• Getting Started in Investing, part two

    money_stuff2

    Here’s a scenario for you. You are serving at a church and things go sour. I mean, they go really sour. Meetings are arranged behind your back. Students stop coming to events and making excuses to avoid you. Your weekly staff meeting with the pastoral team becomes a finger pointing competition. And all roads are leading back to you. You’ve done nothing wrong but everyone hates you. You leave the meeting and head back to your office. You know your ministry at this church is coming to an end. You have felt it ending for a long time. And you are sweating the reality that a job search is imminent.

    All spiritual realities aside. In these moments, and all vocational people in a church will one day be in these moments, there are two positions you can be in.

    Position A: You can make a rational decision, knowing that you will be financially OK whether you stay at this ministry or not.

    Position B: You can make an irrational decision, knowing that if you get fired you are screwed financially.

    [Of course, I’m simplifying this as there are lots of options.] The point is that when things hit the fan at work you need to be able to make a decision that is ultimately best for you and your family. And being knee deep in debt with no savings is not going to help.

    Having worked in churches for nearly 10 years I know that there is rarely much margin between income and expense. And this makes saving money hard and acquiring debt easy. Add to that mix that many people in youth ministry brought college debts into ministry… and you have a recipe for disaster!

    So, practically speaking, what can you do?

    #1 Most Important Thing: You need to figure out how to get a few grand in the bank. You hear every single personal finance person say this and there is a good reason. Having 2-3 months living expenses in the bank allows you the freedom to make decisions that are best for you and not just what will get you through the next couple of months. Living paycheck to paycheck just leads to you acquiring more and more debt. I believe for folks in ministry this is more important than paying down debts… our jobs are just that insecure. And this goes beyond just job issues. I don’t think you can seriously build a budget until you have this little bit of breathing room.

    With almost no margin, how do I get that much cash in the bank? Some ideas…

    – Sell stuff. Have a garage sale. Have a bake sale. Sell used books on Amazon. Sell your baseball cards on Ebay. Sell your extra car.

    – Make more money. We’ll talk more about this in another post. But practically speaking, if there is no margin between what you bring in and what goes out you will need to find another source of income. For Kristen and I this meant that Kristen watched a child from the church four days a week. It wasn’t much… but it helped us widen the margin. If you’re single… you’ll need to look for alternate forms of income. Again, we’ll talk more about this in part five.

    – Spend less money. That’s easier said than done, I know. Our friends mocked us, but in Michigan Kristen and I learned that by heating our house less we could find a bit of margin. Also, cutting back on things you don’t really use that much can make a big difference. Remember this is just temporary until you get a few grand in the bank. 6 months without DVR or trips to Starbucks will be worth it.

    – Decide a dollar amount to save per paycheck. I take great pleasure in transfering a prescribed dollar amount to savings every payday. But if you lack the discipline to do that, there are more forceful options. If you have direct deposit simply direct a set amount to your savings account so you never actually see it as spendable income! A more manual way to do this is to ask the person who cuts paychecks at the church to write you two seperate checks. One goes in checking and the other goes in savings. If you really lack discipline… go ahead and have the take out your tithe/offering too!

    #2 Most important thing: You need to stop using your credit cards. When Kristen and I got married we didn’t have any debts. About a year later we bought a car and went into debt big time to make it happen. But that wasn’t the really dumb thing. The dumb thing is that a few weeks later I said “yes” to an offer for a Discover Card. That thing has been a thorn in my side ever since. At first we paid it off every month and I only used it for gas purchases. Then, we took 3 months to pay for a laptop. Then we bought some furniture. And started using it everywhere we went. Then the monthly balance was so high I couldn’t make myself pay $1000 per month so we let the debt build a little. Before we knew it, it was almost maxed out and we were screwed! The point is… until you take the first step and take using the credit card as part of your buying habits… it’ll own you.

    – Stop carrying it with you if its a temptation.

    – I like using plastic for every purchase, that’s why I use my debit card.

    – Come up with a repayment plan on your own. Currently, we dedicate one of Kristen’s paychecks to savings and one to paying down debt each month.

    – As you pay down the balance, call the card company and ask them to lower your limit. While you’re at it ask them to lower your interest rate.

    – Try to pay at least double the minimum payment… you need to get the principle down ASAP to incur less interest payments.

