The first part of this seminar discusses some foundational ideas and Bible principles of personal finance. In addition to laying the groundwork for the rest of the series, it also defines the Biblical definition of wealth and prosperity, helping to recalibrate our entire perspective on money.

Michigan Conference Campmeeting 2021: How Much More?

<p>The first part of this seminar discusses some foundational ideas and Bible principles of personal finance. In addition to laying the groundwork for the rest of the series, it also defines the Biblical definition of wealth and prosperity, helping to recalibrate our entire perspective on money.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

End-time Finance

Alistair Huong

01 Neither Poverty Nor Riches: Redefining Wealth and Prosperity

♪ You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2021 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

♪ Father in Heaven, we thank you for bringing us together to this beautiful campsite during these warm summer days in a time of peace.

Lord, I pray that you will guide our minds and our thoughts heavenward and also as we try to discover your principles for how to manage some of the more practical things in our lives such as our money help us to be faithful to your word and the principles they have given to us guide us this hour and this coming week as we learn and discuss and study together, we pray in Jesus' name, amen.

So you've come to this seminar, it's entitled End Time Finance, and we are going to be talking about personal finance.

We're going to be dealing with actual numbers and dollars and cents and practical things all couch within biblical principles and also within the greater context of our Adventist prophetic understanding.

So the first half of the week, we're going to be dealing with more of the basics.

We're going to cover personal finance and biblical principles.

And then the last half of the week, we're going to be looking more prophetically and sort of tying the things together.

And the title of our seminar this afternoon is Neither Poverty Nor Riches, Redefining Wealth and prosperity and this is going to give us the introduction to the week.

It will give you us some of the ideas that we're going to be discussing more in depth later on and also covering some principles at least in a broad context that we may not be able to dive really deep into but at least we will have given you a broad overview.

So let's begin and you must be wondering who I am.

My name is Alistair Huang and my official title is I am the Executive Director of Audioverse but beyond that I am also a chartered financial consultant.

That is 1 of the professional designations for financial planning, and I am currently in the process of starting a registered investment advisory firm in the state of Tennessee.

And so I do have some training in that regard, but beyond that, I am a business major, I have a degree in business, but that's not as important as the fact that I was also a math teacher in high school.

And I like to tell people, personal finance, you do not need a business degree to manage your personal finances, but you do need to know how to do math.

You need to know how to add and subtract and divide and know how to do percents and those types of things.

Now, about that business degree, I have a master's degree in business from Southern Adventist University.

What's interesting is that I was able to graduate debt-free.

And we're going to be talking about debt and student loans a little bit.

And if we have time then, I'll tell you the story of how I was able to get my education there with no debt.

My wife and I also paid off our house in 2 years and this was in – we bought our house in 2013 and we paid off our house in 2015, exactly the month when we became parents for the first time in 2015.

You can see them in the picture here, just 3 months ago.

So you will see my wife and my 2 girls on the campgrounds here and you will, if you're wondering what we are thinking bringing a three-year old here or a three-month old on this trip, we are wondering the same thing ourselves.

But it is certainly a blessing to have them.

Now, as far as the financial side, 1 thing that I was warned about when we had our first child is that be prepared that children will nuke your budget.

For us, in the year 2016, the very first full year that we were parents, we spent 25% of our take-home pay, we gave 26% away, and we were able to save 49%.

This was an increase from when we were before we had children.

But in 2020, this was last year, we managed to spend only 16%.

And we gave 27% away and we were able to save 57%.

And of course, I had an increase in salary during that time, which meant we kept our lifestyle the same and we didn't inflate our lifestyle and that's how these numbers work out.

And you must be wondering, what did you say you do again?

You must have money flowing out of your ears.

And you understand when we say ministry salary, that's a code word, right?

I work for a supporting ministry of the Adventist Church, Adi Versus, a nonprofit organization, and my wife, she doesn't work.

And so, oh, you've got to have a rich uncle or something, right, bankrolling you.

Praise the Lord, my parents and my wife's parents, they're alive.

So all of this is just through crunching the numbers, living by a budget.

And some of you must be wondering, do you have like some information, more information about how you did this?

My wife and I actually started a blog called Saving the Crumbs, and you can find us at savingthecrumbs.com where we have documented, maybe not as much recently, but for a number of years there, very, very minute details of our personal financial situation, our budget, how much we made, how much we spent for different things, our food budget, things of that nature.

So you can find us at savingthecrumbs.com.

And I also have some previous financial seminars that have already been recorded.

They are available at audioverse.org, which as I told you, that's where I work.

So you can look me up there and find some of my other presentations.

