, You can trust where it's going, right? And there's a lot of places out there you can't trust, and they're hard to figure out. So that's why having counsel and being wise is so important. It's important to have people that have enough experience losing money to be able to help you not lose it. I will be very candid with you. I have lost money every way you can lose it. Like that office building I was saying about 10 minutes. It was not a fun thing. Yup. The biggest thing for me was probably like getting money, trying to get money into savings accounts earlier. And later just like, being like, oh I can get in the car and then I'll do it after. And then next it's something else and it just keeps going and keeps going. Next year you're what, 40 or whatever you have in savings. Yeah, no, that's good. And Ryan, actually, I said it but maybe it didn't resonate at the time to you. A lot of people spend money to make themselves feel good. Impulse buying. It is impulse buying, but it's just, I deserve it. When you're dealing with God's money, you don't deserve anything. He's given you that money, and so it's your responsibility to be good stewards with that money. that's part of being a good steward is setting aside money in order to be able to have income at the end so that you're not dependent on your children or however all that would work out. So being a good steward is the key to understanding God's economy. Any other thoughts? All right, well, let's close in prayer. Father God, we just come before you, Lord. I thank you for each one of these young adults who are here this morning, this evening. We just pray, Father, that you would bless them and give them great insight into your economy, that they would be able to see more clearly. how to apply your word to their life. And we thank you, Father, for the opportunities that you give us to be good stewards. And we pray, Father, that you would give us great wisdom in that process. So bless each of them this week, and we look forward to being together next week. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.