In the sermon titled 'Budgeting' by Al Burke, the speaker continues the discussion on financial stewardship, emphasizing the importance of budgeting as a practical tool for managing money. Al Burke draws from his personal experiences of raising 11 children to illustrate the necessity of budgeting. He highlights the impermanence of money and the importance of planning its usage to avoid financial strain and reduce stress in marriage. The sermon covers key components of budgeting such as income, expenses, tithing, savings, investing, and debt management. Burke suggests using various tools for budgeting, including Mint, Quicken, and spreadsheets, and stresses the importance of adjusting financial plans as circumstances change. He discusses methods of handling debt, emphasizing the dangers of consumer debt and offering strategies for debt consolidation and reduction. Burke also advises on saving and investing, recommending participation in employer 401(k) plans and diversification of investments to mitigate risk. The sermon concludes with practical tips for reducing expenses, such as monitoring subscriptions, negotiating bills, and avoiding credit card balances.

Well, we're continuing to drill down on this matter of thinking shrewdly about money. We started with the first fruits, moved on to the doctrine, the theology of money. Then this whole matter of more detail on the, on stewardship and, and what that means in lots of its details. And now we're going to continue to move down and, and to more granular, more practical nuts and bolts areas, Al Burke is going to come and then we're going to continue to unfold you know really practical matters of taking dominion and stewarding what we have. So Al, could you come and talk to us about budgeting, the nuts and bolts of how all this works together?

Thank you, Scott, and thank you, Kelly, for that excellent word on stewardship. Many of you have undoubtedly seen the movie classic It's a Wonderful Life starring Jimmy Stewart. In the movie, Jimmy Stewart's under a lot of pressure. He's suicidal and though the movie is not doctorally correct, Clarence the angel comes down from heaven to help him out. And Clarence is telling Jimmy Stewart how foolish it is to get so worried about money.

And he says, we don't use money in heaven. And Jimmy Stewart says, well it comes in pretty handy down here, bub. And I think that's where we find ourselves. We, the world functions on money. And as my brothers before me have pointed out, Money itself is not good or evil, but it is used within the context of our lives and society.

So I thought about coming up here and giving you some credentials. Why should you listen to me? I thought about telling you I have an MBA with a concentration in finance. So I thought, you know, my real qualification is I was able to raise 11 kids through the teenage years, pay that grocery bill, and not file bankruptcy. I remember when I first realized that that grocery bill was bigger than my whole salary when I first got married to Kim.

So that was an eye-opening moment. I'm like where is all this food going? But praise God he allowed a way for me to feed those kids and by the way so many of them are still teenagers and the appetite's not slowing down. But I like to eat myself too, so I can't say too much about that. So I'm using the same slide template as Ash did, only in the spirit of friendly competition and also wanted to hold your attention.

I threw $100, 000 down here in the corner. So in case you guys are tempted to go to sleep, you can just focus on that money and try and count it. I also brought a really cool green laser pointer here, but it's gonna mess the audio up. So I'll just use this to shoot you guys in the eye if you fall asleep. Yeah, you're welcome.

Okay, so budgeting. Why budget? This is gonna be my actual, kind of the topic I'm gonna touch on. Some of these are going to get honorable mention. Some of them have a slide on their own.

And we'll go into detail on some and not on others. But why budget? We're going to touch on that. We're going to touch on some tools you can use. Of course, the two keys to a budget are income and expense.

We're going to talk about those. We're going to talk about touch on tithing, which has already been well talked about by Ash. Savings, investing, debt, good habits over the long run. This is true with money. It's true with fitness.

Small things done repeatedly give good results. Life insurance, that's an area that's often overlooked, especially by young people. It wasn't important to me when I was in my 20s. You know, I wasn't thinking about myself dying in a car wreck, and fortunately I didn't. Types of things to buy, large purchases, the kinds of people, their spenders and their savers, usually there's one of each in a marriage, not always.