So now, for the balance of our time together, just to whet our appetite, to get us warmed up for the rest of the week, we're going to have a quiz, all right?

So the rest of our presentation is structured in the form of a true and false quiz.

10 questions, true or false, and I want to get your involvement, okay?

I'll be asking true or false, and you tell me what you think the answers are.

We should not talk about money because it is the root of all evil." Who thinks this is true?

Yes, that's what I thought based on the audio feedback I'm getting.

It's not that money is the root of evil, right?

1 Timothy 6.10, For the love of money is the root of all evil, which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

The issue is not with the green pieces of paper themselves, it's with the person holding them, right?

And there's 1 thing about personal finance.

It is 80% personal and only 20% financial.

The issue of money is so important not because of the dollars and cents and our net worth and our income, it's about a heart of the person, right?

You remember how much you paid for gas last year?

Because every time we go by the gas pump, we notice, oh, gas is down 5 cents this week, or it's up 50 cents from 5 months ago.

Money permeates every aspect of our lives.

We've got these little devices, right, in our pockets.

They suck money out of our bank accounts dry, right?

I mean, you buy the phone and the phones, you notice, they just get more and more expensive.

And they try to get us to get these subscription plans or else to replace them or to have warranties on them.

And then not only that, they want you to put your credit cards on there and you're buying stuff online and there's these things called app stores and it's like, oh, it's just 99 cents.

And so, all of a sudden, this thing's like a vacuum cleaner sucking us dry of our money and guess what?

We have money flowing digitally now and then, of course, in the age of COVID, I don't have to tell you that even sickness and physical health has very clear financial dimensions, not just not being able to go to work, the cost of medicine or seeing the doctor and health insurance.

02 Gather Up the Fragments: The Secret to Prosperity

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2021 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

Father in heaven, we thank you for bringing us safely together this afternoon.

We thank you for the spiritual, the physical, the social nourishment that we've had at camp meeting so far.

And as we spend a few thoughtful moments now reflecting on your counsel on something as mundane, but yet all pervasive as money, may you give us wisdom, and may you guide us into how to manage these resources for your glory.

So be with us this next hour we pray in Jesus name.

We will cover some basics, basic principles on personal finance and also some preview of what we're going to be discussing the rest of this week.

And just for in case you weren't here Today and tomorrow so the first 3 sessions yesterday today and tomorrow we are dealing with more of the nuts and bolts personal financial topics and Today as you can see on the slides and in your program, we're talking about gathering up the fragments.

We talked about how to define prosperity in a biblical way and how do we manage our money in light of that.

Tomorrow, we're gonna be talking all about debt.

And I will mention this up front in the program.

Initially, I had thought I could tackle both debt and budgeting at the same time.

As I got to preparing, I realized there was no way I could cover all of it.

And so I figured you would forgive me for cutting out the budgeting portion since most people tend to not care about budgeting so much.

Not to say it's not important, but we're going to be focusing on debt instead tomorrow.

And then the last half of the week, we are going to be taking a dive into prophecy and really asking some common questions that I have received in light of our understanding of the end times as well as the personal financial implications of some of those things and so You can look forward to that and we'll discuss more as we go along.

So we have our title and our topic in front of us, Gather Up the Fragments, The Secret to Prosperity.

Now, of course, I have to do my little plug.

Savingthecrumbs.com is the blog, personal finance blog, my wife and I wrote a number of years ago that sort of got us interested in the world of personal finance.

You can find a lot of articles about our personal journey with money there.

And audioverse.org, that's the ministry I represent as the director, and a number of my previous seminars on this topic as well as others can be found there as well.

And some of you have been asking me about this on the side.

I am a licensed professional financial planner, and I am currently in the process of starting my firm.

It's going through the state regulation process, and so I can't necessarily promote it or anything at that right now, but it is in the works just an FYI in case you were wondering about that.

Our first statement comes from the book Desire of Ages, And this is where we get the title for the day.

It says here, but he, capital H, so we're talking about Christ here, but he who had all the resources of infinite power at his command said, gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.

What story in the Bible are we talking about here?

A plus Bible students, you know that story.

Jesus words or these words meant more than putting the bread into the baskets.

We are to let slip no temporal advantage." So this statement really forms the basis of our presentation today.

And that is that in that statement that Jesus gave gather up the fragments.

He was communicating a principle a life principle and in the context of our seminar a financial principle and that is gather up the fragments economize be frugal be resourceful don't waste take advantage of the resources that has been placed into your care.

And that's really the thrust of what I'm trying to emphasize today.

And this story of the feeding of the 5, 000, this idea of gathering up the fragments, played a role in how my wife and I ended up calling our blog Saving the Crumbs.

