Your Money AND Your Life (May 6, 2007 by James Montgomery Jackson)
(Webmaster Note: Immediately prior to the Homily the song "Greed" by Bernice Johnson Reagon was played from a CD by MUSE, the Cincinnati Women's Chorus.)
Not quite five months ago I last stood before you and discussed our various journeys into the wilderness. Mine was a joint effort with Jan to spend winter in the UP at our remote camp. For those wondering, she made it through as well and will be here in a couple of weeks after doing her grandmothering thing. The congregation has worked on its journey into the wilderness as well through the visioning sessions, expansion of the Board, introduction of Fund Trustees and the dream budget. Those who missed the dinner last night missed a good time and if you were hoping for a reprise of my short message last night, this isn’t it – but I’d be happy to talk to anyone about the current operating budget and pledge drive afterwards.
Today I want to have a conversation, albeit one-sided, about the tenth Commandment. In December only one of you raised your hand to indicate you knew all ten commandments. So in the spirit of “no child left behind”, I have revised the curriculum and will now ask – who remembers the tenth Commandment?
“Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.” (Exodus 20:17)
Perhaps there will come a time when I can say I am no longer breaking this commandment – but frankly, I doubt it. The question becomes more, given Jimmy Carter and I, despite our differing religious perspectives, both lust within our hearts, what am I going to do about it?
The first step is recognition. I am not going to change a basic aspect of my nature or nurture; I don’t choose to argue which is at fault. I am 56 living in the United States. I need to learn to deal with it, not wish it would go away.
Throughout my wilderness stay I have been singing and humming Bernice Johnson Reagon’s song, “Greed.”
This is not an American issue, not a 21st century, or 20th century or even 19th century issue. The tenth commandment was written 2 ½ to 3 millennium ago. This is not Jim Jackson’s mid-life crisis. This is a personal issue for each one of us.
I can see it in you
You can see it in me.
In 1999 after a lay sermon at St. John’s Unitarian Church in Cincinnati entitled Your Money or Your Life I read the book of that name by Joe Dominquez and Vicki Robin, life partners who decided to unhook from the work-to-consume culture. Their approach was to cut down spending to an absolute minimum, save like crazy, invest in US Government bonds and live off the interest. Their philosophy: if you are in any way beholden to money, you can’t be living the life you want to live.
While I applaud their commitment to their ideals, I think they missed the point. You’ve no doubt suspected I take a different approach since I entitled this talk “Your Money AND Your Life.” These are not two separate aspects of existence that you can trade off, one against the other, although damned if I didn’t try to do that for far too many years.
Birds don’t have money; dolphins don’t have money; chimpanzees don’t have money. So why do humans? Because we store wealth – more than just food supplies to last us through the winter. In 1975 I read John Kenneth Gailbraith’s book, Money: Whence it Came; Where it Went that addresses that issue. We invented money as a mechanism of exchange to convert one form of wealth for another. And here is where Joe and Vicki make their fundamental error. They arranged their finances so they could pretend to take money out of the equation. Just because you put a large tarp over the elephant standing in the living room doesn’t mean the elephant is no longer there.
No, a vow of poverty only works if someone else is willing to fund the concept. There can be no Mother Teresa without donations. So we are stuck with dealing with money, and assuming you have some level of greed (I can see it in you; you can see it in me) we will have to deal with our discomfort over how we acquire and dispose of money, of wealth – and assuming those are not your only clothes, each of us has stored wealth. Money is the scapegoat here folks, the real question is what are you going to do with your life and are you using money as an excuse?
I have repeated the saw that goes you can tell what someone really values if you have access to their calendar and their checkbook. These days it should be revised to having access to a person’s PDA and online banking records, but no matter. I repeat it because it bears repeating. Tom Owen-Towle in Growing a Beloved Community notes that in Muslim theology on the Judgment Day, humans must make an accounting of all expenditures, except those related to hospitality, which God would be ashamed to demand.
We have many societal problems dealing with wealth and I plan to speak to that topic later this year, but today I want to concentrate on what each of us can do to embrace our money and our lives.
