Introduction: Money’s Fun . . . If You’ve Got Some!
How many of you grew up like I did—not rich?
We weren’t poor; we just weren’t rich. I remember when I was about 12 years old, I wanted to ride my bicycle about a mile down the road to the local Quick Sak. I was going to go down there and get an Icee. I said to my dad, “Dad, I need some money to go to the Quick Sak.”
My dad said, “How old are you?”
I said, “Well, I’m your son. I’m 12.” And he said, “You’re 12 years old. You don’t need money. You need a job.”
Y’all know the kind of dad I’m talking about? Some of you had one like that. My dad didn’t think that work was a management theory. It was something you did. It was an activity. And so he said, “You need to get some money. Where are you going to get some money?”
And I said, “Well, some of my buddies are cutting grass. I guess I could cut grass.” How many of y’all ever cut grass? Isn’t that fun? Especially when you’re doing it for other people.
So he took me to—true story—down on Nolensville Road. I grew up in Antioch, Tennessee, just outside of Nashville. He took me down the main drag to a print shop and printed up 500 business cards that said “Dave’s Lawns.”
I said, “Dad, this is a little overkill. I just wanted an Icee.”
I came home, and he said, “You’re going to knock on the closest 50 doors here in the neighborhood, and you ask those people with enthusiasm if you can have the opportunity to provide their lawn-care needs. Don’t you knock on the door and say, ‘You don’t want me to cut your grass, do you?’”
That’s how he taught me marketing.
I went and knocked on the closest 50 doors, and it worked. I’ve got 27 yards to cut. I was 12 years old. This is child abuse.
I mean, 19 of them were right in a row. I just went down the street. He made me keep a profit-and-loss statement on my business—my income minus his lawn mowers I tore up equals net profit. Yeah, I found out the difference in gross and net pretty quick.
It’s good to work. Work is a good thing. I’m proud of my dad teaching that mean little bald-headed kid that stuff.
Common Struggle: Broke Is Normal
• Pain can be a good teacher
I graduated from high school at 18 years old. Three weeks later, I passed my real estate license and started selling real estate. I took off to college and went through college in four years, which is what you do if you’re paying cash for it. You don’t hang out. You know, it’s like every time I stay here longer, it costs more. I figured this out, you know.
So I was working my tail off, getting all the way through college. And I met my beautiful wife, Sharon, and we got married. We graduated, and we started off our lives broke.
How many of y’all remember when you started broke, right? Oh, man. “We ain’t got money, honey, but we got love.” It was a good thing, too, because we ain’t got no money. I mean, it was . . . It was bad. We were eating off a card table. She was driving a 1902 Pinto. For you young people, that’s a car, not a bean.
We came out of college, and I went through a couple jobs. I started buying and selling real estate. I grew up in the real estate business. Mom and Dad were in the real estate business, and I was good at it. Starting from nothing, by the time I was 26 years old, I had about $4 million worth of real estate, a little over a million-dollar net worth, and my best year ever in that business, I made $250,000 cash taxable income in one year. That’s $20,000 a month. I don’t know where you grew up, but in the neighborhood I grew up in, that’s known as rich. I was having so much fun.
And here’s what’s weird. I do everything backwards, y’all. I didn’t grow up in church, and I met Jesus on the way up.
You know, most people meet him on the way down. Not me. I’m driving the Jaguar, everything’s going good, but I can’t get it to work in my head, and I went to a business conference, and this guy said, “You’ve got to have God in your life to succeed.” I came home and told my wife we were going to church, and she said, “Who are you and what have you done with my husband?” And so we started going to church, and I met God. I met him on the way up.
At 26 years old, our bank that we owed $1.2 million to got sold to another bank. I know that never happens in your town. They looked down, and they said, “A kid 26 years old owes us more than $1 million. Let’s limit this relationship.” That’s banker talk for “ruin his life.” They called our notes.
I had six months to come up with more than $1 million. The second-largest lender heard I was in trouble, and they called another $800,000. So I had $2 million due that’s all tied up in real estate. We spent the next two and a half years of our life losing everything we owned. We were foreclosed on. We were sued. We were sued so many times, we were on a first-name basis with the guy from the sheriff’s department who brings the little lawsuit papers. Sharon’s making him cookies: “Come on in, Harold.”