Because saving the crumbs, gather up the fragments, it's more or less saying the same thing.

But in our case, when we first got married, my wife, being the good, avidist wife that she is, she wanted to save money, she wanted to bake her own bread, and so we were experimenting with the bread recipes, and initially it was crumbly, and it wasn't really, you know, it wasn't perfected yet.

And so when you cut the bread, when we cut bread on the cutting board, and there's some crumbs left over, what do we normally do?

We might just brush it off into the trash or into the sink.

But we decided, look, we're gonna be breaking a lot of bread, so let's just save the crumbs.

We had a container of Tupperware, we just saved the crumbs, we put it in the freezer, and eventually we had enough bread crumbs to use in some other recipe.

And so we realized, hey, this kind of story kind of illustrates the ethos, if you will, that we wanted to communicate in our blog.

And of course, I think it also highlights, in a sense, the idea of gathering up the fragments.

Now, our bread recipes no longer leave, you know, a trail of breadcrumbs, and so we don't necessarily do that quite as much now, but we still bake plenty of bread at home.

Let's go back to set the stage a little bit for where we're headed.

I was in 7th or 8th grade, I was maybe 9th grade.

I was that was the oldest I would have been with my first paying job.

And I wanted to get new basketball shoes because as you can tell I am just the most amazing basketball player right?

Why do you think I want basketball shoes?

Because everybody else had them and I had my very first job and my first job paid me a whopping $5.25 and some of you, you know, more senior than I will probably snicker at that and say, that's a lot of money, you young whippersnapper.

But as any sensible young person would do, I ran the math, right?

How many hours will I have to work earning $5.25 to buy that pair of shoes?

And at the time, I don't know if they were Air Jordans or not a lot of young people look at me and like you gotta be crazy $50 for a pair of Jordans when did you grow up so maybe they were just Nikes I don't know but whatever the case I remember I wanted a $50 pair of shoes and my parents are like you pay for them you got a job now So I realized I had to work 10 hours, right?

I'm fortunately a recovered video game addict, and I wanted a PlayStation.

And so, okay, how many hours am I going to have to work?

It's going to be 16 hours to make 84 bucks.

But then very quickly I wanted designer sunglasses because all my friends had them.

I wanted digital camera because all my friends had them.

And you can't just have the cheap knockoff stuff.

You got to have like the really expensive glass and all that stuff.

And of course I was in high school so immediately my head went to the new car and of course I wanted an SUV.

Money and a job equals the means by which we accumulate more stuff.

And pretty soon, it became very clear that there was not going to be enough hours in the day for me to work at $5.25 an hour to buy all of the stuff on my wish list.

The record, broken record in our heads, I just keep saying we need more money.

And isn't that really what we're communicated every day?

You turn on the news, you watch all the ads on social media and everything is telling us you need to buy more stuff, you need to have more stuff, you need to make more money.

And so we have, we are living now within a narrative on wealth and really it looks like this.

The narrative on wealth is well, let's just do what everybody else does.

Doesn't matter if they're flying off a cliff of insolvency or massive debt.

Everybody spends all their money, every paycheck.

Everybody on Facebook is going on fancy vacations, and everyone's Instagramming the amazing food that they're eating, that I somehow am entitled to as well.

And so we get put onto the rat race and it is based on this unspoken understanding that somehow happiness is equivalent to consumption or somehow the more we consume the happier we will be and Now the American dream is now defined as just having lots of stuff and having lots of stuff No matter what the cost might be Doesn't matter if you're leveraged up to your eyeballs with credit card debt in order to get that stuff.

As long as you have the illusion of owning that stuff, even though the bank owns it, right?

03 Slaves with Smallpox: Practical Tips on Dealing with Debt

Father in heaven, we thank you for bringing us safely together again this afternoon.

And we thank you for the blessings we've received in the fellowship with 1 another, and the studies we've had in other seminars, and the messages we have heard, the spiritual feast that we have truly been enjoying.

And we thank you for your presence in this place.

Once more, we ask that you will be with us to guide us into all truth, and to help us with some of the more practical aspects such as dealing with money and debt today.

So teach us, we pray in Jesus' name, amen.

So in case some of you are joining us for the first time, We are doing a seminar on personal finance and the first 3 sessions of this week today being the third out of the 6, we're dealing with some of the more practical aspects of money, the more day-to-day aspects starting tomorrow.

So starting tomorrow for the last 3 sessions, we'll be shifting gears a slight bit and we'll be looking at prophecy and looking at our financial, personal financial situation and personal finance in light of our apocalyptic understanding of what is coming in the world.

And so the end time finance portion is going to come.

