In his sermon on 'Frugality and Investing,' Colton Neifert redefines frugality as financial prudence, emphasizing the importance of being good stewards of one's resources. He shares practical tips for managing finances, such as converting money to time to evaluate purchases, and scrutinizing recurring expenses to save more. Colton advises against unnecessary insurance and encourages examining the real value of savings versus earned income. He underscores the biblical principle of stewardship by highlighting the parable from Luke 19, illustrating the importance of investing wisely and seeking God's favor. Colton also advises investing in products and services one understands and believes in, and emphasizes the importance of prayer in financial decisions. He concludes by reinforcing the importance of using wealth for good, citing Proverbs to show that true wealth comes from God and should be used generously.

Well, we're going to transition now and continue to talk about matters of frugality and particularly in investing. And we've asked Colton Neyford to come up and share some things. You know, I've had a chance to watch Colton for many years. It was over half a dozen years ago. Colton showed up here as an intern.

And it didn't take me long to figure out that this was Mr. Frugality. They should have named him Frugality. I believe if I remember correctly he when he was an intern for the seven months he was here lived on and I'm not kidding a dollar 35 a day for food. How about that?

Well, was it food? What was it? I'm not sure what it was. Could it have been food? I don't know what it was.

But when I went up and saw it, it didn't look like food to me. But he lived on it and he was very disciplined. Anyway, Colton, would you come up and share with us? Good evening. So I couldn't afford to put $100, 000 in my slides and I don't have a laser pointer, so if you fall asleep, that's okay.

So I'm talking about frugality and investing. So I'm gonna quickly go over the what, the why, and then go through some practical tips for applying these things. So first off, frugality. A lot of times when you think of frugality, you think of getting by as cheap as possible and spending the least amount that you can on things. But really, frugality is financial prudence.

So it's managing your money wisely. And why should you do that? It's pretty clear throughout scripture. I think a lot of these guys have nailed it already. You know, we need to be good stewards of the things that we're given.

So let me jump right into some practical tips that I've used over the years, especially during the internship. So my first tip is to learn to quickly convert money to time and vice versa. So this helps you kind of place a value on what it is you're about to buy, so you can gauge whether or not it's worth it. A quick example of this is, so say you wanna go buy the new iPhone SE, it's 400 bucks, you make $25 an hour, you can quickly say, okay, 400 divided by 25, it's 16 hours, so two days of work. Is it worth me going to work for two days to acquire this phone?

You know, you can be the judge of that. The inverse of that is, you know, converting time back to money. So one example of this is we just moved and there's an office in the house that we moved into and I wanted to build a desk for that office. If I was gonna have the desk built, it would probably cost $1, 000. Parts would be about 250.

And I estimated 10 hours for me to build it myself. So you know cost minus parts is $750 divided by $10 an hour. It's $75 an hour that I'm saving or paying myself, however you want to look at that. So then you can kind of qualify, is it worth it for me to go ahead and build it myself for $75 an hour? Or should I just pay somebody to do it?

Do I have the time or not? So these examples don't take everything into account. That's just a quick rough way to look at it, but you need to consider the money that you're saving doing something yourself is not equal to money that you would earn. Because money that you earn you're gonna have to pay taxes on, you have to tithe, so there's going to be a good chunk coming out of that, whereas money that you save, you get to save all of it. So $75 an hour that I would earn doing a job somewhere is worth less than $75 an hour that I'm saving.

Same thing with the example of the iPhone, you know, go back and look at it, but boil it down to your net income, not the $25 an hour that you make on paper, but when you calculate based on net income, you can see that it may or may not be worth it. It gives you a better picture of how much you actually make per hour. So here's another example to look at. So this is more of a during the internship example, okay? So let's say you make 15 bucks an hour.

Once you subtract your taxes from that, your tithing, you get rid of your monthly costs like gas and food, your phone bill, insurance, etc. The way I figure it, you end up probably saving, if you don't have any other expenses, you end up saving about $1, 100 a month. So when you take your savings divided by 160, if you're working 40 hour weeks, that $1, 100 boils down to $7 an hour. You know, max is what you can be saving. So if you're going to go get your get ice cream with your friends and you look at you know you can get a dipped cone for a dollar or you can get a blizzard for five dollars, that four dollars difference initially might seem very minimal but when you think about working another 30 minutes just to get that slight upgrade, you know, the amount of satisfaction that you get from a dipped cone versus a blizzard, is it worth, you know, paying five times the amount?

