Wealth, Wisdom and the World

How many of you grew up like I did, not rich?

We weren't poor, we just weren't rich.

I remember about 12 years old, I wanted to ride my bicycle about a mile down the road to the local quick sack.

And I was gonna go down there and get me an icy.

Y'all got an icy here.

Yeah.

I was gonna go get me an icy, and I came in and asked my dad.

I said, Dad, I need some money to go to the quick sack.

And 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 gonna 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, true story, down on Nolansville Road.

I grew up in Antioch, Tennessee, just outside of Nashville.

Took me down the main drag there in Nashville, Tennessee, took me to a print shop and printed up 500 business cards, said Dave's lawns.

I said, Dad, this is a little overkill.

I just wanted a nicey.

Came home and he said, You go knock on the closest 50 doors here in the neighborhood, and you asked 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?

So he taught me marketing.

We had junior achievement.

Junior best be achieving something.

So I did.

I went and knocked on the closest 50 doors and it worked.

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 like this.

Made me keep a profit and loss statement on my business, my income minus his lawnmowers 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.

Proud of my dad for teaching that mean little bald-headed kid that stuff.

I graduated from high school and 18 years old.

Three weeks later, passed my real estate license, started selling real estate, took off to college and went through college in four years, which is what you do if you're paying 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.

And so I was working my tail off, getting all the way through college, and I met my beautiful wife, Sharon, and we got married, and 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's 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.

Um came out of college and I went through a couple jobs and 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.

And 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 in my best year ever in that business.

I made$250,000 cash taxable income one year.

That's$20,000 a month.

I don't know where you grew up, 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.

Most people point a crisis is evangelism, right?

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 gotta have God in your life to succeed.

And I came home, 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.

Twenty-six years old, our bank that we owed a million two hundred thousand dollars to got sold to another bank.

I know that never happens in your town.

And they looked down, they said, A kid 26 years old owes us over a million dollars.

Let's limit this relationship, which is banker talk for ruin his life.

And they called our notes.

I had six months to come up with over a million dollars.

And the second largest lender, another bank, 800,000 owed to them, heard I was in trouble because I was in trouble.

And it gets out in the town, doesn't it?

They're not supposed to talk about it, but they do.

And they called another 800,000.

So$2 million due.

It's all tied up in real estate.

And 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.

The guy with the sheriff's department that brings the little lawsuit papers, we're like on a first name basis with him.

Sharon's making him cookies.

Come on in, Harold.

And finally, with a brand new baby and a toddler, we hit bottom.

And we were bankrupt.

I didn't know what to do.

I was 28 years old.

My marriage is hanging on by a thread.

I met Jesus.

I met him on the way up.

I got to know him on the way down.

Y'all know what I'm talking about.

Yeah.

Pain is not my preferred method of learning, but it is a thorough teacher.

Yeah.

You will read the Bible in those times.

What did I do wrong?

And finally we were bankrupt.

Brand new baby.

I remember standing in the shower with it as hot as I could stand it in my face and just stand there and cry.

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 got their act together, right?

At least that's what we think.

Until you find out what's really going on behind closed doors.

And I had started reading a guy named Larry Burquett when I was in the middle of the soup, 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 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 gonna be like 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.

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?

Because I started figuring out this is a love letter to me from my father who's crazy about me.

And once I figured that out, it's 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 I don't, that she doesn't.

And submit yourselves one to another or something like that.

I don't know where she found that one, but 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.

Yeah.

Oh my gosh.

And I started, we started handling our money this way.

And I gotta 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.

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 a lot.

I mean, there's like 2,500 scriptures that deal with money and possessions.

Our proper view of them, the proper spiritual indication, and the tactical, actual thing you do with money that God says.

It was amazing.

And it gave a guy who was in a puddle hope.

Because I didn't have any.

I mean, I was on one of these, I do all these uh TV shows on Fox and CNN and Good Morning America and CBS and all these people, and they were real sweet people and all that.

One of those anchors I was on there doing a thing with one of my books one time, and they 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's a lot of twits on Twitter.

I'm one of them, but 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 have a good friend of mine.

I was with him last night.

In the last year, he has lost 56 pounds.

Everyone sitting around the table talking to him, a bunch of guys sitting out there, he's in my small group in my church, everyone sitting around the table.

You know what we ask him?

We ask him, how did you do that?

When you see someone's life gets changed, you always say, their marriage gets saved, their children get turned around, their finances get turned around, their career goes on a trajectory that's unexplainable, and you always say, How did you do that?

When people start asking me, I started telling them.

And then I started doing counseling at my church, and then we started a little Sunday school class that had four people in it, and I looked up and there were 400 people in there.

Because it turns out I'm not the only one that's stupid.

If you've made mistakes with money, you know what that makes you?

Over 12.

Every one of you have, 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.

But I can boil it down to five things.

And the devil hates it when you take notes.

So get your pen.

Five things.

Five things.

If you do these five things that the Bible says with money while earning an income, you do them over and over and over.

And all that they imply over a period of 15 to 20 years, you will prosper.

It may happen faster, 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.

Those kinds of things aside, if you apply these five things to cause and effect, the sowing and the reaping always happens.

