This podcast is dedicated to young people just getting started financially. Getting on top of wise stewardship of resources is critical for young people. The earlier they apply Biblical wisdom, the sooner they will experience some level of financial freedom.

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture. Today we want to talk about the Word of God's direction, particularly for young families, for young people, even young men. We want to give financial counsel to young men, particularly, or people starting out. There's no better time to get your finances in order, according to the Word of God, than when you're really, really young.

So we're hoping this might be helpful. And so Jason, we have a really, well, I was going to say he's an old friend. He's been a friend a long time. He's not that old, you know, but we've got Jim Zeiss with us. Hey, Jim.

Hey, how are you guys doing? Good to be with you. Good to see you. Yeah, good to see you. We're doing great.

Yeah, I think I've known Jim for over 20 years. Very dear friend. Just a blessing to our ministry year after year, a board member for many, many years. And his whole life he's been in commercial real estate and apartments and has a lot of financial wisdom. He came to our church recently and did a financial intelligence conference.

And I was so taken by it, I thought, let's do a podcast on this so he can kind of give some of the things that he shared with people. We did that in our church primarily for the younger couples and families and single people. Hey, we wanted to get even, you know, eight, nine, ten-year-olds there, and they were there taking notes and they got some really good stuff out of it. So what we're going to do is that we're going to just hit some of the high points of the things Jim shared with our church and talk about them point by point, seven financial practices, for young people get started early. Okay.

So the first one, Jim is we are stewards. We are stewards. Right. It seems like a basic principle, but we have to understand that God created this earth. He owns it.

He owns us and the things he's given us, just like the parable of the talents, we are to take the talents he's given us and be good stewards of them. And we'll have to give an account of how we've used God's talents. So I think when you're Dealing in financial situations, it's always good to remember it's not our money. It's God's money. And how can we use it to advance his kingdom and glorify him?

Amen. Yeah. Everything we have is given by God. The time that we have is allocated by God. You know, in Psalm 24, we're told that the earth is the Lord's and everything in it, it's all His.

And we are just stewards. We're not our own. Right. I think a lot has to do with it. How much do we really fear God?

Do we really believe that it's His money, His talents that He's given us to use? And like I said, we'll have to give an account of how we've used them. So I think that's important for any young family to remember that we are stewards. Amen. Okay.

Number two, second, stay away from the kingdom of thing them, the kingdom of thing them. That was one of my grandfather's sayings which my father picked up on. And he taught myself and my brother and two sisters around the dinner table all the time about business principles. That's what they called it in my grandfather's family, the kingdom of thingdom, meaning do you want to buy a bunch of things that really don't matter, or do you want to save your money, invest it, and get on the train toward financial freedom? Because when you spend your money on things, you don't have money to invest.

And I know a lot of people who get into the kingdom of thingdom and it leads them to living paycheck to paycheck their whole life. And it's not a good situation, especially, I've even seen Christian couples who spend their money and then after decades they don't know they don't know what they did with their money they don't have any saved. You know people talk about you know buy assets don't buy liabilities you know buy don't buy doodads don't buy things that actually don't have any value. You know, buy things that have some appreciating value. How would you explain that in practical terms, Jim?

The way our father taught us is if something's going to go down in value, you always pay cash for it. Meaning if you're going to buy a car, You don't take out a loan for it. You pay cash for it. If you have a reasonable expectation that something's gonna go up in value, then you can take out a loan for it. What else, I don't know if I answered your question or not.

Yeah. Hey, you know, my, my experience, particularly with young men is, Hey, a young man or a young woman can, can, can set themselves back 10 years by, by buying, you know, a new car, you know, when they're really young, Buying way too much car when you're young deprives you of enormous wealth that you could be actually accumulating. You buy this hot looking car and it depreciates really fast. You lose everything you put into it. And so my counsel to young men is, hey, look, buy a transportation car when you're young.