    – Once you get a few grand in the bank, turn all your efforts to getting rid of credit card debts. If you have more than one debt, pay the one with the highest interest rate off first.

    #3 Most important thing. Reward yourself! Look, our jobs are hard. And I think some of the reason so many of us get ensnared in debt and no savings is because we overcompensate and reward ourselves too much. I think there is ample reason to celebrate your successes and take time to celebrate. My beef with Dave Ramsey’s style of personal finance is that he’s too aggressive. He sets you up for a fad diet… and once you reach your goals you have starved yourself so much that you are liable to go buy something stupid just because you can. I go for a more reasonable style of savings/debt repayment. I’m OK with it taking a few months longer if it means I make sustainable changes to my life. That’s why we reward ourselves regularly along the way. We save up a little something outside of our “plan” and then do fun things! Our family has a date night each week… it’s frivolous, but it is a nice reward. I think you deserve to treat yourself for doing a good job! I know in youth ministry there aren’t many other people who will reward you, so reward yourself.

    Here’s the good news. Getting a few grand in the bank will probably only take you 6 months if you make it a legit goal. And from there you can turn your DVR and your heat back up! But a little bit of pain is going to go a long, long way for you sustaining in youth ministry into your 30s and beyond.

  • Bad news for suburban kids

    graduation-dayIn the next few weeks millions of high school seniors will hear their name called and walk across the stage to recieve a high school diploma. There is an interesting phenomonon on graduation day that I’d like to point out.

    Kids in the city are typically pretty excited about the achievement. In the city graduation rates are typically lower and there isn’t the same assumption that every child will graduate. Consequently, everyone is more excited and a city high school graduation ceremony is truly a celebration. Parents go nuts when they hear their kids name called. And students literally do backflips when they get their paper.

    Kids in the suburbs are typically excited about graduation for other reasons. It’s assumed they will graduate so the ceremony carries an air of “farewell to my friends” more than a true celebration of achievement. Parents take pictures and clap politely as their children achieve something they fully expected their child to achieve. Rather than this being a moment to celebrate, students are anxious about how much they will get at their graduation party or hoping to get to go to the hot girls party. It’s a nice day but lacks the flamboyance of the party in the city.

    That’s not the bad news.

    dorm-lifeThe bad news is that kids from the city are going to kick the kids from the suburbs butt from here on out! While their richer, more priveledged peers wallow away their days coming up with new ways to not work, take advantage of their parents wealth, and essentially avoid responsibility as long as possible, all while piling up tens of thousands of dollars in college debt. Kids from the city are taking advantage of the system and running laps around their advantaged peers.

    Let’s contrast things.

    1. The typical “rich white kid from the suburbs” goes to college on a combination of his parents dime and college loans. Almost none work significant hours. (20 hours per week or less seems to be the norm) They waste time professionally. They are so busy playing, going to class, and hanging with their friends that they skirt by classes without taking them seriously. I’ve met countless affluent college kids who passed all of the tests but didn’t learn a thing in 4 years of college. They graduate with $40,000 in debt and no real life experience. Without a job they move back home and hope that someone will give them a job. I’ve even witnessed these affluent college kids chose to live at home and make no money while skipping opportunities to take entry-level jobs at places in their chosen career path. The assumption is that the system will work for them. One day they will magically wake up from a video-game-induced dream get their dream job and make loads of money. The truth is they don’t know how to work hard to earn good money as they’ve never been forced to innovate solutions or hustle to make rent money. In fact, with the mom/dad fall-back plan there is no motivation to strive to achieve anything. They will always have a roof over their head, they will always have food in the belly, a car to drive, and someone to care for them. And even more true is that the silent racially lopsided system doesn’t work like that anymore. While they were watching The Hills, kids from the city took the upper hand.

    2. The typical “working-class minority kid from the city” goes to college on a combination of scholarships, work study, and summer jobs. While their more affluent peers weren’t looking, their ACT and SAT scores have caught their suburban peers and the system rewards minorities who compete academically with rich white kids. In other words, a Hispanic student from the city will get a full ride with the same scores that the suburban kid had. (It’s no secret that scholarship dollars are easier to get for minorities.)  Taking advantage of that, these students work harder in class, consequently learn more, and are ultimately rewarded with more opportunities than their affluent peers. job-search-resumeWork study and summer jobs, combined with almost no college debt result in a college graduate who is highly marketable and financially advantaged for the first time ever. They are more industrious, more hungry to take responsibility, and more aware that they can make it than ever.

