Michigan Camp Meeting 2016: The Harvest is Great

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Financing Yourself

Jeff Allen

Financing Yourself- Part 1

Heavenly Father, how thankful we are for life today.

How thankful we are that you're the owner of all things and the giver of all good and perfect gifts.

And we're thankful that you have entrusted us as managers, as stewards of your stuff.

And as we go through this class today and through this week, help us to come away with a fresh commitment to that role as stewards.

And please teach us the things we need to know and give us the courage to fulfill Your plan.

Alright, well, let's go ahead and get started here.

Well, you are at the Financing Yourself class, so hopefully everybody is in the right place.

Yes, I know not everybody quite knows what we're going to be talking about but this week we're going to be talking about all sorts of things.

Today we're going to be taking a look and we're going to be talking about what is money.

We're going to talk about the United States, how wealthy we are, how unwealthy we are, and how we kind of fit into that picture.

We're going to talk a little bit about...

How many of you have ever heard of Dave Ramsey before?

We're going to talk a little bit about Dave Ramsey.

We're going to talk about some of his ideas.

The General Conference has also put out nice resources called Faith and Finance.

We're going to incorporate a lot of those ideas all week, so if you come today and you haven't heard something that you were just dying or hoping to hear, don't worry.

If there's a particular topic you really wanna know, let's talk afterwards, and I can tell you, no, maybe we're gonna be looking at that on Wednesday or Thursday or something like that, if there's a particular thing that you really wanna make sure you hear, make sure that you get to that 1, okay?

There's a picture of me and my family up there.

I have like this portrait of myself that looks all professional and whatnot.

And my wife's like, you can't use that cause it's not cool.

So She emails me the picture and says, you got to use this picture.

So it's a picture of my wife, my 2 little boys.

I have a 6 year old and I have a 3 year old.

This was taken last fall up at Silver Lake.

They're actually up here at camp meeting.

So I probably have 1 of them across the hall here and our other ones out in the primary class.

So I am a licensed certified public accountant in the state of Michigan.

Previously I worked 9 years of in public accounting so mostly all on the audit side So I have a lot of audit experience.

I do have tax experience, but I'm not a tax expert.

Disclaimer, big disclaimer there, so if you want to come and ask me about your super detailed tax question, I might say, I just don't know.

But my audit experience, A lot of you are familiar with a couple of the places I've audited.

We used to do a lot of work for the Seventh-day Adventist Church, so I have audited the General Conference auditing service.

They come and do the audit for GLAW here, and then we do the audit on top of them, so I've actually audited GLAW, about 17 other academies all across the nation, and also the General Conference itself.

So I've been out to the General Conference, done a couple years of auditing on top of GCAS out there as well.

So it's always fun to get out there and see everything that they have and learn more and more about the church's finances, because I'm a nerd like that.

Currently though, I am the assistant controller, assistant treasurer for Centurion Medical Products.

We're a national medical supply company, medical device manufacturer.

We have plants in Howell, Michigan, Salisbury, North Carolina, and then we also have a wholly owned subsidiary out of Mexicali, Mexico.

So doing all sorts of fun accounting work nationally and internationally.

They were a client of mine and about 18 months ago they needed extra help so I actually left public accounting to go work for them.

I am also currently the treasurer for the Lansing Seventh-day Adventist Church.

I have been for about the last 5 years, so just give you a little bit more about me.

I've served as an elder, an adventurer leader, a children's ministries assistant, a VBS actor.

I know that's that's real important with finance, right?

But you know what, when you got little kids and your wife's the personal minister, or the children's ministries leader, you are definitely the de facto assistant.

But I'm also a general personal finance enthusiast.

Sometimes I feel like I hit this dry spell where I can't learn anymore and then I find something else, I'm like, I can't believe I didn't know this.

And so hopefully this week what I can do is I can share some of these things with you.

Hopefully we can answer your questions and we can take care of any problems that you might be having in your life, okay?

Today we're going to talk about where does all the money go and that's what we're going to focus on.

How rich is the United States of America?

Well, We're the fourth largest country by land mass.

Russia, Canada, China, number 1, 2, and 3, but the United States falls in number 4.

So just by sheer space, we have a ton of land.

We're the number 2 country with the most natural resources.

We're the number 1 largest economy in the world.

What that means is that if you take the total value of what the United States produces in goods and services in a year, that's what that means.

You can add up number 3 through 5, and the United States is still larger than them combined.

So definitely, the United States is a land that is truly wealthy.

We're ranked number 9, the richest country in the world in 2014.

And the USA is estimated to have a net worth of $118 trillion when you include human capital in that number.

I had to abbreviate it because it wouldn't have fit very well on the screen going all the way across all the commas.

We have a military spending budget of almost $600 billion in 2015.

That is more than the next 10 largest countries combined.

Mind-boggling how much money we have and how much we spend in the United States.

Our federal government has a spending plan of 3.8 trillion dollars each year.