So the next thing, Mr. Burke already touched on this, but trim your recurring expenses. These things eat away at you really quickly and you don't realize because they seem so small at first. Something I do a lot is when I get into some kind of a monthly commitment, I immediately think how much is this going to cost me over a year or over 10 years, et cetera. You can kind of learn to value it that way.

So 15 bucks a month is 180 a year, 50 a month is 600 a year. And then especially look at the benefit that you're getting from this recurring cost, especially things like Hulu or Netflix, you know, those things are, what, 15 bucks a month. So it's $180 a year, but especially as young men, you know, you have a lot of free time. It's better to put that free time into doing profitable things. You know, So here you're spending money on Netflix or whatever.

You're spending money to be less productive and make yourself less valuable. So here's another example. So you can look at recurring costs and subscriptions and things like that. But there are also things you do habitually, which are kind of the equivalent of a recurring cost. So one example here is going to McDonald's or whatever fast food joint.

So if you habitually go out to eat for lunch three times a week, it's easy to just pull up and go, okay I want, you know, my chicken McNugget meal, it's eight dollars, you know, do it and don't think about it. But if you, if you just, If you're satisfied with a little bit less, you can easily trim that $8 down into $3, get two hamburgers and a Coke versus getting the chicken nugget meal, and you end up saving $780 a year just by making that one little change. And it's not something, I think, if you look at it after the fact, after you've enjoyed your meal or whatever, how often do you go and you get a hamburger and you get a hamburger and you say, man, I wish I had spent the money and got a steak. You know, at that point you're satisfied. So it's, you're spending a good bit extra just for little pleasures that don't really matter.

Another thing Mr. Burke already talked about was insurance. Insurance favors the insurer. They're not going to sell you the insurance if they're not making money on it. One thing to do is calculate what you're insuring in your max loss.

Liability insurance obviously is a good idea because you could hit somebody who's driving a Porsche and have a $200, 000 bill. But for me, especially before I was married, I never drove a car that was worth more than $2, 500. So to pay for full coverage on that car, a lot of times insurance seems like you know a really prudent thing to do, really smart thing to do, but to pay for full coverage on that car was going to be an extra 50 bucks a month. So 50 bucks a month is another 600 bucks a year. Oh sorry, no it's another 60 bucks a year.

Wait. $600. Thank you. It's another $600 a year. So if I totaled that car every five years and didn't insure it, I would still be saving $100 a year.

So it's just good to think those things through. Sometimes it's easy to just pull the trigger and say, yeah, yeah, it's smart to get the insurance. So those are just a couple of things you can look at. Food, insurance, there's a hundred other examples where you can just kind of examine your monthly costs and your habits and trim that out and be saving more. The next point is that money has the same value irrespective of the effort exerted to obtain it.

So basically, if you make minimum wage and you have to work X hours to save $1, 000, that $1, 000 is worth a lot more to you than you know you would you your boss gives you a $10, 000 bonus or you make a bunch of money in the stock market or whatever you know and you get that $10, 000 immediately it's much less valuable in your mind You know, but If you go back and you calculate what would this, under normal circumstances, what amount of work would I have to put forth to get this, it makes you much less likely to quickly go blow that money on things that you don't need. Once you get that money, evaluate what are some things you could do. You could save it towards retirement. You could, you know, put it down towards your house or you could invest it. And so that brings me to my next topic which is investing.

What is investing? It's spending with the expectation of a return. So it's not even necessarily money. So like tonight everybody who's been giving these talks they put time into you know preparing these talks and to give these talks. And it's with the expectation that the people who are hearing these things, it will be more beneficial for them than the time that they put into it.

So it will yield a return. Why should we be investing? I think Luke 19 is a great example, where you have the nobleman who gives money to all his different servants. And one earns 10 minus for the one minor, the other earns five, and the other says, hey, I just kept this thing for you, and here it is back. Obviously, that's not what was expected from him.