And then, hey, maybe when you get older you can buy whatever car you want, but if you go out and buy that big car early, it'll set you back for years. So, you know, go cheap on the young side of your life. So Scott and Jim, here's Jesus in Matthew 6 24, no one can serve two masters for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon, mammon being material possession. So that is right to what your grandfather told you, stay away from the kingdom of thingdom, because it really does become a master and not a servant.

Yeah. Hey, you know, people's prosperity, you know, often dies on the sort of vanity. Cars are, you know, we're very tempted to make those vanity items. But yeah, so stay away from the kingdom of thingdom. Great statement.

I back to that point for just a minute, I saw or I had lots of friends in high school. As soon as they turned 16, 17, they wanted to go buy a car and they spent a lot of money fixing it up and they spent a lot of money on insurance. And when it was time for them to buy a house or start a business, they didn't have any money. My brother and I walked a lot of places or we rode our bikes there. When I got married, I needed a car for transportation.

I bought a car for $75 and it burned a quarter oil a week, but it got me where I needed to go. I had one of my, after this, after this conference, we did one of my little grandchildren. I think she, she, I think she's seven. I said, what did you think about the conference? She said, stay away from the kingdom of thingdom.

So there you go. That's right. Okay. Number three, number three, recognize how you spend money, recognize how you spend money And you talked, you talked about different kinds of spenders. I think you gave us three kinds of spenders.

That was really helpful. My brother and I have lots of employees and we're lending them money. And When we talk about this employer, that employee, we started putting them in categories like my father would and we'd say, oh, he's a spender. Oh, she's a saver or this person over here, they're an even Steven. And I think you can figure out what the categories are.

The spender spends their paycheck. They save little or no money. The saver saves. And the even Steven, he'll spend Almost all his money, but he won't go into debt. He'll get all the way even and then he'll quit spending We call those the even stevens What's your advice of the even steven?

Be a saver Would quit spending so much money No, that's great when my father was my father grew up in the depression and they had a saying in his neighborhood in St. Louis, if you got your paycheck and you spend it all, they termed that you had the spending sickness and that you needed counseling. And he would always tell us the names of these two ladies. When they got their husband's paychecks, they would spend it all. So they had to get counseling for the spending sickness.

So they would learn how to start saving their money. So my father told my brother and I a thousand times growing up, don't marry a woman with the spending sickness because if you're a saver and she's a spender you're gonna be bucking heads all the time. How can an ox and a donkey pull the same wagon? You know you have to be on the same page with your spouse. So you took us, you've already, you've taken us to this, to the next one, and that is don't marry a woman with a spending sickness.

And would you say don't marry a man with a spending sickness? Oh, absolutely. It's, it's both ways. Yeah. In the depression it was, it was unheard of to get your paycheck and spend it all without saving money.

In fact, a lot of people, they would save money by putting it under their mattress in their bedrooms. That's what my father and mother did. They didn't trust the bank, so they put it under the mattress. Yeah, I think you're putting on your finger on something profound, which is that the Depression-era people thought, ended up thinking about money very differently than the modern brain does, because we've been living for a long time in relative affluence and where borrowing was really cheap. And people who came through financial difficulty learned a lot of lessons that maybe my generation has not learned but could really benefit from.

Right, they remembered when the banks were closed and you couldn't could not get your money back out of the bank because the banks were a lot of banks were going bankrupt during the depression. Okay let's move on to number five Be on a budget. Be on a budget. Being on a budget is very important. You don't know how much money you could be saving unless you're on a budget.

And if you're on a budget and you take your wife out to dinner or you take a vacation, you don't have to feel guilty about the money you're spending because you've already set aside the money for the budget. But I think it's very difficult to obtain financial freedom unless you're on a budget. I have many employees that have to borrow money for $400 to buy a couple of tires for their car or something breaks down in their car. They don't have $400. In fact, there was a Federal Reserve study that they interviewed 3,200 couples and asked them if you had a $400 unexpected bill, would you have the money to pay for it?