And finally, with a brand-new baby and a toddler, we hit bottom. We were bankrupt. I didn’t know what to do. I was 28 years old. My marriage was hanging on by a thread. I had met Jesus. I met him on the way up. I got to know him on my way down. Y’all know what I’m talking about?
Pain is not my preferred method of learning, but it is a thorough teacher. You will read the Bible in those times. And finally we were bankrupt. I remember standing in the shower with it as hot as I could stand it in my face and just standing there and crying because I was so scared, and there was nobody to talk to because I was so ashamed to tell anybody what I had done.
Because everybody else has their act together, right? At least that’s what we think. Until you find out what’s really going on behind closed doors.
• Fortunately, there’s hope for the man in the mirror
I had started reading a guy named Larry Burkett when I was in the middle of the lawsuit. He’s a guy who teaches that the Bible talks about money principles.
Now, I’ve got a finance degree, okay? I’ve got letters and licenses after my name, you know? And I still did stupid with zeros on the end. How many of y’all ever done something stupid? How many of you who didn’t raise your hand have a problem with lying?
And so I found out the Bible has financial principles in it. And I thought, “That’s pretty cool. If I’m going to be a Jesus guy, I ought to know what Jesus says. I better read this stuff.”
And I start reading it. And I went, “Oh. I didn’t do that right. . . . Mm. Ooh. That left a mark. . . . Ooh. Ow. Hey, I did that one right. . . . Ooh, my finance teacher actually agrees with that one. . . . Nobody agrees with that one.”
Have you ever done that? I started figuring out this is a love letter to me from my Father who’s crazy about me. Once I figured that out . . . It also became my marriage manual.
It’s how we’re married. And so I found all those places where she has to do what I say. And then she found those places that she doesn’t. You know, “Submit yourselves one to another,” or something like that. I don’t know where she found that one.
My kids are looking all through here for time-out. They’re like, “Dad, what’s this rod stuff?” and I’m like, “Come here, baby. I’ll show you.”
And we started handling our money this way, and I’ve got to tell y’all something: It worked. It turns out this is the truth. And to the extent this doesn’t line up with your feelings, get over yourself. You’re wrong.
To the extent your broke friend doesn’t like your biblical financial principle, well, if broke people are making fun of your financial plan, you’re on track. It’s like fat people making fun of your diet, okay? Think about this. Unbelievable.
So I started finding these things. And there’s, like, 2,500 Scriptures that deal with money and possessions. Our proper view of them, proper spiritual indication, and the tactical, actual thing you do with money that God says . . . it was amazing. And it gave me—a guy who was in a puddle—hope when I didn’t have any.
I do all of these TV shows on Fox and CNN, Good Morning America and CBS. And all these people, they’re real sweet and all that. And one of those anchors interviewing me about one of my books said, “Okay, this is amazing! You started with nothing, you became a millionaire, you lost everything, and now you’re a multimillionaire! How did you bounce back?”
I said, “Dude, when you fall that far, you really don’t bounce. It’s more of a splat.”
And so I was splatted, man. I had an “I surrender all” moment, and we took these principles and everything I could learn about them and understand them from an academic viewpoint, a spiritual viewpoint, a biblical viewpoint, a biblical-historical viewpoint, a socioeconomic viewpoint, a psychological viewpoint, an emotional viewpoint, a relational viewpoint, and I started to really understand how money works—not what your broke brother-in-law’s theory is.
Because everybody’s got an opinion in America today. Thank you, internet. Everybody’s important now. Everybody’s opinion matters now. Sorry, but it doesn't. It doesn't. I’m sorry. Isn't that heartbreaking? There are a lot of twits on Twitter. I’m one of them.
So we started applying these principles to our lives, and it changed our lives. And you know what happens when your life gets changed? People ask you a question.
I was with a good friend of mine last night. In the last year, he has lost 56 pounds. Everyone was sitting around the table talking to him—a bunch of guys sitting out there. He’s in my small group in my church. Everyone’s sitting around the table.
