So there I was, way back in the hot, hot summer of 1980 in Forth Worth, Texas. I’d just changed out of my dark brown formal wedding tux into nice jeans and a polo shirt, heading for the getaway car with my new bride.
My ’71 Satellite Sebring Plus was shiny clean and parked just out back of Southcliff Baptist Church. Family and friends had wildly decorated my blue sports car with streaming toilet paper and white shoe polish messages that might have been a little suggestive. And somebody had stuffed a potato in the tail pipe.
No matter. My young wife and I were headed out for our honeymoon! Woo-hoo! Church-sanctioned intimacy at last, waiting for us just a couple hours’ drive away!
The one thing not on our minds as we strode to my car with great anticipation was some out-of-the-blue financial management tip, if you know what I mean.
But sure enough, from our right quickly approached one of our acquaintances from Young Adult Sunday School class. Eager to intercept us before we could escape, she was clearly burdened with something she felt she had to pass on to me…immediately!
“Greg, I don’t know when I’ll see you again,” she said, “and I needed to tell you something. Marriage can get to be hard work after a while, and money matters can be a real stumbling block. But if you’ll set aside 10% of everything you make into a savings fund, and don’t touch it and let it grow, you’ll never have a problem in that way. Okay! God bless!”
She waved us off, and as she walked away I responded with nothing more than a puzzled raise of my hand in acknowledgment. What in the world possessed her to tell me that at this moment? I wondered.
To this day, I don’t remember that young woman’s name, but I never forgot her tip.
But neither did I heed it. And I wish I had.
Save 10%? Ha! I’d been a seminary student surviving off tuna fish, often with no bread or mayo, and depending on free meals at my church now and then. But suddenly I had a wife making over $700 a month working in a downtown bank. When you added my part-timish contribution to our fledgling budget during the school year — $100 a month from coaching Jr. Optimist League sports at a local elementary school and $50 a week from part-time Youth Ministry work out of town — just like that I was a rich man.
Comparatively, of course.
So our thinking became, Let’s live it up! “Celebrate good times, come on!” (Thanks, Kool & The Gang!)
Even though I was still to be in seminary for another 3 years, Betty Crocker Double Fudge Brownies with Dr Pepper became our go-to celebration indulgence. (Caveat: We always tried not to pay more than 1¢ per ounce for our much-loved soft drink. We’d wait until it was on sale in big returnable glass bottles at the local Piggly Wiggly.) And we even had steak now and then. We ate out at times. I never went hungry anymore.
But my new wife, in spite of having received from her doctor a starter version of the pill, had gotten pregnant on our honeymoon. Financial challenges were already in the making.
And in the years just ahead, even when I got a full-time Youth Ministry job at $22,600 (think 1982 dollars!), we still struggled over finances. We had one child, then two (later on a third and a fourth!) and the “prophecy” was coming true. Money matters…well, they matter. And we had no savings.
I’d completely disregarded the principle of setting aside a long-term savings fund built with 10% of my income. And at times there was hell to pay.
I even cut my finger wide open when I angrily swiped at a steak sauce bottle on the dining room table before me. The bottle shattered, inflicting a gaping wound directly on the part of my left hand’s finger that bore my wedding ring.
We’d been having a rather animated argument over money.
I ended up spending our last $85 to get my finger sewed up. Really smart, huh? I still have the scar to this day.
And when my wife and I finally split up — at first emotionally then for real — we were deep in debt. $18,000 deep, in 1997. That might be near an equivalent $40,000 today. And the stress back then had contributed to unimaginably dark thinking and living, even though we were believers, church-goers. It wasn’t the entire reason for our divorce, not by a long shot. But it was like a vise grip on the darkest regions of our psyches, and it squeezed the very worst out of us both.
They say today that in 70% of divorces, money stress is a big part of the breakdown.
So…
How hard is it to start saving 10% of your income? What mindset, what discipline, is required to do it?
Do spiritual resources and convictions from a steady walk with God help in this regard?
What if we have a good example in our parents to follow? What if we don’t?
My father is a retired Accounting Professor and CPA who at one point was also certified to sell retirement age financial investment products. He knows a thing or two about budgeting and financial planning. And he has a passion to help others do a good job of organizing their money matters. So he recently asked me to co-author/edit an e-book with him entitled Financial Planning Made Easier: An Illustrated Primer To The 5 Keys For A More Awesome Financial Future. Soon, it will be available on Amazon Kindle. A second and third book will follow, to include understanding investments and making good use of insurance.
Hope you’ll be able to use Dad’s books quite profitably and enjoy them. (You’ll enjoy the illustrations in the first book, for sure!)
And I hope you’ll be wiser than I was as a young man with a wife and kids to take better care of than I did.
I should have cut out the brownies and Dr Pepper — and several other indulgences — and put money into savings.
How might things have been different if I had followed that one wise practice?
Now I understand it. Grand Vitality. Financial health affects marital relationships in a big way and the soul health that is inextricably tied into them — which in turn affects our physical health too.
My earnest advice, learned the hard way? Strive for financial health — with protected, growing savings — to bless the whole time of your journey on earth! And Dr. Walter Austin’s book, referenced above, just might be a key tool for you to use.
Grand Vitality 