And they said no. 40% of them said no, they would not have the money. 40% of 3200 couples. I think being on a budget is a way to save. My father would tell us one of the principles from the book, The Richest man in Babylon, pay yourself first.

Meaning if you make $500 a week, if you want to save $200 a month, you would take $50 out and put that in the savings account, paying yourself first, and then try to figure out how to live on $450. That was a book that almost all kids read. It was written in 1926, The Richest Man in Babylon by George Clawson, to help children understand the value of money and how to save it and reinvest it. Yeah, it's really helpful book. You can get it on audible.

Like you said, it's a, it's a short book, but really, really profound. Another one that I found helpful when my kids were growing up was Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. He walks through a lot of these principles of how to preserve the wealth that God has given you, and there's some really, really good resources out there. I married a frugal mathematician. You did.

So if you can marry a frugal mathematician, you are setting yourself up for happiness in many ways. But she has really been the queen of the budget for as long as we've been married. And so she allocates things in advance of the need and wow does that free you up from stress. Meaning one of the things she's allocating towards is car expenses. So there's money that has been held aside paycheck by paycheck for car expenses knowing not exactly what they would be or when they would be, but knowing that they would be.

So when we have a car expense, we're pulling from existing resources, not panicking, thinking, where are we going to get this money from? Yeah. Amen. That's really good. Yeah.

Okay. You married up, Jason. Yeah, no kidding. Yeah. No kidding.

Everyone tells me that and they're all right. Oh my. Yep. That's really neat. It's such a blessing to have a spouse that thinks wisely and not indulgently and actually thinks about things you really need, not just the things that you want.

Yeah. Maybe you could talk about that, Jim. I mean, there, the, there, our wanters are very powerful. Understanding the difference between wants and needs is really important. Right.

It's my in-laws, they put a, they put a sign on their refrigerator. And I think they had one in their car too, but the sign said, Do I need this? Or do I want this? When they were trying to get out of debt? And I was just going to share there's in order to be financially successful, I think you need self control, self denial, self sacrifice, and self discipline.

We need those, the same traits Jesus had when he was on this earth, self-control, self-denial, self-sacrifice, and self-discipline. We have to be able to have that money when we need it, but it's, you have to discipline yourself in order not to spend it all. Boy, isn't the Book of Proverbs a great place to go to fortify all those things that you just mentioned. That's right. Okay, so let's go to number six.

Now this is particularly directed to young men. Start your business before you build your house. What do you mean by that? Well, that goes back to, I think it's Proverbs 24, 27, where it talks about, let's see, I had it somewhere. Here, I've got it in front of me.

Prepare your outside work, make it fit for yourself in the field, and afterward, build your house. My brother and I, when we were 14 and 13, we knew we wanted to buy apartments. My father told us constantly, you're gonna have to start your business before you get married. Because once you get married, it's gonna be a lot more difficult because you're gonna have more bills, more responsibilities, you're gonna have a wife and children to take care of. And you only have a certain amount of capital.

I have people call me and say, my son built this house and he already bought this house and all his capital is tied up in there, but the house is just about paid for, but he wants to start a business. What should he do now? And I, I suggest sell the house, start the business, and when the business is going, then go back and buy the house. These young men only have a certain amount of capital. How are you going to use it to create more capital?

Just like Matthew 25, You're given five talents, two talents, or one talent. Jesus expects us to take the five talents and create five more, the two, and create two more. The one who had one talent, he buried in the backyard and the master says you wicked lazy servant, you shouldn't should have done something with it. For some people, buying a house first and going that way, it is probably the best way for them if they're not interested in starting a business. But it's, we were taught growing up as far as retirement, we didn't talk about retirement, but some people say, oh, if I had a million dollars, that's my goal to save a million dollars for retirement.

That was not the goal in our house. If you made 20,000 a year at your job, the goal was to create 20,000 a year in passive income that matched your working salary so if you did want to stop your job, you still had the same salary coming in. So for young men, it's you have a lot more energy, have a lot more time, less responsibilities to start your business before you get married. My brother and I have been partners, like you said, Scott, for 47 years, we've owned apartments. We started our business six months or seven months before I got married because I knew once I got married, it was going to be a lot more difficult to start a business.