You know what we ask him? We ask him, “How did you do that?” When you see someone’s life get changed, their marriage gets saved, their children get turned around, their finances get turned around, their career goes on a trajectory that’s unexplainable, you always say, “How did you do that?”
Five basics for biblical finance: Easy to understand, hard to apply
When people started asking me, I started telling them. Then I started doing counseling at my church, and then we started a little Sunday school class. It started with four people in it. Seems like I looked up and there were 400 people in there—because it turns out I’m not the only one who’s stupid. If you've made mistakes with money, you know what that makes you? Over 12.
Every one of you has made mistakes with money—probably this week. And so have I, and I teach this for a living, and everyone listens to me. But I make fewer mistakes now than I used to make, because I found God’s Word, and I applied these devastatingly simple, but profound, concepts to my life and to my money. Now, there’s a lot of stuff we could talk about, but we don’t have time. I can boil it down to five things.
And the devil hates it when you take notes. So get your pen. If you do these five things that the Bible says with money, while earning an income . . . If you do them over and over and over and do all that they imply over a period of 15 to 20 years, you will prosper.
It may happen faster or it may happen slower, but you will prosper—with the possible exception of a devastating calamity hitting your life that we can’t control. We can’t control tsunamis and cancer.
But those kinds of things aside, if you apply these five things, the cause and effect, the sowing and the reaping always happens 100% of the time. And I will tell you, these are tough. They’re hard. They’re easy to understand, but they’re hard to do. If you’re really smart, you’ll to act like you don’t need them. Smart people have the most trouble with this. That’s why I was good at it.
1. Get on a budget
First rule: You have to have a budget. You have to write it down on paper, on purpose before the month begins. Every dollar has a mission; every dollar has a name. Not “sort of, kind of” in my head; not “It’s on my iPhone app.” Write it down on paper, on purpose, before the month begins. Every dollar has a name, and if you’re married, you agree on that with your spouse.
Jesus said, “Don’t build a tower without first counting the cost lest you get halfway up and you’re unable to finish, and all who see you begin to mock you and say, ‘This man began to build and was unable to finish.’”
“There’s another Christian that can’t pay his bills.” Listen, if you’re not going to drive it right, don’t put a fish on the back of it. Amen? None of this halfway doing stuff.
I’m Christian. I’m doing stupid things. I’m jumping off the cliff and going, “God, catch me.” And I call that faith. And He says, “No, you’re dumb. You can’t fly.”
There’s a cause-and-effect thing going on here. Write it down. If you manage money for a company called You, Inc. and you manage money for You, Inc. the way you manage money for you now, would you fire you? Don’t answer that.
My friend Zig Ziglar used to say, “If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.”
John Maxwell says, “A budget is people telling their money what to do instead of wondering where it went.”
If you were going to build a $4 million house, you would have a blueprint, every detail mapped out—where the plugs are going to go, where the heat and air’s going to go, how the roof structure’s going to be.
Everything is laid out before you break ground. You don’t roll up for a $4 million house on the hood of an old boy’s truck and go, “Put it over there and kind of make it like this.” You’ll build a pretzel. Don’t do that.
You have a blueprint. You have a plan. I run a company with hundreds of team members and multiple profit centers within the company. Every one of those folks has a plan for the revenue they’re going to produce in this month, this quarter and this year and the expenses they’re going to spend to do that in this month, this quarter and this year. Thereby we do annual projections.
It’s really not rocket science. It’s sixth-grade math. What are you going to do with your money? Don’t get to the end of the month and say, “Where’d it go?” You end up being a rat in a wheel. You’ll work your whole life—run run run run run run run run run run. Then you get to the end of your life, and there’s nothing.
You earned $4 million to $10 million in your working lifetime, and you have nothing because you didn't write it down. It’s a serious principle.
2. Get out of debt
The second one is: You've got to get out of debt and stay out of debt.
Now, everybody knows Dave Ramsey is going to say that. Everybody knows I’m going to say Proverbs 22:7: “The borrower is slave to the lender.” When you don’t have any payments, you know what you've got? Money. That was hard. Are we through yet? You getting this? It’s not deep.
