How we steward money matters. We are already stewarding money, whether we choose to pay attention or not. What does it look like to handle it well?
Learning a bit about money is a good place to start. Your options with money are simple: earn it, spend it, give it, save it, borrow it, or invest it. What makes it complicated is that every person has a different personality, lived experience, needs, and goals.
While there is nuance to it all, anyone that can fog a mirror can learn the basics of personal finance - you don’t need to be a professional!
A word about stewardship
I believe everything we have comes from God - He is the one who provides. We’re called to trust Him, and He promises to meet us in our needs. Money is not a replacement for trust in the Lord, and this is NOT a health and wealth gospel where our faith earns us monetary fortunes.
With that, trusting God doesn’t mean being careless with what He’s given us. Good stewardship means managing money in a way that leads to flourishing, being aware of the responsibilities that come with resources, humbling ourselves, and continuing to seek wisdom.
Good stewardship is not a pretty playbook with one right answer all the time. It can mean getting out of debt, giving to a person or cause, splurging on a date with your spouse, putting some aside for later - all of these in their own time. What you do with your dollar comes from following where God leads you, which may not make sense to anyone else.
He has also given us brains to assess, plan, and learn. You can trust God to provide and also set up an emergency fund - I don’t think those are mutually exclusive.
That’s the spirit I’m approaching this with. Not greed, anxiety, trying to hoard wealth, or build some empire. Just trying to steward what we have in a way that leads to flourishing, with grace for mistakes we have made in the past and ones we will make in the future. It helps to understand the pieces of the puzzle, but only you can put them together for your specific situation.
Financial flexibility
Generally speaking, having some financial freedom is nice to have. Flexibility to spend time with your kids, change jobs, pursue work you care about, or simply sleep with a little more peace of mind. Even work you love can start to feel like a grindstone if you’re run down, barely making ends meet, or moving backwards financially.
We’re after enough breathing room that money stops making our decisions for us.
How we’re going to do this
I’m going to walk through personal finance from scratch. I’ll explain it like I would to a friend over a beer. I will try to avoid technical terms and over-explaining things, trusting the wonderful work of other people to dive deeper.
You can jump ahead, but I recommend building the foundation and structure of your financial house before skipping to flashier topics.
Lastly, it is hard to flesh out tactical advice without sounding like a know-it-all. If it comes off that way, forgive me, it is not intentional. Much of this I have learned by charging ahead, falling on my face, then stubbornly admitting I got ahead of myself and should have slowed down. I hope to save you the same trouble.