That's more than what do we just see Germany at number 4.

Their entire economy produces 3.3 of goods and services a year.

The United States, just our government alone, spends that much money.

Financing Yourself- Part 2

Today I don't have a whole lot of slides.

Today's going to be a bit more interactive.

Everybody brought your 10 key, your big calculator with you, right?

It's on your cell phone now, so it's on the charger back at the camera.

We're going to give you some tools to take with you today.

And then I want to make sure I leave time at the end if you have questions.

Some of our best discussions come from just questions that you guys have that you bring up that maybe I haven't thought of or you haven't thought of, so totally open for that.

We'll leave time at the end, too, if you want to talk personally afterwards.

We will be talking a little bit more about budgeting today, and I know that sometimes that's a real personal issue so if you have personal questions we'll make sure we can have time afterwards to talk about that together.

Today we're going to talk about telling the money where to go.

Let's take a quick recap of what we talked about yesterday though.

Yesterday when we were all here together we talked about we noticed that the United States is actually very wealthy but it's also a very very in debt country right?

We learned that character affects our relationship with money.

We talked about that financial education is important, and it's important that we're all here because now we're all learning about financial education.

We talked about that few people actually understand financial matters.

Remember the FINRA study that we took a look at that they took in 2012?

Only 39% of folks could actually answer 4 questions about personal finance correctly.

We talked about what money is, we talked about how it works, and we talked about how to use it.

I passed around some samples yesterday and I have them again here today if you want to look afterwards about money that was out in Zimbabwe, the $100 billion note, Hyperinflation.

We looked at some old US currency that was actually backed by silver, but nowadays we have what's called the what?

The fiat currency, meaning it's backed by nothing other than the government saying use it.

And then we also introduced the Dave Ramsey 7 Baby Steps.

We'll be looking at his Baby Steps all through the week.

I think they provide great guidance for putting together a solid financial plan.

So let's take a look at them again this morning.

The first 1 we talked about yesterday was that thousand dollars to start an emergency fund.

If you have nothing, if you're in debt up to your eyeballs, you have nowhere else to start, the very first and most important thing is just get some money in the bank, right?

That way, when we have a problem, we have an emergency, we don't go to the credit card to fix the problem, we go to our savings account to fix the problem, right?

Step 2, paying off all of our debt using the debt snowball.

We are gonna talk about the debt snowball today.

We're going to build 1 up on the chalkboard, and we're going to build 1 right out so we can see how it works.

Step 3, taking 3 to 6 months of expenses and building it up into savings.

Step 4, Investing part of our income for retirement.

College funding for children if we have any.

Some of us don't have children, but some of us do have grandchildren.

Could you imagine if you didn't have a house payment how much money you'd have left over every month?

If you have no payments in life, if you have only money coming in, if you have a budget, If you have a financial plan, could you imagine how much more you could be giving, how much more you could be giving to the cause of God?

We talked about the $1, 000 emergency fund yesterday.

Well, we don't want to go use the credit card and get more deeper in debt to get the problem fixed.

That's why we have an emergency fund to help get us started.

We should keep it in easily accessible, fully insured bank accounts.

Now I know some of you are thinking, well, all that money is just sitting in the bank, it's gonna earn .0000001%, you know, I might only make 3 cents a year on it.

But could you imagine if you had to use your credit card and you had to pay 22% interest on the fix rather than taking the money out of your bank account?

That costs a lot more than 3 cents, right?

I'm not going to pay a homeowner's insurance.

Yeah, yeah, and you know homeowner's insurance would definitely pick in and help, but you know, how long do you think it might take to get reimbursed on some of those things?

You really want to leave you know 3 feet of water in your basement for 3 months while you're waiting?

Yeah then they won't help you put the transmission in your car?

What if a family member has a medical problem?

A lot of us wouldn't be really willing to stand by and watch them suffer when we know we could help, right?

So maybe the question was maybe you need to go take FMLA, that's Family Medical Leave Act, where you're allowed to take up to 12 weeks off of your job without having to basically be terminated, but your employer doesn't have to pay you during that time.

So how do you take care of your bills if you're helping somebody else, right?

What the emergency fund should be used for, we just talked about it, could be a broke down car, flooded basement, not for vacation, and it's not for those unbeatable deals.

I know that, you know, all those cases of, you know, food at the ABC is a great deal right now but it's probably not the best use of the emergency fund right?

So yes absolutely that's what an emergency fund is for.

I promised you we're going to take a look at getting out of debt and we're going to take a look at budgeting today.

So we're going to take a look at using the debt snowball.

It's not quite the snowball where you take it up and you smash it at your sister's face, right?

It's the kind of snowball, more like an avalanche type of a snowball.

It's Like when you build a snowman and then you roll it and you roll it and before long the thing is so big you can't even push it anymore.

Financing Yourself- Part 3

Dear Heavenly Father, Lord, we thank you for today.