That's great. Okay, seventh, the final principle, find enjoyment in your labor. My father would always tell us, whatever you do, you should love doing it. If you want to be a dentist, then you know, you should love it. My father would on Sunday nights, he would tell us, or he would ask us, you know what tomorrow is?

And we'd say Monday morning, just kind of teasing. I mean, say, No, it's Monday morning, I get to go to work tomorrow. I can't wait to get there because it's so much fun. And I love it. And when my brother was seven and I was eight, on a Friday night, my father told us, tomorrow, you boys are going to work with me.

We're going to go work on the apartments. We couldn't sleep Friday night. We were so excited we're going to get to go do this work thing that my father loved doing. So in the book of Ecclesiastes, it says five times that one of God's gifts to men is that you would love your labor. So whatever you do for a living young man, just make sure you love it and you enjoy it.

Like I said, I've been doing apartments for 47 years and I still love it. I still love going to work every day. I love taking an apartment that's all beat up and make it really nice for someone to move into. You know, this is so true. Jim is very happy in his labor.

You know, when I've called him over the years, you know, Jim is actually happiest running a jackhammer. So I'll hear a jackhammer or I'll hear, you know, a paint sprayer compressor or a hammer drill, you know, or something like that in the background. And I know Jim is just, just soaking in the beautiful sounds because he loves, he loves his work. I do love jack hammering And I just turned 70 in August and I got to do a bunch of jackhammering this summer, which I was really happy about. Sometimes I come home and I'm all dusty and dirty and my wife will say, what were you doing today?

I tell her, well, we had to jackhammer this apartment and I, I got to run the jackhammer and she says, why were you running the jackhammer when you have all these young guys working for you? And I, I said, well, why did they get to have all the fun? Oh, that's great. We have to realize for young men, we have to realize manual labor is a good thing. It's not to be looked down upon.

Right. Like Martin Luther said, all jobs are honorable before God. Amen. Amen. Well, Jim, Jim, you told the tale of two families.

Why don't you tell us the tale of two families? Yeah, there's a one family is the wise family and the other family is the foolish family. True stories. My father and mother were married in 1949. My grandfather had passed away when my father was 20.

He got married when he was 23. My grandfather left him inheritance of $200. So basically my father and mother got married with no money and they the first week they're married they sat down and said what can we do where we're not living paycheck to paycheck our whole life? My mother was working full-time, my father was working full-time. So they sat down, planned out a budget, and they said, let's see if we can save half my father's net income and we can start investing it.

So they did it the first month. Well, first they found an apartment that fit their budget, $14 a month, And their friends were renting apartments for 65 to $85 a month. Their apartment was above a cleaner's and there was no hot water in the apartment. Any hot water they needed to wash dishes or take a bath, they had to heat up on the stove. Oh my.

And guess what? It was $14 a month. And that fit their budget. So they saved half his net income the first month. They did it the second month, the first year, the second year, they continued it for 65 and a half years, the whole time my father and mother were married.

They would save half my father's net income and invest it. And after 25 years, he says between 23 and 25 years, he had the same amount of passive income. He was making $20,000 a year throwing newspapers and he is making 20,000 a year passive income. So he always told us that story growing up. And then the Foolish family is my in-laws, which I have permission to tell their story because they want to help other young couples.

This is a Christian couple. They've been married for 26 years and they both, they were both 22 when they got married, but they started working when they were 16. So six years of working before they were married and then 26 years of working. She's a nurse and he's a janitor in a public school. They called me up and wanted to borrow $2,000.

This is about 10 years ago. And I said, sure, you can borrow the money. And they said, but we want to come into town and talk to you about our finances. So they came into town and I said what's going on with your finances and they said well we have all our credit cards are to the maxed out. We're close to fifty thousand dollars in debt.