However, I will say for those of you who have been faithfully attending, the principles that we have been addressing in the previous few days come to bear nevertheless within the context of the end time prophecy.

So I don't want to make it sound like we're going to just throw everything out, right?

God's principles are timeless and we can apply them throughout whatever circumstances we may find ourselves in.

And today we are looking in particular on the topic of debt And the title you see there is Slaves with Smallpox, Practical Tips on Dealing with Debt.

And savingthecrumbs.com, I've mentioned it before, It's the website where my wife and I have written about this.

And also, audioverse.org is the website where I am the director, but I also have some previous financial seminars available on there.

And if you looked previously in your program, you will see that the subtitle for this session was supposed to also include a discussion on budgeting.

And in the course of preparing, I realized I'm not going to be able to do it justice to do both topics in 1, and so I cut out the budgeting part.

I'm sorry, I know, that must really disappoint you.

But on Audioverse, I have a message entitled Counting the Cost.

It's from a GYC convention some years ago, Counting the Cost, and that is 1 entire hour-long session going through how to do a budget.

And I'll just tell you now, the way I approach budgets, it's not handcuffs telling us what we can't do, but it's a plan to help us accomplish what we want to do.

All right, that's really a mental shift in budgeting.

It's about what we can save to what we can achieve.

And so counting the cost, you can look that up.

And I have the slides available on there as well.

You can see the tables and the process of how I recommend budgeting.

And I want to hearken back to our first day together where we had our quiz and 1 of our quiz questions was this question.

So let's pick it back up right here, our discussion on debt.

I now write to ask you if you will let me have the use of $2, 000 to help me in bringing out books that the people need.

If I should fall in the conflict before the Lord's appearing, my sons would carry forward the work of circulating my books according to my plans.

When the expense of issuing my books is lessened, the sales will soon pay up all my debts." We looked at this in our first session, but to just recap, Sister White is not our example, Jesus is our example, but nevertheless, I find it difficult to believe that Sister White would so almost nonchalantly ask to borrow money if being in debt was on the level of moral crimes as a sin.

And we're going to come back to this statement to try to glean out some of the principles of why this was acceptable.

So it's not sin, necessarily, to be in debt.

However, the Bible and elsewhere in the spirit of prophecy, there are some other statements.

It says, the borrower is servant or better translated as slave to the lender.

This is Proverbs 22 7 and I think this stands to reason if we owe money to someone, then we are attached to them.

We really have not the freedom to do whatever we want.

And so, Avidus Home also says this, page 393, be determined never to incur another debt.

Deny yourself a thousand things rather than run in debt.

This has been the curse of your life, getting into debt.

Avoid it as you would the smallpox." And I like to tell the joke that it's COVID-19 and now nowadays avoid it like you would COVID-19.

The children of Israel were slaves for hundreds of years.

It's not a sin to be a slave, but should we aspire to be a slave?

And in the same vein, is it sinful to have smallpox or COVID or to be sick?

On 1 hand, yes, sin may not be on the moral level of a crime like breaking 1 of the 10 Commandments, but on the other hand, it's analogous to having a terrible disease or being in the condition of slavery.

You don't want either of those things, right?

So the summary really is, debt is bad, but not a sin.

It is something like sickness, you want to avoid it.

It's something like the condition of being a slave.

And that's also where we derive the title of our message this afternoon.

Interestingly enough, we, the American public, really are a nation of slaves with smallpox.

The average household debt in 2020 was $149, 230.

Average student loan balance, so it might be more than 1 loan, $58, 468.

And credit card interest per year on average is $1, 155.

It has been said that debt is as American as apple pie.

Series

End-time Finance

01 Neither Poverty Nor Riches: Redefining Wealth and Prosperity

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Homesteading

All You Need to Know About Money on an Index Card

58m

Workshop: Surrendering Our Finances

Neither Poverty Nor Riches

1h 17m

Does God Want Me to be a Millionaire?

1h 2m

Talking Points 1st Quarter 2023: Managing for the Master Until He Comes

12 Rewards of Faithfulness

28m

The Hyve Podcast Season 1

Profit is Evil. Right?

35m

Financial Freedom Seminar

Establishing Our Plans: The Financial Planning Pyramid

1h 3m

Ed Reid: Faith and Finances in the End Times

Creator of Heaven and Earth

59m

Financial Freedom Seminar

Neither Poverty Nor Riches: Busting Common Money Myths

57m

Talking Points, 4th Quarter 2021: Present Truth in Deuteronomy

10 Remember, Do Not Forget

30m

Young Professionals

Unlocking Your True Potential

1h 10m

Sound Doctrine