Despite your best attempts to get financially free, is your money STILL out of your control? Then it may be time to dig a little deeper…

After speaking to a number of clients this week (of many different circumstances and walks of life), I’ve come to believe that if you can take these four steps to change your money, you will RADICALLY change your life.

Not complicated (nor very technical), they’re difficult only because they go to the CORE of who you are and what you believe, and therefore directly affect your money mindset!

Despite your best attempts to get financially free, is your money STILL out of your control? Then it may be time to dig a little deeper…

After speaking to a number of clients this week (of many different circumstances and walks of life), I’ve come to believe that if you can take these four steps to change your money, you will RADICALLY change your life.

Not complicated (nor very technical), they’re difficult only because they go to the CORE of who you are and what you believe, and therefore directly affect your money mindset!

Show Notes

• [01.49] The weight of money worries

• [04.57] God’s promised land as it pertains to money and your future

• [06.21] Your values

• [08.21] The sources of knowledge that you draw from

• [09.59] ‘The tree is known by its fruit”

• [10.52] A mindfulness exercise

• [13.26] How we change our thinking to change our actions

• [18.54] Talking to the right people about money
  

Quotes

"There are no quick or easy fixes when it comes to money." - Lisa Linfield

"It's not a fault in our KNOWLEDGE that we aren't changing our behaviour (it's not what you know). The fault is in our thinking." - Lisa Linfield

"We are very good at living in an echo chamber, where we tell ourselves what we value, but our ACTIONS tell a different story." - Lisa Linfield

"Our resources are always constrained. There is never an end to our desire." - Lisa Linfield

"All problems look very different given time, and when approached with grace." - Lisa Linfield

Related posts and episodes

• The humbling discovery that’s shifting my focus

• The powerful insight of your bank statement and calendar

• But… I’ve always been bad at money!

• How to use Parkinson’s law to have more money

• Save for tomorrow, tomorrow

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TRANSCRIPT

When I felt God’s call to teach people about money, He graciously gave me a picture and a verse that I use as my true North.

The picture was of God’s children, walking a dusty hard road, huddled together hunched over, carrying the most unbelievably heavy weight on their shoulders.  Like oxen, carrying a thick, heavy, yoke.  They were exhausted… trying to walk the road of life yet struggling to keep one foot in front of the other with this weight of worry.  That worry, he showed me, is money. That his children were struggling under the burden of money.

And the verse he gave me was Joshua 1 vs 8… Be strong and courageous, for you will lead these people to inherit the land I swore to their ancestors to give them.

I think in my journey since then, I’ve battled in equal measure with both of them.

I want so much to run into the pictures of the people I meet and just remove the weight, give people a quick fix, wave a magic wand, and find an easy solution to their challenges.  But like the old saying, give a person a fish and you feed him for a day.  Teach them to fish, and you can feed them and their family and village for a lifetime.  There are no quick fixes to money

I’ve also struggled with the verse God gave me.  Strong and courageous?  Oh my goodness, I want to run and hide all the time.  Taking on money as your area of teaching, particularly from a Christian point of view, is taking on the current world view of society.  It’s bringing a mirror to people’s spending, shining a light on their lack of provision for their future, and that neither wins friends, nor keeps you safe relationally.  So on so many occasions I’ve wanted to run and hide.

But what has impacted me greatly is the second part of the verse… Lead my people to the land I want to give them, I promised to give them.  And that’s where the fun, joy and wonder of being used by God and given a front row seat over time to watch people live a life more free of the burden, the worry and the stress of money.

So what is the promised land when it comes to our money and our futures?

The promised land always has, and always will be, returning to the Garden of Eden for each one of us.  A place where we walk WITH God, where we are free, yet follow His Will, and where we look after his land and people in accordance with his will.  A place where he is our one and only focus.  A place where he protects and provides for us abundantly.  Sounds good, right?

God has always been first and foremost interested in his relationship with us, and in being our FIRST.  Our one and only God, the only thing we worship.  As Jesus summed it up in Matthew 22, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…. And love your neighbor as yourself.

This, Jesus is saying, is what is most important in life.

What is most important in your life?

Now interestingly enough, the Oxford Languages calls “the principles or standards of behaviour, one’s judgement of what is important in life” – Values.  The Cambridge Academic Dictionary defines Values as “the principles that help you to decide what is right and wrong, and how to act in various situations”

What I love about these definitions is that it brings what we value as important from something in our head, to how we behave and ACT

So I want us to pause for a few seconds for you to quickly jot down your top 5 most important principles or values you hold.  Don’t overthink it, just write down what you believe, in order, are the top 5 things that you judge as important in your life, that govern the way you act.  We’ll get back to that just now.