Interest rates, credit scores, paying cash, debit, and credit, forms of payment essentially. So let's look at why budget. So your money is going to leave you, that's a fact. So you can either think about where it's gonna go and kinda have a plan. You never have a perfect plan because things happen along the way and you have to adjust.

But that's better than no plan. A lot of people have no plan. They just come, spend money and they run out maybe on the 20th or the 15th and kind of upset and maybe have a fight with their wife about it. So having a plan is a good thing and you can adjust your plan. You will adjust your plan.

It's also good stewardship as was as was exposit by Brother Kelly. You know the money is given to you by God. He expects you to act wisely with it. Okay? It's a stress reducer in marriage.

A lot of problems in marriage occur with money. What did you spend it on? What did I spend it on? Why did you buy that? You know, where did it go?

There wasn't enough. So these kind of things can be greatly reduced by having a plan and working together. Allow for adjustments. You need to allow for adjustments because they will be necessary. Know where you are in your financials.

You know, you may be starting off, you've got some debt or whatever. It's good to know where you are and where you're going. You want to gain stability versus live in a chaotic world. A lot of people live in chaos. It helps you to save for larger purchases.

You may know you're going to need a car going forward, or you're going to want to buy a house, or you need to get braces for one of your children, something like that. These are good things to plan for. When your cash flow starts to look better or even beforehand sometimes you'll be able to bless others. You want to prepare for unplanned events and you want to be able to care for loved ones. These are all reasons why you should budget.

I'll touch on quickly some of the tools you can use. There's a lot out there. Mint is out there. It's a free one. There's other ones.

I'm not familiar with all of them. I'm really old school. I use the computer-based Quicken. And I was shocked to learn that only 1% of people use that. And they're all old people.

And that's me. But I like it, it's pretty cool. It works, you know, and I track stuff, I've done it for years. Kim will tell you, when we first got married we did it on paper and we, I don't know if you remember in the pre smartphone days everybody had day planners or Franklins. I gave her a Franklin form and I think she hates that word to this day.

But I would have her record, and I would too, everything we spent, and then I added a painstaking process at the end of the month. And I think my grocery bill was like $400 back then. But anyway, that's kind of the beginning. We started with paper and we eventually moved to I think Microsoft Money, which is no longer a product, quick and use something to plan it. Some people, I read on the internet 72% of people use spreadsheets, which that's not surprising.

That is a clunky way to, it'll track it, but trying to manage that data at the end is a real chore with that. It can be done, but it's not easy. Some people will do it on paper, that's fine if that works for you. But with all of them, you develop a plan for your income expense, you track it, you analyze it, and you adjust. That's what you do.

A little word on the methods here. Some people will say, and this is true, if you pay cash, you'll spend less. And the reason for that, it's painful to walk up to the counter and throw down four Benjamin Franklin's for something. It's a lot easier to hand the credit card, they don't do that anymore, it's scanned, $400 goes out but those four Benjamin Franklin's or eight Ulysses S grants that really is painful So you spend less. I've read a fact I don't know or a stat I don't know if it's true.

You spend 35 percent less when you're using cash. Now the problem with cash is it's dangerous. If I send my wife to the store to buy, you know, Walmart supplies, she's gonna walk in there with a thousand bucks probably. That's pretty dangerous, you know, especially if it's a repeated pattern and there's the lady with the pile of money, you know. So because of that, I've always had her and my daughters use a non cash form A lot of people use a debit card.

That's fine You can use a credit card to the temptation there is you know It's too easy to leave a balance on a credit card. And if you're not disciplined and don't pay it off, it's a very expensive way to borrow. We'll talk more about that in a minute. Okay, let's talk about the income first. And I think this actually came from Dave Ramsey talks about the big shovel.