    As an adult I look at this and slap my head. If you were an employer looking at the resume of recent college graduates… which employee would you want? The kid who came from nothing but is crawling out of poverty by his achievement and hard work? Or the kid who was handed everything and never worked a day in his life?

    And that my friends is bad news for the suburban kids.

    Parents! What are you going to do with this scenario? How can you change your behavior from enabler to motivator?

  • Ouch! Major Bellyflop

  • The battle of Guantanamo

    guantanamoI suppose I’m just naive. With nearly every state clamoring about a loss of jobs why aren’t more states raising their hands and saying, “Yes, we’d like those detainees in my state. Give us the money to build the prison and we’ll house them forever.” Actually, Colorado is asking for them.

    If I’m Jennifer Granholm, I’d lobby to build a new Supermax prison in Saginaw or Flint. A billion for my state as well as $200 million per year to look after them? Sign me up!

    It’s silly to make the inference that somehow these detainees will be allowed into general population. Just like its silly to assume that the country is somehow more safe because they are in Cuba vs. them being in the United States. It’s a prison. It’s not like they are going to walk out and get jobs! There aren’t any jobs to be had!

    Of course, there are real reasons to keep them off of U.S. soil. If they are brought to the United States it implies that they are legally detained. I think there is an open debate as to whether the United States can legally detain people indefinitely.

    Should Guantanamo be closed? It’s become a symbol of how the Bush administration handled the war on terror. For that reason Obama wants it gone.  He wants to fight terrorism in a different way. ItClosing it doesn’t really solve the problem… but Obama is now caught in a catch-22. He now has the information he didn’t have when he made the campaign promise to close it. But now if he doesn’t close it he has to admit that Bush was right to have it there in the first place.

  • Music Meme

    I wasn’t tagged directly… but I felt tagged in spirit by Marko’s music meme. So here goes:

    The 411:

    1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc)
    2. Put it on shuffle
    3. Press play
    4. For every question, type the song that’s playing
    5. When you go to a new question, press the next button
    6. Don’t lie and try to pretend you’re cool!

    Opening Credits: Over My Head — The Fray

    Waking Up: When I Said I Would — Whitney Duncan

    First Day At School: Make Someone Happy — Jimmy Durante

    Falling In Love:     Homeless –Paul Simon

    Fight Song:     No More — Boaz

    Breaking Up: Listen to the Music — The Doobie Brothers

    Prom: Angel — Sarah McLachlan

    Life: Faithful — Steve Fee

    Mental Breakdown: Every Little Things She Does is Magic — The Police

    Driving: Pick up the Pieces — Brae

    Flashback:
    Hometown Glory — Adele

    Getting Back Together: Sweet Home Alabama — Lynyrd Skynyrd

    Wedding: 42 — Coldplay

    Birth of Child: Who Says You Can’t Go Home — Bon Jovi

    Final Battle: Bye, Bye Love — Ray Charles

    Death Scene: I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For — U2

    Funeral Song:     Mona Lisa — Nat King Cole

    Remembrance Song: You Alone by David Crowder Band

    End Credits:     Open Skies by David Crowder Band

    I’m tagging Billy, Todd, Tim, Jeremy, Sara, and Kim.

  • Saturday Tunes

    Saturday TunesAh, Memorial Day. It’s hard to have an “unofficial start to summer” when your kids have 6 weeks left in school and the temperature pretty much hovers around the same 20 degree variable 10 months a year. Alas, it’s summer and I’m excited about that.

    We’ve had a hectic for a kick-off to a 3 day weekend. Last night we decided to take the trolley down to the Gasplamp district of San Diego to enjoy our family date night. While we got settled onto the trolley I got a text that my long-awaited iPhone app had finally released. (You get to submit and wait for Apple, no choice on a release date.) Tucking that distraction into the back of my mind we had a good evening of walking around downtown and eating at the Old Spaghetti Factory. [Just OK food, but the kids liked it.]

    This morning I woke up and did a bit of PR to get things moving with the app. Then I dashed of to Del Mar to film a podcast segment with a comedian… who was funny despite it being 10 in the morning. From here we actually don’t know what we’re doing until Tuesday morning. I’m sure we’ll figure it out.

    For now, I’m just chilling and listening to some music.