He was expecting him to go, he said, go and do business till I come. He was expecting a return. So I think it's a biblical practice. Obviously, I know the point of that parable is not investing money. So practical tips on investing, I'm no expert in the stock market but what has worked well for me is understanding the risks you know don't don't invest what you can't afford to lose.

The fact that you're battling inflation and your money sitting in a savings account Right now is probably you know it's earning very very little So you want to put that money to work for you like some of these other men have said When I googled I saw an average return of 7% on the market, but anything is better than what you're going to get in a savings account. Invest money that you're not going to need immediately because you invest and it may be right before a dip. And you need to be able to ride out that dip. You don't just immediately sell. It's not a good practice.

But I would say pick a product that you use and you love. If you find something that just wows you and you find yourself telling other people about it and you can't believe that you're the only person using this, that's probably a good thing to invest in. Invest in things you understand, otherwise you're going to be just playing more of the game of playing the market. So my experience is that any time I have tried to play around with the market and be pulling my money in and out and investing in different things, doing these quick in and out investments, it's never worked out well. I would say just pick something and invest in it and write out that investment long term.

And definitely pray because God is sovereign and that definitely plays a big role in it I would say. So I've got some closing thoughts. I don't know how I'm on time. I probably went a little fast. I think I've been talking fast.

So here's just some things, you know, as I've been reading through Proverbs that I've written down, you know, in preparation for this talk. Intend to leave an inheritance for your children. Don't just crunch the numbers. Seek God's favor. You know, you see that.

Let me pull up some of these verses here. You know, He who oppresses the poor to increase his riches, and he who gives to the rich will surely come to poverty. Don't just do the most expedient thing. Be seeking God's favor. This was another one that I had to come to grips with during the internship and especially after saving for marriage was, don't worry.

I remember being so intent on saving X amount of dollars every month and, you know, criticizing every little expense. And I remember wanting Chick-fil-A one night and being like, no it's gonna be six dollars I can't do it and then just realizing we've been memorizing Matthew 6 where Jesus says, you know, don't worry about the money, Focus on the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added to you. You don't need to worry about those little things. If it's gonna be more expedient for you to go to Chick-fil-A and be studying the word, yeah, you can do it every once in a while, don't freak out about it. Let's see, so I have wealth comes from God.

By humility and the fear of the Lord are riches honor and life. Don't overwork to be rich, I think that's a direct quote. Because of your understanding, cease. That's another thing, you know, when you're considering time and money and, you know, valuing the money as time and being able to see that relationship, especially when you're a young man and you're saving for marriage, it's easy to use your extra time and your overtime to try and be making more money. But then especially as you get married and you have kids, and that time becomes a lot more valuable to you.

So it's good to try and get yourself in a position where that time is also gonna be more valuable to your employer because you don't wanna work, you don't wanna spend your free time working for $15 an hour because you would much rather, you would definitely spend $15 to have an extra hour with your kids. So I mean what's the point of all this? What's the point of earning money? Use your money for good. Proverbs 11, 24, 25.

There's one who scatters yet increases more, and there's one who withholds more than is right, but it leads to poverty. The generous soul will be made rich, and he who waters will also be watered himself. So it's just like the widow's mite. You don't have to, you know, don't set your goals and say, once I have $100, 000 in the bank account, then I'm going to help whoever is in need. Be practicing it already.

It's like what we said in Luke 19. If you're a good steward, If you're faithful with little, you'll be given more. Things don't satisfy. Like I said about the hamburger and the steak, you eat the hamburger, You eat the steak, it doesn't really matter in the end. You know, you can save up and be working for that car or that house or whatever, and once you get it a month later, it doesn't phase you.

You know, you're not still elated with that thing that you bought. Will you set your eyes on that which is not? For riches certainly make themselves wings. They fly away like an eagle toward heaven." So don't put your trust in what you can squeeze out of the time that you have. So, this is the whole key right here.

This is the whole thing. Proverbs 3, 9-10. Honor the Lord with your possessions and with the first fruits of all your increase, So your barns will be filled with plenty and your vats will overflow with new wine." I think that sums up everything. So there you