“But I wanna . . . “ Yeah, that’s the problem: “I wanna.” I need nothing, but I want a lot of stuff. There’s nothing wrong with getting you some nice stuff, but there’s problem when your stuff gets you. When you've got a student loan that’s been around so long you think it’s a pet. When MasterCard is your master. When you have discovered bondage or American distress. “Well, you can’t live without debt.” That’s what my finance professor said, too, and he was broke. What’s wrong with that picture? A broke finance professor is like a shop teacher with missing fingers.
You have kind of a Dr. Phil moment with some of these people. “How’s that working for you?” All these people are running around, these “experts,” and all of them taught me . . . I was in the real-estate business. We used OPM—other people’s money. We were taught leverage and all the sophisticated views of leverage and all this stuff, and I can unpack it for you and I can pencil-whip you. I’m a math nerd. It’s what I do, but at the end of the day, there’s nowhere in Scripture where God used debt to bless His people. It’s not in there one time.
As a matter of fact, there’s not even one positive thing said about it. It’s not a salvation issue. It’s not a sin. It’s not any of those things. Biblically speaking, it’s just stupid.
You know, the Israelites were hemmed into the valley by the Amalekites, so they did a bond issue. You've got to know the Word. Study the Word. God will show you because He loves you. He’s got a plan for you.
3. Build quality relationships
The first rule is you've got to do a budget. Second one is you've got to get out of debt—because if you don’t have any payments, you've got money.
The third one is build quality relationships.
Now, this is kind of weird, but think about it. Marriage is grand; divorce is 50 grand. Dysfunction in the family costs you money straight up. Crazy parents, drunk brothers . . . if you let them come into your boundaries and interfere in God’s stewardship of your household, their dysfunction will cause you to be broke because you join in the dysfunction. And we all got it. Anybody who thinks they don’t have crazy in their family just hasn't been awake lately.
Everybody’s got crazy somewhere in the family. Some of it’s behind a closet door, some of it’s back over the hill, some of it’s around the corner. You might not know where it is, but crazy is in your family. And I’m no exception. I’m from hills in east Tennessee. When we do crazy, we do it big.
We sadly get to work with the effects of all the dysfunction because we do financial counseling and coaching. And so we've worked for 25 years now with addicts, and I just got to tell you that if you’re addicted to something, whatever it is—gambling and pornography are the two big ones right now. And certainly the old standbys—drugs and alcohol and that kind of stuff. People who are addicted—100% of them—are eventually broke. And people who stay with them are all 100% eventually broke until the addiction changes and Jesus heals it.
That’s an extreme example of quality relationships, but Tom Stanley, who wrote the book The Millionaire Next Door, did another book called The Millionaire Mind. In The Millionaire Mind, he studied decamillionaires—people with $10 million or more—and he found 39 correlating characteristics of those people.
Relationships had something to do with the top five: the length of their marriage, the quality of their marriage, their integrity—the kinds of things all having to do with behaviors, having to do with character, having to do with the ability to play well with others. Because guess who gets ahead in this world? Nice people who are generous and love other people.
That’s who you promote if they work for you; that’s who you are glad when they get promoted if they work beside you. That’s who we want to win.
“Well, the jerks always win.” You watch too much TV. Out here in the real world, the jerks get punished because we don’t want to do business with them. A guy comes to my house is a jerk and cusses my wife while fixing my heat and air? He doesn't get to fix my heat and air anymore. Hello.
Isn't this simple? If someone throws your food on the table and says, “Eat it,” I’m not going to that restaurant again. This is not service. This is abuse. This person’s not getting promoted. Is this how life works?
The Bible says, “Evil company corrupts good habits.” Your household income, your personal income over a period of time—not instantaneously, but over a period of time—will be within 10% to 15% of the average income of your 10 closest friends. You don’t let your kids hang out with juvenile delinquents. Why? Because they will become juvenile delinquents. Little Johnny down the street who’s smoking weed? You don’t get to run with little Johnny. You will be a weed head too. Right? Is this what we parents do?
We don’t do missionary dating at our house. Right? You come up to pick up one of my girls in front of our house and you honk your horn, you’d better be delivering a pizza.