    Here are the next 10 tunes flowing to my cranium. As always… completely random with my ratings included:

    1. Fix You by Coldplay ***** (Love this free album!)

    2. The Swing by Kimya Dawson ****

    3. Make Someone Happy by Jimmy Durante ****

    4. The Glory of It All by David Crowder Band ****

    5. Stuck to You by Nikka Costa ****

    6. I’m Sticking With You by The Velvet Underground ****

    7. One by U2 *****

    8. Can You Feel It? by David Crowder Band ***

    9. Joyful, Joyful, We Adore You by Charlie Hall ****

    10. Hard Times by Ray Charles

  • Getting Started in Investing, part one

    money_stuff

    I’d like to let my youth ministry friends in on a dirty little secret. While pay has dramatically improved for youth workers in the past two decades the most consistent reason people leave youth ministry once they reach their mid 30s and above is mounting financial pressure. In other words, there are some glass ceilings on the personal income side of things that will eventually cause you to look for higher paying work in the church or not in the church if you don’t plan ahead. Plan ahead and you relieve the pressure bit by bit. Don’t plan ahead and that pressure builds and leads to a catastrophic failure.

    Here is a short list of those pressures:

    – Housing expenses skyrocket: That rental gets old, doesn’t it? Buying a house can be great when you land in the same place for 10 years or more. But buy and sell a house a couple of times when you change jobs and you’ll quickly see that’s a bad strategy for financial security.

    – Retirement savings becomes important: Most churches either don’t offer a retirement plan for their associate staff or it is extremely inadequate. Even if you are in a denomination that pays into a pension fund… getting ordained in order to get vested in that fund can be more costly than the pension you’d earn in the long run! (And with many mainline denominations tanking financially, you really need to wonder if that money will be there in 30 years.)

    – Kids get more expensive as time goes on: When you first have babies you think diapers and formula is a blow to your budget. Just wait! Eventually those kids will need braces, outgrow clothes every two weeks, want to go to camp, need a car of their own, and gulp… want to go to college.

    – Medical insurance won’t cover it all: Again, when you are young and/or first married this doesn’t seem important. But with premiums soaring churches are cutting back on benefits. So as you age into needing good insurance chances are your church is increasing co-pays and other out-of-pocket expenses.

    – Pressure to keep up with your peers: There’s only so long you want to live like college kids. Eventually, you are going to want grown up furniture, go on nice vacations, and have a little extra something here and there. I don’t mean that you’ll get more materialistic as time goes on… but you just get sick of scrounging.

    If you do nothing, eventually these pressures will leave you with no other option but to leave the ministry. You can do everything right in the 9-5 activity of working at your church. But if you don’t have a plan to address these mounting pressures, it will sneak up on you and the pressure will grow so intense that you may have no other option but to leave the job you love for a job that pays better. If the choice is lose your family or lose your ministry you will chose lose your ministry 100% of the time, right?

    My goal for this series is to encourage those in youth ministry– you don’t have to bail out!

    If you want to join along I will help you with a few basic strategies that will lessen these pressures. My hope is to help you stay in youth ministry longer. While things like soul care and youth ministry strategy are super important for staying in it for the long haul… I’m going to help you deal with the dirty little money secret that could eventually knock you out of ministry.

    Part two: Dealing with debt and savings

    Part three: COLA-  and I don’t mean Pepsi or Coke.

    Part four: 401ks, IRAs, 529 and other numbers that are important

    Part five: Outside income opportunities

  • Why Men Need Friends

    To tell them stuff like this is stupid and a waste of their time. Look carefully, ladies. There is no wedding ring on this one. He’s still on the market.

  • 5 Songs that Pump Me Up

    Music is a powerful measuring stick for where a person is in their life, isn’t it?

    The songs that I identify with right now reflect a lot of who I am as well as a lot about how I feel about the stuff going on in my life. Here are songs that I listen to on a regular basis and just get me all fired up-n-stuff. A couple of them are obvious while a couple may only make sense to me.

    1. Mama Said Knock You Out by LL Cool J

    2. Waiting on the World to Change by John Mayer

    3. Lose Yourself by Eminem (not sure when I haven’t loved this song!)

    4. Rise by Eddie Vedder

    5. You Found Me by The Fray

    What gets you all fired up-n-stuff?

