I won’t stop talking about money

Practical follow-ups to last week’s post and discussion

Would you trust this man? Joel Apolinario sounded like an honorable Christian, but he deceived many Filipinos through financial fraud.

“The people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light.” —Luke 16:8

I appreciated the public comments and private feedback I received on last Friday’s post about money. Responses confirmed that even though millions of churches and Christian organizations regularly ask for money, meaningful discipleship-level discourse on how Christians should handle money is usually lacking.

Following are some practical observations and stories that might be helpful to you or people you care about.

Inability to save is a chronic problem. In a January 2025 survey, 40 percent of Americans said they didn’t have enough cash or savings available to cover a $1,000 emergency expense.

Budgeting, living within one’s means, and disciplined saving are obvious answers. But those recommendations don’t work if you don’t know what you’re spending.

When Nancy and I married in 1982, we agreed to record all income and every expense and review our records monthly to make sure we were on track. And I mean every expenditure. If Nancy bought a 10-cent cookie to go with her bag lunch at work, she was expected to come home and tell me so that I could record it. Nancy groaned about my rigor at times, but she understood the purpose. Even when our income was very modest, we always earned more than we spent and always gave more than 10 percent of our earned income to our church and friends on mission.

After three years, Nancy asked if we could stop writing everything down. I agreed to her request, because our financial discipline was well ingrained by then. But after that, whenever Nancy asked how we were doing financially, I would smile and reply, “I have no idea, because you told me to stop keeping track.”

Sadly, many Christians are vulnerable to fraud due to their desire for more money and their tendency to trust others who profess Christ. Some have been deceived by promises of impressively large returns on investments, like this one in which the perpetrator robbed victims of $32 million. A reader in the Philippines shared this report on an investment scam there that was busted in 2019.

In her comment on last week’s post, Barb Lanser offered a series of specific ideas, including some related to eating in restaurants. At various times in our marriage, Nancy and I set a strict monthly budget for restaurant meals and entertainment items, which are the largest discretionary expenditures for many people.

Barb specifically mentioned the cost of drinks when eating out. When I was young, I learned that restaurants purchased large amounts of cola drinks at about 10 cents per 16 fluid ounces and sold 16-ounce glasses of cola with meals for $1.75. With inflation, the numbers have changed, but the markup percentage is often about the same. Nancy and I established a habit of drinking water with meals and having our other drinks at home.

We consistently ask, “Do we really need this?” rather than “Does everyone else have this?” before buying. In my current life, the most visible reflection of this lifestyle is that I do almost all my local daytime travel by bicycle. We could easily afford a second car, but bicycling on local trips doesn’t take much longer and keeps me physically fit.

Godwins Lwinga from Malawi provided a fascinating comment about the problem of Christians who think money itself, not the love of money, is evil. I’ve had a slightly different problem: I live as if spending is evil, so I sometimes don’t spend when I should. One of my published books had a serious deficiency because I wasn’t willing to spend the money to purchase all the books written by a controversial figure I was studying. If I had spent an extra $50 to obtain and read a few more books, I could have strengthened my argument and protected myself against criticism.

Finally, Nancy and I have deviated from the common practice of leaving a substantial part of one’s estate to children. We are giving annual gifts to our children now, on a defined schedule, and leaving everything else to a financial management firm that will administer the disbursement of those funds to Christian organizations.