My philosophy, I taught this to my kids, if you're gonna work get paid well. Now that doesn't mean don't earn your money, it means get yourself in a position to where you're valuable. Okay you can go out and make seven eight bucks an hour or you can make thirty forty fifty an hour or somewhere in between, but the point is you're gonna want to think about it. You're probably gonna start off at a lower paying job, that's fine, but over the long run, you wanna think about what am I gonna do, what credential am I gonna get, What skill am I gonna pick up? What am I gonna do to better myself and make myself more valuable to an employer or start my own company?

And I put in here, like your work if possible. I'm sure you guys have seen people. How you doing? It's Monday. How you doing?

It's Friday. You know, that's, you know, everybody has a little bit of that, but those guys, I remember in my 20s I would meet these guys and they're so depressed it's Monday. I think, I don't want to be depressed on Monday, you know, and I don't want to be too elated on Friday. I'd like to like the work. So to the extent you can and I'm not, some guys put that in too high of a priority and they say well I gotta like my work whether I make money or not.

No you got to provide for your family but if you're gonna work try and make some money at it and try and make it something you like. Now, any job that's great is going to have bad days. No doubt about it. And any job that's bad will have some pretty good days. But on average, you want to have something that you basically enjoy doing and that doesn't have too much drudgery associated with it for you.

And that's different for every person. I met a guy one time, he was pumping out my septic tank, and he loved his job. And my pump was broken, he had to reach all down in there. He really liked the job. And I'm like, praise God, there's people like you.

That's what I was thinking, you know. And he was a good guy, he blessed me that day. Apprenticeships, that's another way that you can do, you can pick up skills. Credentials, that comes in all different forms. Today we have all kinds of computer science stuff going on, credentials with Microsoft, Cisco, cybersecurity, there's all kinds of stuff out there that they can add value.

If you're project manager you can get project management certifications and things of that nature. They have things out there called nanodegrees. They're small little studies and they're basically a small degree in something, data science or whatever. There's all kinds of interesting things out there you can get to increase your value. Again, have a plan for increasing income and kind of look at the next step.

What would the next logical step be for you? And then I have here a thing I think about the industry you're going into, a young man or a young person. You're going to go into a growth industry or mature industry. And I pulled this graph off the internet and what this is trying to say is every business has a cycle it starts off Loses a little money at the beginning it ramps up quick it becomes kind of a cash cow and then over time it dies Let's think about something like this so Tires When I when I graduated from college I went to work for a tire company. Now tires were a mature business.

They had lots of competition. They had some cash, but They were fighting it out. They weren't in a growth industry, right? There hadn't really been anything happening since 1948 when they invented the steel belt. That was a big breakthrough.

After that, it was just kind of, figure out a way to remove a couple pennies from production. So after doing that for about four years and realizing that that wasn't really something that I enjoyed that much, I flipped over to cellular communications. This was 1994. Cellular communications, I'll break the rule and use my green pointer, was right there. It was taking off.

10% of the people had a phone and growth was 50% a year. It was an unbelievable change. I went from meetings where they said we got to find a way to reduce the penny of production to, hey what kind of sandwiches do you want in the next meeting? Every meeting had food. I started to develop a weight problem because cash was flowing so freely.

In the morning we'd have bagels with cream cheese. Kim, why'd you just say amen? Why'd you do that? In the afternoon we'd have doughnut, or not doughnuts, but cookies and chocolate covered strawberries, I mean it was unbelievable. But it was fun, fun place to work, lots going on.

You know, I remember one time I needed, I needed, I was trying to acquire some real estate and I needed, I needed to get some details on a property. I said, how should I do this? Go hire a helicopter. I'm like, can we do that? Yeah, so I hired a helicopter to fly down there.

Nowadays, we just use a drone. It'd be much cheaper. But give it some thought on what kind of industry you're in. Because if you're in a steep growth phase, there's going to be lots of promotional opportunities. I remember when I joined the cellular company, if you'd been there two years, you had a lot of experience.