Here’s the thing… It’s not what you KNOW, although that may influence your thinking, it’s how you think.  Ask all of us trying to manage our health and waistline – we all KNOW we shouldn’t eat sugar and we should exercise daily, and eat lots of green stuff… yet, in the evening, when our willpower is low, we think ourselves out of what we know – it’s just one, life’s too short, I’ve had such a hard day… and in goes that piece of yummy!!!!  We convince ourselves our reasons are superior to the facts.

Now most people have two sources to draw their thinking from – what I call The World Out There (social media, our parents, teachers, etc), and their own experiences.  This is how they judge what is important in life.

But as Christians, we have two additional sources… we have the bible, and the prompting of the Holy Spirit that we’re given.  And depending on how much time we spend focusing on each of these four, depends on what influences our thinking the most.  If we focus on what the world says, it will crowd out the still small voice of the spirit…. And if we focus more on our feelings and experiences, it will crowd out what God says

But the rubber truly hits the road in our Actions.  Luke 6:43 and Matthew 12:33 have Jesus telling us that the tree is known by its fruit.  It is there that we see what we TRULY believe.  We are, unfortunately good at living in an echo chamber where we tell ourselves what we value, but our actions tell a different story.   

And it’s in this dissonance between actions and thoughts that God truly focuses.  –when we will gently have a mirror lifted by God so we see how incongruent our lives really are. 

As much as I profess health to be one of my top values, the triple caramel ice-cream tub and my track record of exercising tell me that it isn’t.  No good tree bears bad fruit. 

So what does all this have to do with my money?

In August 2020, I did a podcast episode 147 on “The powerful insight of your bank statement and calendar”… because here’s the thing… our values, “the principles or standards of behaviour, one’s judgement of what is important in life” is reflected most in two things

1.       How we use our time

2.       How we use our money

What you want to value is written on the list you hold in your hands.  What you truly value is expressed in how you spend your money and your time.

So tonight, I want you to do a mindfulness exercise - go home and check the list you hold against your bank statement…. And just observe what comes up for you… NO JUDGEMENT… What you’re your bank statement tell you about your REAL values? How do you justify your spend?  What are the objections.  No judgement, just allow God’s spirit to gently walk you through this time of prayer.

God’s promised land for you truly IS a land free of worry, free of burden, where we truly do Love the Lord and our neighbour.

But the first step towards that is absolute congruency between our values and our actions.  Between our priorities and the way we spend our money.  The tree is known by its fruit.  And the first way we’ve looked at is to look at our actions and see what it ACTUALLY says about our thinking.

The second is to look at how changing our thinking can change our actions.

Now I’m a no-fluff kind of human.  I like things simplified for my crazy brain to make sense of things, and so over time, I have developed what seems a stupidly simple concept, but is one of the most powerful ways of thinking that actually changes behaviour

From an everyday perspective, the tool I use most is the tool called “Worth It”.  Once you’ve decided what truly is worth it to you, what are the top priorities for you in your life, it really becomes the scale against which you make life’s decisions.

Now worth it started in our family with reference to sugar.  My twinnies absolutely LOVE jelly’s – jelly babies, jelly jersey’s, jelly sours… that’s there thing.  For me, it’s chocolate and triple caramel ice-cream.  So when they offer me their jelly’s, I decline and tell them that FOR ME… it’s not worth it.

When it came to moving here from Joburg, we narrowed it down to a beautiful home in Boschoek and our little home in Hilton.  Naturally, when the discussion came as to what we preferred, the girls all unanimously voted for Boschoek – the house was spectacular.  So we told them that whilst that was absolutely fine, it would mean that we would have no money for holidays.  So we could have the Hilton Home AND holidays, or the Boschoek home and staying put.  For our family, holidays are our worth it, and we’ll give up a lot to be able to spend time together in God’s nature.

Here's the thing about life – our resources are ALWAYS constrained.  And there NEVER is an end to our desires.  No matter who you are or how much you have… as humans we always want that one thing we don’t have – ask Eve.  And so worth it helps us to prioritise -  it always has a reference point..  Gummies or ice-cream.  Big house or holidays.  And what’s worth it to me could be completely different to what’s worth it to you. 

So when it comes to money… it’s a juggling act of a finite resource.  Spend without guilt on what’s worth it – but the flip side is that for everything else that’s not worth it, ruthlessly cut back. 