We live in an apartment. We have a nine year old car. We're renting a big screen TV. We're renting our washer and dryer and we have five payday loans out. And after we pay all our bills, all the payday loans, we have $35 for the whole month to buy groceries and put gas in the car.

Oh my. And we're at the end of our rope and we cannot survive on $35 a month. I said, okay, so what are you going to do with the $2,000? Well, they said our car needs $800 worth of work, which we didn't budget for, like your wife would do, Jason. And they had a $1,200.

The last payday loan that they took out was $1,200. So they, they wanted to pay off their payday loan and fix their car. Well, this payday loan was $125 a month. $100 went to interest and $25 to principal. Welcome to payday loans.

Yep. So with, so they were going to pay off the $1,200 and they get rid of that $125 a month payment. So they would have 125 plus 35 that would give them $160 a month to buy groceries and put gas in their car. They only had one car at the time. So I wrote them a check, gave them the money, and I said, I want you to do me a favor.

And we listed the years that they had been working, 32 years. And next to each year, I had them write in as good as they could remember the net income they made for each year. And they each did it, 32 years worth of labor for both of them. And I got out my calculator and added it up and it totaled over 1.2 million dollars. Take home pay.

And I asked them, what did you do with the 1.2 million God gave you to be a steward of? And they said, well we'd stop at the quick shop and get a coffee and donuts on the way to work. And then we like to eat out for lunch because you know, we're working full time. And then they did the same thing for dinner a lot of times. They're renting a big screen TV, renting a washer and dryer.

They said we don't have a nice car. We haven't taken any nice vacations. The wife started crying. She said, I don't know what we did with the money. I said, if you would have just saved 10%, you guys would have $120,000 in the bank.

With investments, Who knows, it could be $150,000 or $200,000 in the bank. So they, I also told them, you know, you've been stranded at Grand Central Station for financially for the past 32 years, you haven't moved. And they needed to get on a budget. They were not tithing. They said they couldn't afford to tithe.

So They got their finances in order and they got on a financial train to financial freedom. They're on it now and they've made a lot of progress. It took them almost seven, probably closer to eight years to get out of debt though. But they, they want other young couples not to fall in the same trap they fell into. Yeah.

But it was, it was both ends of the spectrum. My parents, from day one, they're on their road to financial freedom. This couple, no plan, and just spending, they were both spenders. And what's kind of ironic is, my parents are not Christians. And my father was teaching us biblical principles growing up.

And here's a Christian couple, members of a Christian church, Baptist church, and they're the ones in financial trouble and the unbelievers are prospering financially because they're following biblical principles. Right. And my Christian relatives are not following biblical principles and get into financial trouble. So in our household growing up, my father would ask us, when we were little kids, he'd ask us, if someone gave you $5,000, what would you do with it? And the right answer was, how do I make this $10,000?

Where my father would have, he would ask that when cousins came over and spent the night or kids in the neighborhood ate supper with us he'd ask them the same question what would you do with $5,000 a lot of times they'd say get a bike or take my family on vacation. Remember, this is in the 1960s. And my father take his knife and he pounded on the table and he'd say, wrong answer. $5,000, $10,000 or he'd pound his fist on the table. He wanted to make the point.

Yeah. Amen. It just teaches us that no one floats into financial freedom. In other words, if you're just in, if you're just On a ride in the inner tube down the river where you float to is not financial freedom It requires some paddling upstream to get to financial freedom and the sooner you start the better off you are You know Paul told the Corinthian Church that it's required of stewards that they be found faithful. And of course, you just told the story of two stewards, two different kinds of stewards.

So anyway, we did this, you know, particularly for young people, young single people, young families and things like that. The top seven financial principles for young people. So Jim, thanks so much. That was really helpful. You're welcome.

It's fun guys. Yeah. See you later. See you later. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast.

We sure hope to see you next time. Thanks for listening to the Church and Family Life podcast. We have thousands of resources on our website, announcements of conferences coming up. Hope you can join us. Go to churchandfamilylife.com.

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