In these mature industries, you got guys 25, 30 years, it's just a different dynamic, so Give some thought to it. I'm not saying there aren't good jobs in the mature industry, but there's definitely a different work dynamic. And by the way, this phase, each of these phases can last a long time or not long at all. We know plenty of businesses that have gone off the end of this. Encyclopedia Britannica, where are they?

Does anybody know what they are anymore? Blockbuster video, you know, there's a lot of them that have kind of gone off the end, and that really happens. Palm pilots, some of you guys don't remember those. You probably do, but anyway. Okay, what should a budget look like?

This is rough percentages. People agree or disagree on these. You know, I just kind of tried to group this from some of my own thoughts and some things I've read. Tithing 10% and then I grouped it into needs. Housing, groceries, food, groceries, transportation, insurance, and utilities.

If you don't have one of those, you're probably not living too happy with life, right? You need a roof over your head, you gotta have some power and some natural gas in there, and gotta have some food on the table. Start transitioning to the wants. Now I put clothing as a want. It is really a need but Clothing has a lot of flexibility in it.

You can I'm sure later on we start talking about some of the frugality tips You know you can get some pretty nice clothes at used stores And we've done that a lot with our family, right? With as many people as we have in it, you better go used or it's gonna cost you a lot for name brand stuff. Dining out, I love to eat out as much as the next guy. I love food actually. And I love good food.

So it's a temptation for me, but that's a place that really balloons up your budget quite quickly. Health care is important. I don't mean to imply here that you should you should skimp on that, but it's a sometimes there's some discretionary things that aren't threatening to you. Recreation is good to have in there. Personal spending.

You never want to have zero give in your budget because if you don't have money that's kind of a little bit of slush you will fail because you're gonna buy the pack of Wrigley's gum or you're gonna get the milkshake and you're gonna say oh Budge is blowing them out, we'll forget the whole thing. You want to have a little fluff in there where you can you've got that money to spend whatever you want it on so there's got to be a little bit of room there. And then the importance of saving and investing and if you have debt in reducing your debt that's key too. Okay a few expense saving tips I know we have a whole session on this later, but these are just some that I wanted to mention to you. Stay on top of your subscriptions.

If you're like me and something happens and you sign up for Dropbox or whatever, or something comes along, hey, you got to send to FACTS. Yeah, I'll go with eFACTS. I'll sign up with them. And it's a free trial. You forget to turn those things off and then you look back and say oh I got five dollars here, ten there, fifteen here, twenty there.

Those things can add up. So stay on top of those and don't let those creep in. Managers sell internet and phone bill. Now that coming from me that's pretty rough because I'm in the phone industry. But these it's a fact.

Prices have been coming down. Competition is pretty high. New rate plans come out. These internet broadband providers like to sign up you know 49 bucks and then they creep it up 54, 59, 70, 75. By the time you look at it, it's 120 bucks.

You call them up and say, hey, my bill's 120 bucks, what can you do? Oh yeah, we'll knock it back down to 49. You know, so there's, sometimes it's just a phone call. Sometimes it's just a phone call. Sometimes it's just a phone call.

And a lot of people are cutting the landline cord. A lot of people have landlines, a lot of people don't. They're gone sometimes. Sometimes there's a legitimate reason to keep one, But the cell phone quality now is very good in most cases. Negotiate if you buy in quantity.

Now you'll see places like Sam's and Costco, they actually, I don't know if they still do it. Sam's used to give 20% off if you bought chicken by the case. Now a case was big, I think it was like 60 pounds, right? And we always had a little trouble finding freezer space for all that. But 20% is significant, especially if you're going to eat it anyway.

So there's something that's priced in. But you can also negotiate discounts. I was at a fair one time and had my family. And there's another family with us. And we went to the cheeseburger stand there, and I said, hey, what kind of deal will you give me on 30 cheeseburgers?

The guy goes, wow, 20% off. I'm like, OK. You know, sometimes you don't think to ask, But it happens a lot. Ask for a discount for cash. You know I had a well pump put in my house 10 years ago and I had done some transaction, I had some cash, I think it was about 2500 bucks and I said, well will you knock off for cash?