You’re going to come in. We’re going to talk about Jesus before you go because you might meet Him if you don’t behave, right? This is how this works.
I’m an old-school dad. I’ll be here cleaning my gun when y’all get home. You know what I’m talking about, right? So this is the deal, y’all. Quality relationships change everything.
If you don’t let your kids run around with juvenile delinquents because they might become one, who are you running with? You’re going to become who you hang around with—your mouth, your mind. I can tell you, the movies you've seen and the books you've read have been influenced by the people you run with, and those affect your income, and those affect the outcome of your personal financial statement.
This is stewardship of your life. You’re stewarding your life.
4. Save and invest
Number four: Save and invest.
The Bibles says, “In the house of the wise are stores of choice food and oil, but a foolish man devours all he has.” Wise people save money. If you spend everything you make, you’re a fool. According to that, biblically speaking, I have been a fool. Because at times in my life, I spent everything I made.
There were times I tried to out-earn my stupidity because I’m pretty good at making money. I just wasn't always good at keeping it. Finally, God got hold of me in that crash, and He said, “Son, it’s time to be a grown-up. It’s time to put on your big-boy pants. It’s time to be mature in your faith and actually take control of what you’re supposed to take control of.”
“I’m not saving money. I have faith.” You don’t have faith. The Bible says, “In the house of the wise are stores of choice food and oil.” If you have faith, you would believe that. Wise people save money.
It’s not an act of faith to have nothing and hope the government’s going to take care of you. That’s not an act of faith. That’s an act of silliness. You know, you have to have a plan. We teach people to save for three basic things.
The first thing you save for is a rainy day. Grandma said it. Right? It’s going to rain. Better get ready.
Money magazine says 78% of you are going to have a major negative financial event in any given 10-year period of time. You’re going to have a job layoff; you’re going to have a car wreck. Something’s going to happen, and you’re going to need some money.
One I don’t understand is unexpected pregnancy. What?
But something’s going to happen, isn't it? You’re going to need some money.
The second thing you save for, you save up and pay cash for things. When you save up and pay cash for them, guess what? That means you had a plan. That means you saved money. That means you had a budget. And that means you don’t have any debt, because you just pay for it.
And this interesting thing happens when you pay for it. You own it. It’s over. Transaction’s over. Otherwise, we just pedal and pedal and pedal and pedal and pedal. How many of you are like me—you bought something, and by the time you finish paying the payments on it, you hated it? You just think, “I hate this thing. Payment, payment, payment. I’m sick of it.”
Save up and pay cash. “Weird, Dave.” I know. Normal’s broke. I don’t want to be normal. Weird is my goal.
The last thing you save is long-term investing so you can retire with dignity and send your kids to college. You know, $100 a month invested in a Roth IRA from age 30 to age 70, in a decent growth stock mutual fund averaging 12% is $1,176,000. From age 30 to age 70, you retire a millionaire. There’s no excuse to retire broke. When you spend it all, we don’t have a plan, we don’t save. We don’t think about who we’re hanging around with. We don’t play these things in together.
5. Give
So the first rule is you've got to have a written plan. The second one is you've got to get out of debt so all your money’s not going to the other people. The third one is you've got to deal with quality relationships. And the fourth one is you've got to save and invest.
The last one’s my favorite. People who win with money always are givers—100% of them. Whether they’re people of faith or not, they’re always a giver. Always.
You will not win with money until you learn how to give. And here’s why: When you give, you become a generous person. Not just financially generous or mathematically generous, but your spirit changes.
You’re the person who opens doors. You’re the person who carries groceries out to somebody’s car. You’re the generous person, and generous people fall back into number three—quality relationships.
You see these things all start to blend together, and you get this beautiful kaleidoscope of God’s Word called your life, and it transforms your life. Now, these are easy principles to understand. They’re hard principles to implement. But when you do, barring a calamity, 100% of the time, it works.
Closing prayer
God, we thank You for this day. We thank You for these people. Lord, I pray wisdom that leads to prosperity on every person and every family sitting here. God, show them Your Word. Cause them to become intrigued and curious, and cause them to change not only their lives, but their whole family tree.
In Jesus’ name, amen.