  • Pushing Back to Find Sanity in Christ

    this-way-to-sanityClosing in on a year as “just a family in the pews” I have learned a ton about myself, my walk with Jesus, and what it’s like to be on the other end of church life. Having spent my entire adult life on the church leadership end of things I would often say, “I don’t remember what its like to just go to church.” This last year has been an amazing vantage point.

    When we first came to Harbor we knew right away that we wanted to be a part of it. We went to a service on Sunday and shared coffee with the pastor and his wife later that week. They told us their story and their vision for Harbor… Kristen and I were sold and let them know right away we were committed to staying on board.

    As the months went by we felt like we were getting sucked in and were powerless against it. What I mean by that is that churches have a tendency to get their tentacles on you and slowly wrap their eight arms around you so that you find yourself fully enveloped by its grasp until you wake up drowning in holy activity. One moment you are helping in the nursery and then you wake up to realize that you are serving at the church 7 days per week and 3 times on Sunday.

    Since I was new in my job and had just come out of serving at a church, I was determined that Kristen and I would stay out of the vortex. It may sound weird but people in our lives were firmly encouraging us… in order to reconnect with Jesus you need to do less church work and work more on your relationships outside of church. While I felt like it was a counter-intuitive approach to spiritual growth, I trust the people God has put in my life to tell me the truth… to tell me the truth!

    And yet we started getting sucked in. A weakness I am working on is that I have no ability to say no to something I have the ability/skills/talent to do. Someone from the church would pitch me an idea and my “no thank you” must have come out like a “yes, no problem.” Next thing I knew I was sucked in. It turned out the people in my life were right… and the breath of fresh air I was enjoying so much was quickly snuffed out and replaced with bitterness, anger, and temporary depression. We were right back where we started. In fact, we were probably worse off then ever.

    lead-weightFlash-forward to January and early February. I was fully freaking out about our involvement with the church on Sunday mornings. In fact, for some reason I was literally freaking out at church. I would be fine right up until we left. Then we’d pile in the car and I could feel my blood pressure getting higher. I’d get to church and be ready to explode. A little dizzy, on edge, and feeling the strong desire to flee. All my mind would be saying is, “Leave me alone. I just want to be left alone.” And the more people were nice to me the more intense the feeling. It was really one of the most bizarre experiences of my life. Mr. “I’ve got it all under control” was completely not in control. I’d tell Kristen, “I think I’m losing my mind.” I was being completely honest. I was really scared that I was actually losing my mind.

    Each time someone at church asked Kristen or I to do something it got worse. I kept saying to myself, “The kids hate coming to church, I hate coming to church, and I can tell Kristen is upset that we’re all upset.” While the calm rational side of me knew that we needed to worship on Sunday mornings the irrational, emotionally-charged side of me started to think that the best way to make these symptoms go away was simply to stop going to church altogether.

    [Enter wise council from stage left] Perhaps the solution wasn’t either of those choices? “Stay and be miserable or leave and do nothing are both crappy solutions.” That is when it hit me. What I really needed to do was meet with the leadership and push back.

    Gracious. That’s all I can say about my meeting with the staff. My experience with church leadership and AS church leadership has always been to tie someone’s involvement with church stuff to their spiritual growth. When people met with me to bail on things I always took it personally. I would always be polite and thank them for their service… but they’d leave and I would be annoyed. To look across a table and say… “I can’t explain the why, but I know that I need to say no-to-all for a while to find freedom and connect with Jesus” was so freeing. And to have those words embraced was incredible. While I’m certain the two men I met with were discouraged by the outcome of that meeting as they drove away… I was amazed at their maturity. They gained 10,000 points with our family simply by agreeing that our family needed to do nothing. (Not less, nothing.)

    fresh-airSo here we are three months later. Other than our uber-active community group my family is a regular family who fills the pew on Sunday morning, hosts a few friends on Monday nights… and that is it. I don’t know how long we will practice this new displine of “no-to-all” but I have to tell you that it is working. The more we push back from being super-involved the better things get for our family. More family time, more family growth, less busyness, less tension… these are all good things.

    I don’t know how long this needs to last. My feeling is that I need to guard our family like this until the desire to serve comes back. It hasn’t happened yet. And for once in our lives we aren’t in a rush to make something happen. But for now, we are embracing this new period of our lives. We are embracing a lifestyle of a new normality. It’s a renessaince of the soul that I am enjoying. Maybe a little too much?