He goes, are you a criminal? I said, no. He goes, OK, I'll knock off 200 bucks. You know, 200 didn't seem like much on the bill, but 200. And I started thinking, wow, that's like several dates with my wife at a really nice place.

You know, more recently, a couple of years back, I had a new HVAC system put in, same thing. He knocked a few hundred bucks off. I didn't pay the whole thing cash, I just gave him some cash. You know, so if you ask, you know, when you're paying cash, you're eliminating risk for them that whatever form of payment you're gonna use is gonna work, and plus there's just kind of this baked in idea in our society that you should get a discount if you pay cash. You're going to find in, I don't want to do a spoiler, but you're going to find that might not always be the case with some of the things that Alan's going to talk to you about tomorrow.

Wait for a sale, especially the big purchases. Big things do go on sale, even up to cars. There are certain times to buy cars that are better than others. You can save a lot of money if you have delayed gratification. You really want that new truck.

I like new trucks. I don't want to say that I don't but hey there are ways to save money because when you have to have something quick you're gonna pay a lot more for it. If you can wait and be patient and look for something you know you'll save money usually. Eat out less. Shop for insurance And this is an area I should have mentioned at the beginning.

I'm not coming to you from a place of perfection. I've learned a few things over the years. I've implemented some of them very well. Others I haven't implemented very well at all. And this is one I'm not very good at.

I don't shop insurance very well. But I know it's out there. I know you can save money on your homeowners if you check with other companies, save on your auto. There are ways to do it because those those rates do vary a lot. Don't carry credit card balances.

Credit cards are unsecured debt. We're going to talk a little bit more about that in a second, and their interest rates are high. I did a little research this afternoon, you know, a lot of them are in the teens, 15, 20, if you go to like a retail, 22, 23 percent. Hey, in Colorado, the law allows the interest to go to 45%. 45%.

That's a big number. Consolidate debt. Now, this I say with a great deal of caution, because what a lot of people will do is they'll outspend, they'll spend more than they take in, they got the Visa card maxed out and all these other things maxed out, and they'll find a way to consolidate that debt, which will put the debt in some other form like a home equity loan, then they'll start racking the credit cards up again. You don't want to do that. You want to change behavior and consolidate the debt as part of the procedure in order to get out of debt.

Use coupons. Learn to do things at home that you would normally pay people for. I tried to work up a number on what we saved in haircuts. Kim has cut the haircuts of everybody in the family for the last 20 plus years, and that's a big sum of money. You know if you think haircuts are 16 bucks, 20 bucks, whatever they are, that adds up.

You know so look at the things you do. Can you repair the things at your home? Can you do your own vehicle maintenance? Obviously, you know, there's a limit to what the regular person can do, but a lot of these things can be done and save money. Rarely by new.

I say rarely because there are cases when it might make sense. Use an HSA for medical. Now this is a health savings account. A lot of employers offer these. You put pre-tax money in an account and then all your medical comes out of there.

You can use it for one of my favorite tricks is one of the kids in your braces is I'll ask the orthodontist, okay how much have I paid all up front? You know and one one orthodontist told me I'll give you 20% off. 20% on $4, 000 braces is large. Most of them give 5% or 6% or something like that but it's still a savings and it's in the HSA You really don't notice it too much, because it's there for medical. So it's not like it's part of your normal budget.

It's a little bit separate. Don't buy extended warranties. Now I know some people argue with me on this. And they might be right. There are probably.

Actually, there's one case when I did it, I was buying a dryer and I was at Lowe's and they go, you want to send a warrant? I'm, nope. And Mike nudges me and he goes, Daddy, have you thought about how many more loads we do per week than the average person? I'm like, that's a good point. So I bought the warranty and sure enough the dryer did break within a year so that's how it paid off.