We are at different stages of life – some early in careers, some mid-career or nearing retirement and many already retired. The pressures we feel about money are different. I have the advantage of having been in all of the stages and made poor decisions in each stage, so I am an expert on this subject.
I have incorporated these mistakes into Jim’s 6 Rules about Money.
Rule #1: Have a Plan
It starts with an overarching goal or series of goals. My current overarching monetary goal is self-sufficiency. I do not want to be a monetary burden on my children or to society at large. I am fortunate that I have some savings, and if I am a good steward of these savings, this is a realistic goal for me. My current growth addresses understanding the meaning of that stewardship. What is your overarching monetary goal?
With a goal comes a plan, which is like a map. You can find where you are; you can see where you want to go. It shows major highways that are well traveled, it shows blue highways less traveled, but perhaps much more interesting.
Now I happen to be a fan of budgets – hey, I’m a numbers guy. Jan isn’t. Both can work fine, as long as you do as Jan does and make sure income equals or exceeds outflow (including savings). Even if you don’t continually track your expenses and compare them to your budget, every once in a while it’s good to keep a record of all your expenses for a few months. Surprising things turn up.
In 1984 I made a decision to quit full-time work and go back to school for my MBA. I did a little projected cash flow and was shocked to determine that my FIXED expenses were more than my total expenses had been only three years before. How did that happen? It happened because I wasn’t paying attention to the cumulative effect of a series of seemingly small decisions.
Rule #2: Be flexible.
Having a plan and an immutable plan are two entirely different things. The idea here is to give focus to how you spend your money, not tie yourself up in knots because you exceeded your clothes budget by buying three pairs of socks this year instead of the budgeted two. Make sure you leave some funds for nonessential purchases that just make you feel good. If you don’t you will begin to feel deprived by whatever plan you have implemented and that is a sure sign you will begin cheating.
And if you are like me, you will cheat. And when you do, you reach rule #3.
Rule #3: Be honest.
I am going to buy books. I can convince myself I am using some of my wealth to support authors. I can say they are for research for MUUC services. I frame it a lot of different ways, but the fact remains, at the end of each year I will have bought some books, even if I had unlimited access to the Library of Congress.
So, since I budget, I have budgeted miscellaneous spending, which includes books. I no longer beat myself up about buying books, and of the 100 or so I read each year, 90 or more are borrowed and several are gifts. Before I make a purchase I make sure it is a book I want to own. I have a concrete reason for each particular book I buy. They may not be “great” reasons in the general scheme of things, but they are considered.
It is my money, my life and my decision.
Rule #4: Be conscious.
At the intergenerational moment, I gave each child a dollar and told them I was giving them a gift and a burden. It was free wealth – the gift. They had to decide what to do with it – the burden. Here is a fundamental truth: Money, in and of itself, does not cause any problems; our minds cause the problems. We humans have invented this burden for ourselves. So be it – the question is will you make it a light burden or a heavy one.
So be conscious of your spending, but also be conscious of the price of your earning. The most money I made per hour was the period after I retired when my former employer still wanted my time to help transition a large client. I charged them a fair rate – much higher than they were used to paying me – but one that still provided them with a hefty profit margin. In preparing these Sunday services I make something under minimum wage. Partly, that’s because I’m deliberative in the process and take more time than I might. Partly it’s because I buy books to support my idea gathering. Mostly it’s because I’m not doing it for the money. I’m doing it because it is what I want to do and earning money is secondary. I have made a conscious decision to spend a good chunk of my time this year developing Sunday services that I hope will be as meaningful to the congregation as they are to me. For this I am willing to give up other things I might be doing.
I don’t have to work, and so I have that luxury. But even when I did work, I watched others make different choices than I that expressed their values. I was willing to be transferred for promotions – others chose to forego the transfer to stay close to family and friends. I chose to work additional hours each year – others worked less, were paid less, had less promotional opportunity. I retired earlier than they. So, who made the better decisions?
That is a “greed-based” question. The real question in economic terms is framed as marginally utility. How much life-satisfaction do you gain by spending the extra hours working, versus whatever else you might do with your time? My route was full-bore working and retiring early. Jan off and on worked part-time and ended up working many more years. Both good decisions – for us. Each decision was deliberately made.