100% of the time, and I will go ahead and tell you, these are tough, they're hard, they're easy to understand, they're hard to do, and if you're really smart, you're gonna act like you don't need them.

Smart people have the most trouble with this.

That's why I was good at it.

First one.

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 kinda 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 coming 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 gonna drive it right, don't put a fish on the back of it.

Halfway doing stuff, and I'm a Christian.

I'm doing stupid things.

I'm jumping off a cliff and going, God catch me.

And I call that faith, and he goes, 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 U Incorporated, and you manage money for U Incorporated, the way you manage money for you now, would you fire you?

Don't answer that.

My friend Zig Ziggler 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 gonna build a$4 million house, you would have a blueprint.

Every detail mapped out.

Where the plugs are gonna go, where the heat and air is gonna go, how the roof structure is gonna 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.

Multiple profit centers within the company.

Every one of those folks has a plan for the revenue they're gonna 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 gonna do with your money?

Don't get to the end of the month and go, where'd it go?

Because you end up being a rat and a wheel.

And you work your whole life.

Run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, and you get to the end of your life, and there's nothing.

And you earned four to ten million dollars in your working lifetime, and you have nothing.

Because you didn't write it down.

It's a serious principle.

The second one is you gotta get out of debt and stay out of debt.

Now everybody knows Dave Ramsey's gonna say that.

Everybody knows I'm gonna say Proverbs 22, 7.

The borrower is slave to the lender.

When you don't have any payments, you know what you 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 the problem is when your stuff gets you.

When you got a student loan that's been around so long you think it's a pet.

When master card 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.

Broke finance professors 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?

Because all these people are running around, these quote-unquote experts, and all of them that 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 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.

Never once did God, you know, were the Israelites hemmed into the valley by the Amalekites, so they did a bond issue.

You gotta know the word.

Study the word.

Because God will show you.

Because He loves you, He's got a plan for you.

The third one.

First one is you gotta do a budget, the second one is you gotta get out of debt.

Because if you don't have any payments, you got money.

The third one is quality relationships.

Now this is kind of weird.

But think about it.

Marriage is grand, divorce is fifty 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 doesn'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 behind over the hill, some of it's around the corner at the still.

It's you don't know where it is, but crazy is in your family.

And I'm no exception.

I'm from Hills East, Tennessee.

When we do crazy, we do it big.

So you dysfunction and your personal dysfunction, 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 guess I've got to tell you that if you're addicted to something, whatever it is, gambling, pornography, those are the two big ones right now.

Huge, just unbelievably huge.

And you know, certainly the old standbys, drugs and alcohol and that kind of stuff.

But people that 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 but Tom Stanley, who wrote the book Millionaire Next Door, did another book.

Book called called The Millionaire Mind.

And in the Millionaire Mind, he studied decamillionaires, people with$10 million or more, making$750,000 a year 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, those kinds of things.

All having to do with behaviors, having to do with character, having to do with their 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.

And out here in the real world, the jerks get punished.

Because we don't want to do business with them.

Guy comes to my house as a jerk and cusses my wife fixing my heat and air.

He didn't get to fix my heat and air anymore.

Hello.

Isn't this simple?

They throw your food on the table and go 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?

Say yes.

So 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 ten 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 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 that parent?

So yes.

We don't do missionary dating in our house.

Right?

You come up to pick up one of my girls when they were dating in front of our house and you honk your horn, you better be delivering a pizza.

You're gonna come in and we're gonna talk about Jesus before you go.

Because you might meet him if you don't behave, right?

Is this how this works?

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.

So so quality relationships changes 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 gonna 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.

Number four, save money.

Invest money.

Save and invest.

The Bible 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.

I have been 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 a 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.

Because 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 gonna 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.

And we teach people to save for three basic things.

The first thing you save for is for, you know, for a rainy day.

Grandma said it, right?

What'd she say?

She said, save for a rainy day.

Rainy day.

Visual aid.

It's gonna rain.

Better get ready.

Better get ready.

Money magazine says 78% of you are gonna have a major negative financial event in any given 10-year period of time.

You're gonna have a job layoff, you're gonna have a car wreck.

Something's gonna happen.

And you're gonna need some money.

One I don't understand is unexpected pregnancy.

What?

But um something's gonna happen, isn't it?

You'll need some money.

The second thing you save for is you save up and pay cash for things.

So when you save up and pay cash for them, guess what?

That means you had a plan.

That means you'd save 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 peddle and pedal and pedal.

How many of you are like me?

You bought something, and by the time you finish paying the payments on, you hated it.

Because you just you just 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 won't be normal.

Weird is my goal.

The last thing you save is you save for long-term investing so you can retire with dignity and send your kids to college.

Do 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%?

$100 a month, pizza and cable money, latte breath.

$100 per month is$1,176,000.

From age 30 to age 70, you retire a millionaire.

There's no excuse to retire broke.

We just 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.

So the first one is you got to have a written plan.

Second one is you got to get out of debt so you don't have your all your money's not going to other people.

The third one is you got to deal with quality relationships.

And the fourth one is you got to save and invest.

And the last one's my favorite.

And we're going to talk about these at length.

Last one's my favorite.

People who win with money always are givers.

100% of them are givers.

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.

100%.

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 of 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.

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.