But my general guidance there is those are profit, you know, those are profit things for the sale, for loosing and sale the warranty if they're gonna make money on it, so the odds are in their favor saving and investing Get an emergency fund because if you don't have any funds on hand the smallest thing will throw you into calamity I've heard a thousand bucks, some people say fifteen hundred, whatever. Somewhere in that zone, get some money, save it up, have it. Okay? Then pay off debt, accept the house, using various methodologies. When I say that, some people like to do what's called a snowball.

They pay off the little one first and then they don't have that payment anymore and they can push it toward the others and that they build momentum. The mathematicians like to pay off the highest interest ones first, which is mathematically correct, but you may not get that adrenaline rush, you know, because it might be a bigger one that's on the lower higher interest so that's the kid and then save up to three to six months of expenses for for your emergency fund invest 10% plus pay off your home early if you can investing always participate in your 401k they usually have a match And it's not uncommon to be like, you pay 6%, your employer will pay 5 or 6. Okay? Consider risk versus return, and I'm going fast because I've only got a little bit of time here. Risk versus return.

Essentially, the higher risk of an investment, the more you're going to make on it. I'll talk more about that in a second. Always diversify your investments. Diversify means don't put all your eggs in one risky basket. You don't want to have...market risk is risk of the whole market.

Company risk is market risk plus risk of some problem at a company. Like if I bought all a certain company's kind of stock and there's an accounting scandal there, that stock crashes but the market doesn't. So you want to have your money diversified, Spread out on about 30 different companies or use a mutual fund or the entire market itself something like that. Don't invest in your employer stock anymore than half do. If you're given stock by your employer it's great switch it out and put in something else because your salary, if you have a bonus, everything you have is already kind of wrapped up in that company.

The last thing you need is your whole 401k in its stock. I've heard horror stories. I remember the old company WorldCom. I heard the story of a guy who had his $750, 000 back then in his 401k. It was all WorldCom stock.

When WorldCom crashed and went out of business, he lost everything, including that $750, 000. Had he had that $750, 000 invested in other stocks or in diversified funds, he would have had that. So don't over-invest in your employer if you already have a lot wrapped up in there which you will just by virtue the fact that you're employed there. Two kinds of people risk lovers and risk averse most people are risk averse some people are risk lovers I gravitate more toward the risk lover than the average Joe but it's interesting to think about Most people don't like risk and that caused them to be very conservative with their investments, sometimes too much so. And then there's different types of things you can get stocks, individual stocks, mutual funds, bonds, CDs, all these have different risks and returns, bonds and CDs being pretty low.

Sorry I'm going so fast. Debt. Okay there's several kinds of debt. Consumer debt's the worst, it's unsecured which means the bank has no recourse to get that money back except to hassle you and ruin your credit rating. It's very high interest.

These are credit cards same as cash deal retail cards same as cash is a horrible thing I did it once when I was young I felt like I had a burden on my back like the guy in Pilgrim's Progress Christian I had that burden on my back in his case It was sin But I felt like I had a debt on my back that I just couldn't get rid of until I paid it. And they're banking on you missing the payments. Because if you do, interest goes all the way back to the beginning, and it's usually 22%, 23%, 25%. So 90 days same as cash, 180 days, one year same as cash, stay away from it would be my advice. Cars, less bad, but they're secured by the vehicle, car debt can still be bad.

It's just less bad than consumer debt. I personally think Home mortgage is okay, it's really hard to save up several hundred thousand dollars, especially when home prices are increasing. Then I talked about the two ways of paying off debt again, high interest first or snowball with momentum. Okay, You guys are probably familiar with this, but the whole credit market revolves around credit scores. This is basically how they're based You know they've got your payment history How well you've paid your debts in the past how much credit are you using how long you've had credit what your credit mix is That's what types mortgages cars credit cards and then how many people have inquired lately on your behalf because you wanted a new loan.