Have you deliberately made your decisions about earning wealth, or have they been made for you?
And while I am on the earning side of the equation, once you have some wealth to store how should you go about investing? Here’s Jim’s formulation about that: don’t even think about trying to do on a part-time basis what the economy is willing to pay someone several hundred thousand dollars a year to do full-time. Don’t try to pick individual investments – even with the help of a broker. You are using old information to bet against the pros. And even if you happen to be reasonably good at it – how much time will it take? What happens if you mess up? Invest in the economy as a whole – broadly diversify – and spend your life-force on something you can affect.
Rule #5: If you can’t afford it, don’t buy it.—unless you have to.
Credit card debit in the US is astronomical. The average credit card debt carried by Americans is $9,000. Interest on that is over $1,000 a year. Total consumer debt is over $1.7 trillion. The federal government can (and does) print money to pay its debts. We can’t. If you can’t buy whatever it is with cash then defer the purchase or buy something less expensive. Unless you have to – and I mean HAVE to.
Your house is an exception. Maybe your first car – but hopefully only the first one.
The price we pay for the immediate gratification is very steep. If you contemplate breaking rule #5, go back and review rules 1-4 again to make sure that is really the best decision for you.
I once went to a dealer to purchase a car. After we agreed on a price, I indicated I was planning to pay in cash; he offered to prove to me that it would cost me less to borrow the money. We went through his math. He honestly did not see the error of his logic and I won’t spend time going through it here, but if you are in doubt ask yourself this question:
If the bank is losing money, why do they want give me a loan?
Rule #6: Be fair.
We all like a bargain. Why pay more than you have to? I would like you to turn that question around. What is the value to you to pay less than you should?
Based on my experience with a number of UU congregations, we Unitarian Universalists affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person – until we come to pay someone. Then we all become management and try to determine the magic figure. The magic figure, one of my former bosses explained to me, was the lowest pay an employee would accept and not decide to change jobs. It was the amount she only thought deep inside her head so no one in management could hear – or maybe she would whisper it to her lover in bed the night before pay raises were given. Great managers, he explained, somehow always knew that magic figure.
And curse me if for years I didn’t want to be a great manager. I am not going to address the societal needs for “living wages” today. What I am going to challenge you as individuals when you negotiate to have some work done on your home or hire a kid to mow your lawn, and what I am going to challenge us as a congregation as we seek to grow our professional staffing in the future is this: Don’t ask what is the least we can get away with. Ask what is fair. And if we can’t do fair, then just like an individual’s purchase, until we can afford it, I believe it is more soulful to defer the hire until justice can be done to all parties.
Notice that my rule speaks of fairness, not generosity. And this the Sunday morning following our Congregational Stewardship Dinner last night – what am I thinking when some of you haven’t had the chance to turn in your pledge card?
Generosity is fairness applied to yourself. Giving a gift to your favorite charity or MUUC is not worth a darn thing if you are not being fair to yourself, since this is your choice how to spend your hard-earned money. For years I treated church like I managed my slice of the business.
I’ll save the story of my revelation about giving for another time. Suffice it to say I have a new perspective and from that perspective I have discovered how enriching it is to me to support my Unitarian Universalist faith through my contributions of time and money to MUUC, my winter church in Cincinnati, the UUA Service Committee and Chalice Lighter grants in both the Central Midwest District and the Heartland District. Together the monetary portion of my gifts equals a tithe of my total expected spending for the year. (As a retiree I have no idea what my investments will earn in any given year, so I based the tithe on my expenses.) As my gifts increased from less than 1% of income to 3%, then 5% and now 10% what I have received from making those gifts has expanded beyond anything I might have anticipated. Giving until it feels good works for me.
But it is your money and your life. And the fact is, I don’t believe in St. Peter standing at the pearly gates with your PDA and online banking records in hand saying “Welcome saint, or oh-oh.” We live our heaven and hell here with the choices we make. It is your money and your life. What will you make of it?