Lord, we thank you for the opportunity that you've given to us to have another day of life, another day to learn, another day to grow.

Lord, I pray that you would speak to our hearts, to our minds today, as we study about the topic of personal stewardship, and Lord, what it means to be a steward and how we can work to manage your money in Jesus name we pray amen all right so let's make sure we're all got a locked door here today we're gonna be talking about personal and organizational stewardship now yesterday we took a look we built a budget and 1 of the very things we put at the top was what?

So we consider it important enough to put it at the top of our budget, so it's probably important enough that we spend some time actually talking about what it is, how it works, and where does your money go when you give to offerings.

And we're gonna take a look at where it especially goes in the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

So I'm not gonna lie to you, I've heard part of this presentation before.

He's actually the under treasurer for the Michigan Conference.

So I had heard it and I'm like, you know what?

So when we get to some charts and things, I know that they're good because they came from the conference.

Recap from yesterday, we talked about building an emergency fund, right?

And we talked about putting how much into it?

And what was the point of the emergency fund again?

It wasn't for the emergency Disney trip, right?

It was for when we have a problem, we can hit the emergency fund so we don't have to put more on the credit card when we're trying to get out of debt.

We talked about paying off debt and prioritizing the debt to pay it off.

And what do we do with the debt snowball?

We list our debts from smallest to largest.

We talked about where our money goes, right?

So we talked about that big fun B word, which is b-b-budgeting, which everybody loves so much.

We made a budget for the pretend family that we were working on, and we found out that we could have an extra $190 a month, and we applied it towards our debt snowball to help get out of debt even faster, right?

We talked about the importance of saving 3 to 6 months of expenses in the emergency fund after we get out of debt.

And why did we need 3 to 6 months of expenses?

Do you remember what the unemployment rate went up to in the United States?

A lot of speculation that the true unemployment rate was well north of 30%, meaning people that you could find work, but it wasn't really, you were underemployed too, meaning you weren't making as much as you could make for the skill set that you actually had.

Having a 3 to 6 months emergency fund helps alleviate some of those problems so when you lose the job you have something to fall back on so you don't have to take the McDonald's job right away.

You don't have to take something that comes up right away where you might not make as much.

It affords you to be a little bit more picky with getting the new job, okay?

So, today we're gonna talk about stewardship.

It's 1 of those words with a lot of letters, so it's probably 1 of those $10 words, right?

We've heard of stewardship of all different kinds, you know, being a good steward of this or that.

Okay, let's just write some of these things down.

Here's the straight definition of what the word stewardship means.

The conducting, supervising, or managing of something, especially the careful, responsible management of something entrusted to one's care.

Can you think of anything that's been entrusted to your care in the personal finance world?

Why is stewardship important in personal finance?

And that's what we're gonna take a look at today.

We live in a culture where we think that everything we get is ours, right?

Other personal finance classes tell us that, right?

So let's take a look and let's get into the Bible and let's see what we can find out about what personal stewardship is all about.

So if you brought your Bible, I'll be reading from a Bible.

We'll flip the text together, but if you didn't, that's okay.

The earth is the Lord's and all its fullness, the world and those who dwell in it, for He is founded upon the seas and established upon the waters." The earth is whose?

You're like, quit asking leading questions at 937, right?

Financing Yourself- Part 4

Dear Heavenly Father, Lord, we thank you for this day.

Lord, we thank you for the rain and how it nourishes and keeps things green.

Lord, we thank you for the opportunity we have to come together today to learn more about finances, Lord, and how we can be good stewards of these finances by being educated in financial matters.

We pray you'd bless our class today, help us to have a great discussion, and Lord, to learn a lot.

Today, the topic we're gonna talk about is called turning drops into an ocean.

Clearly, we're gonna be talking about investments and how to grow our money.

Let's take a quick recap of what we looked at yesterday.

Yesterday we talked about what stewardship is and why it's important in personal finances.

Remember I said that planning out a five-session class, I stuck it right in the middle because I personally thought that stewardship should be right in the middle of our finances.

So we put it right in the middle of our course.

We talked about organizational stewardship.

We talked about how the Michigan Conference and the World Church are involved and how our ties and our offerings flow up and down and what they help to cover, what they pay for.

We talked about the Seventh-day Adventist church structure.

We talked about everything every way from the local church right on up to the world church.

We talked about tithe uses and flow across the various different entities.

And we also made sure we talked about the good financial plans, incorporate stewardship plans for God's resources.

Well, today we're gonna talk, we're gonna get right into it.

This is 1 of my most favorite topics in personal finance.

And you look at me and you're like, why would you care?

You don't even look like you're close to retirement age.

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Series

Financing Yourself

Financing Yourself- Part 4

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

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Recorded

Parts

Financing Yourself- Part 1

1h 15m

Financing Yourself- Part 2

1h 12m

Financing Yourself- Part 3

1h 11m

Financing Yourself- Part 4

1h 10m

Sound Doctrine