So this all develops a score and this plays into what kind of rates you can get on loans. But more importantly this is going, this is actually playing into things like insurance premiums. Unfortunately we're living in a society where credit score is getting more important. So this isn't something we should overly worry about but we should be cognizant of it. We should know what it is and you can monitor your report for free.

You should correct errors because there will be errors. These data entry people are sloppy. You may even get letters at times that say, you owe so-and-so a hundred bucks and you've already paid it or you didn't, you should dispute those in writing within 30 days because then the burden falls on them to prove it and most the time they're too lazy to prove it. They'll just drop it because they don't want to go through the hassle. If you don't say anything it kind of is assumed that you actually owe that.

So you should school up on that. This is a pretty fun thing I ran across several years ago I thought I'd share with you and talks about the power of compounded interest. If you take a sum of money, in this case I have a Benjamin Franklin here in honor of my little money pile, and invest it, you know, what you can do is you take the interest rate, you're going to get on the return and divide it into 72. In this case I've assumed a 12% return on investment which is pretty high I know it would double every six years if I made that investment age 18 up until I have 66 that's 48 years that's eight doublings so that means it goes two times two times two eight times or we call that 2 to the 8th power 256 times. So the $100 becomes $25, 600.

Okay? As a comparison at 3% it is it only multiplies by 4.13 times. In other words, it's $413. That's the power of compounded interest year over year. Okay, at 6%, it's 1, 639.

Some people will tell you the average rate of return on the stock market is 12%. Some will say 10, some will say 11. It all kind of depends on how you look at it. But it's in that zone, but it's not stable. It doesn't go up that much every year.

It has wild swings up and down. But over the long term, it usually goes up. I once heard Warren Buffett say, he goes, I don't have any idea whether the market's gonna go up or down, today or tomorrow. But over the long run, it's gonna go up. And that's how he invests.

He researches companies, he finds out where he thinks there's under value, and he invests for the long run. Here's the historical return of the stock market up in the upper right of this. You can see most of the time it's up, a lot of times it's down. On average it's about here in the 10 or 12. This is interesting here, this graph on the left, this kind of reflects what kind of return you can expect if you invest for certain time frames.

If you put in for one year, you might be up 60 or you might be down 40. On average maybe up 10 or 12. If you do three years, your losses are a little less and your gains are a little less. In other words, any three-year period between 1973 and 2016 gives you the probability of your outcomes, right? Notice when you get to 10 and 15 years, your probability of losing money is almost zero.

That's because the markets are going to probably go up, absent of some other complete financial calamity that we don't envision. Here's the historical performance of stock market on the left from 1983 to the present. On the right is the COVID-19 effect. This is one year. So you saw a 35% drop in the market.

It's now back to parity. There was a debate on CNBC every day. Are we going to see a V? Are we going to see a U? Are we going to see an L?

You judge for yourself. I think it's kind of a V. You know, it was a tremendous buying opportunity for those with cool heads. Okay, last slide in a no amount of time. What do we spend our money on?

I find it helpful to think about this. When I'm gonna spend a dollar, I'm gonna spend it on several types of things, either an appreciating asset, mainly a house. Of course, it could be something else. It could be a Rembrandt, I guess, whatever. It could be something that's gonna go up in value.

A house is great though, cause it keeps rain off my head and usually goes up. Not always, could, general rules that go up. Depreciating assets, cars. Okay, and this is also most things we buy, TVs, if we buy TVs, espresso machines, whatever it is. We buy them, they probably go down.

We can sell them later, but not as much as we bought them for. Cars are particularly damaging cuz they are so large of an investment in their their depreciation so fast at least initially and we'll talk more about that in a future session. Consumables, food, paper towels and so on of course those are things, pizzas, They're gone as soon as you use them. You need them though, but you know you can kind of balance that and then servicing of debt. On more of the positive side we have savings, we have investing which we've talked about, and we have giving to the church, charities, and other people as you see fit.

I think this is my last slide. Yeah. So that concludes my talk. Hopefully it's been helpful to you. And thank you for the opportunity to share this with you.