When we looked at our expenses, our biggest single line item, apart from schooling, was the monthly cost of our house.  But, for John and I, our priority value, way above a house,  is our family.  And realising we have so little time with our girls still home, we made a radical decision to sell up everything in Joburg and move to Hilton.  Time is our most precious resource, and our worth it.  So we chose to ruthlessly downsize our biggest cost, our house, and chose one that was a quarter of the size, and a quarter of the cost each month.  But that gave us the freedom to live into what is really worth it in our lives – time with our girls – because we no longer needed the salaries we previously did.

It sounds very noble and easy in hindsight, but I always say, it’s by God’s grace that we landed where we are.  And he has graciously used our MANY mistakes with money, and our wobbly decisions, to enable me to teach the many people I do about money.

The second way we change our thinking to change our actions is by returning to the concept I touched on earlier – we change the inputs into our thinking.

The thinking that determines action in the moment comes from four key sources

1. The World out There – what society has told us about money from when we were little

2. Your own experiences – both positive and negative will hugely impact how we act with money

3. What the bible says about money

4. How in the moment we are led by the holy spirit to spend our money

Whilst TWOT tells us so much junk about money and especially that it will enable you to live a happy life, there is something that I do want to suggest can make a big change to our money.

You need to talk more to the right people about money. 

Jesus talked A LOT About money.  16 of his 38 parables relate to money, wealth and possessions… with more words of his focused on this than on any other topic.  So why is it that our society speaks so little about it?  A problem shared is a problem halved… and there is so much wisdom out there as to how other people have handled your difficulty….

 And if not to a friend, to a financial coach or adviser – we see people addressing life’s challenges in SO many different ways, something may help.  As a client this week said – “it’s so nice to get a different perspective as we live in the echo chamber of each other, and miss the other options we don’t even know about”.

The world has moved on so much in its thinking about money.  Take even the concept of retirement – in 1935 when Social Security started, the retirement age was 65, but life expectancy was 58.  So you had more chance of being dead than of retiring.  In its genesis, it was intended that by the time 70 hit, only 10% of the population would be alive.  So 90% of people didn’t actually ever have to worry about “saving enough”. 

It's why there was the concept of inheritance – because you died early, you didn’t need the wealth you built up to survive retirement.

These days, with the average life expectancy at 83 with a retirement age between 60-65… inheritance is NOT a concept that you should even worry yourself with.  Today, Your children are the luckiest humans in the world if they don’t have to support you in your retirement.  The statistics show that most children will support a parent – it’s the new norm.

A financial adviser can help you place your situation in the broader context.

Not only that, but You have to KNOW how long your money should last.  I was once brought in by a couples child because they were worried they were going to need to support their parents and they wanted to plan for it early.  The couple themselves were extremely careful with their money, and shared with me that they had been debating for a long time leaving Joburg and retiring closer to the bush – but knew it would cost more and so hadn’t done it.  When we went through their money we found that not only did the kids NEVER have to worry, they also could live a little more easily.  We’ve upped their monthly amount and they’re in the process of moving to Nelspruit.

So knowing brings about a whole bunch of freedom to act.

Which leads me to my last thought on talking about money – and that’s

Discussions within the family and managing expectations.

In some cultures, it’s expected and taught from a very young age that the young will support the old.  And, because it’s known and expected the children prepare for it as they start working.  They buy houses that have flats; they save extra; as a family they discuss it regularly.

But other cultures have an expectation that parents will save enough for retirement and therefore the children don’t prepare for paying for their parents. But because how long we’re living has increased by one third in the last century, many cultural norms such as inheritance and support of parents haven’t managed to keep up.  The norms now don’t fit the realities.

So some of the most important conversations need to happen within families.  The earlier it happens, the more time you give each other to prepare. If you know you’re going to run out of money, you need to speak early and give your children time to invest and build up the reserve to manage it.  The problem looks very different when it’s approached with time and grace.

And lastly, you need to speak to each other.  I often get brought in to work between the generations of a family and I remember a couple where we discovered they had around 6 months of cash left.  The wife was so shocked and asked why he had never told her… and his answer was that he’d told her to cut back so many times but she hadn’t listened.  Oh she said, I thought you were just being a grumpy old man! 

Real discussions early on enable you to change the direction of your lives… with 6 months, there are very few choices you have… and for her, she felt it was a huge betrayal of trust.  There was an implicit agreement that he would sort out retirement, and she the children… so for her, he hadn’t kept his end of the bargain.  BUT that would have been okay if she had known earlier and could change the path.  At 78 to go out and find a job when you haven’t worked since your 20s is a lot harder than to do that in her 40s or 50s.

And finally, there is so much wisdom in the bible.  Everything we have is given to us by God.  Our promised land always has been that place where we are able to live with God – as Micah says:  Act Justly, Love Mercy and walk humbly with your God.