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So I want to talk about this idea of having a financial audit with God. And I know the word audit is not exactly exciting, but the main reason I want to do this is that there are challenges that happen all the time in life. In Isaiah, there's a line that goes something like describing a a common mistake that people make that they think that tomorrow will be like today only far better. That's a tremendous mistake. There are a few things you can count on in life and while other people are not one of them, gravity is something and increasing taxes. Those two things you can definitely count on. And in that same vein, whatever you do in life, it carries a certain amount of overhead. Anytime you build anything, that could be a literal physical thing or it can just be a system that you organize. Your life itself is one such system. there are forces working against it all the time. You can think of these as overhead. A more technical description would be entropy. Anytime you organize anything, there will be forces acting against it at all times to tear it down. And you don't necessarily see these things. In fact, the more complex the system you create, the less likely you are to see that entropy. But just because you don't see something doesn't mean it's not coming for you. And you can bet your bottom dollar that life is coming for you. Now, no matter who you are, you can think about your life and I'm sure you can enumerate many times over its scope where you were slammed with something that you did not expect or you were completely wrong about something that you were really confident about. Now, just applying that pattern out into the future, why would you think that it's less likely for those things to happen the further along you go? And yet, most people do. If I were to say to you, hey, uh, the more money you have, the harder it is to keep it. You might say, oh, no, that's not true. That's not true. Is it based on evidence or is your belief based on wishing? The wishing part is we really want to think deep down, hey, it's going to get easier. Hey, it's going to get better. Is there evidence for that? Life gets better as you get stronger, but that doesn't mean that the problems get easier. It just means that the easier things are easier to you because you're getting stronger. So, we really need to recode our brains. And that's the preamble for this financial audit with God. Now, here's the good news, the light part of it. It turns out that by rearranging the money you already spend, so not necessarily getting anything extra, you can have massively more joy, peace, and security. That's pretty much true for pretty much anybody. So, what what's kind of the less rosy part of this? It's not really optional. God holds us accountable for the resources that he gives us. He even holds us accountable for the resources he gives us access to even if we don't do anything about it. And it's really important to to take up that that responsibility as a steward. And on the one hand, if you do it well, there's great joy and peace and everything else. On the other, if you don't do this or you ignore it, not only is life going to kick your butt, and it's going to, and if you don't do this, you already know that what I'm telling you is true, unless you're one of these people who mystically explains away all their misfortune in life by claiming it's someone else's fault or just some cosmic uh fluke, even though every single person who does the things that you do is in just as bad a place. But the other side of this is that God will hold you accountable and it's not a place you want to be. It's one thing to call upon God when you need his help because something took you by surprise and you did everything you knew to do and now you're calling on him in innocence for his help in something that was was bigger than you. It's a it's a very different thing to go to God after being a complete doofus your whole life and to say, "Well, you know, I really I deserve this and far worse, but I want you to take me out of what I deserve." That's a very different prayer and you don't want to be there. All right. So, let's talk through a couple of ways you can know how badly you need to do this. First off, do you live check to check? If the answer's yes, you are not being a good steward of the Lord's resources. Now, that's going to be a really offensive claim, but just hang with me. We'll get around to showing why. Can you handle surprise expenses? That's another way of saying the same thing. Does your financial picture go right out the window when you need to fix your car? Like something you really should be expecting. Or you have a medical bill that's just sort of it's not something crazy. You don't have bone cancer. or you just broke a limb. Well, if you can't handle what the kinds of expenses that you should be expecting, odds are you need to make some financial changes. Do you know where your money goes? A surprising number of people have no idea what they spend their money on. If you ask them from memory to produce a a spreadsheet of where their money went over the last 30 days, they would be off. They maybe they wouldn't even be able to attempt it because they have no idea. It's just they their left hand doesn't know what their right hand is doing and not in a good way. How intentional are you on how you spend your money? Do you have some kind of process of how you decide to do it or is it just sort of here's a demand? Oh, there's money in my pocket. I'll go spend it. And then finally, how much self-control do you have over how you spend your money? How often do you tell yourself no? A surprising number of people impulse buy whatever the heck they want until they're out of money. Now, that's a a a good a good time to bring up this idea. Money is never about money. Money is always pulling in all these other things out of our lives. If if you live checkto check, that's not the only problem you have. In fact, it's it's a symptom of a much deeper problem. If you don't spend your money intentionally, that's not the only problem you have. I guarantee your whole life is like that. If you can't handle um surprise expenses, I guarantee your whole life is structured with the assumption that everything will be perfect all the time. It's not just a money problem. If you can't control yourself and say no to yourself, I guarantee you that you have tons of sins in your life where it's the same thing where you're not controlling yourself emotionally. You're you your your rational process is not in the driver's seat of your life because it doesn't ever just happen with money. What God wants from us in being wise stewards, he wants us to, it comes back to this idea in Malachi of having meat in the Lord's house. And there's like 10 layers of ancient Israelite idioms there that we have to weave through. But the long and short of it is he wants us to do all that we do in his name or according to his character, which is to say for the motive of making everything as good as it can be. Now this starts with you and it extends out to your family and then from there everything else where you have some sort of influence but the point is that it needs to be intentional and directed to the greatest good. Now who decides what the greatest good is? Well, you're going to have to do that. And you might be better or less good at that, but that's a separate situation. The point is is that you're the one who gets to decide that. And so you should be deciding that and not just sort of throwing your cash or whatever other resources you have, your time, your energy, your your your emotional and mental well-being into the wind and just letting it go wherever it goes. So before we get into practical practical ways of doing this, the question could be asked, well, I mean, how how how intentional do we need to be about this? Does it really require some sort of process? And what you'll see very quickly is that the answer is yes. To the extent that you don't go through this with due diligence, with the the necessary detail, you're going to be making all these pockets where you can make bad decisions without realizing you are. And it's a magnet for everything bad about human nature. And we could go into a lot of detail on that, but essentially you'll be selfish and dishonest and short-term focused and emotionally focused, and you'll be about as far away from the long-term optimal situation as you could be. Now, it it won't be visible to you unless you go through this exercise because it's going to be so easy to just think, "Oh, well, there's no other option." Yes, there is. Oh, well, this just happens to me. No, it doesn't. Oh, I'm I'm different than everybody else, and this this isn't my fault at all. Yes, it is. And when you go through the details, you you can't get away from that, and you have to face it. Okay? But that's empowering. because it it shows you the way. Anytime you specifically consider the ideal about something, you can't do that without also creating a path towards it. People are afraid to think about what might be better, but they don't realize it's the only way to proceed beyond where you are. And those things always go together. It's like, oh, I'm going to feel bad if I realize how much of my misfortune is actually my fault. Well, sure. and you should, but you won't feel any better until you make better choices. And you can't make better choices without first enumerating what those could be. So, let's do it. Here's the practical exercise. Get yourself a piece of paper. If you're more comfortable with it, you could use a spreadsheet. I'd probably go the electronic route, but that's just me. So what you want to do is you want to make a column for the name of the expense, the cost, the benefit, and then a final column for net benefit. Now, you can get as specific with this as you'd like. Most people don't really like detailed numbers, but you could use, for example, uh a number of pluses in the cost column. uh I'm sorry, benefit column, minuses in the cost column, and then cancel them out for the net benefit column. So, if you have something that you're spending money on in life, because you're just going to go through and make an entry for everything you spend money on, and I recommend setting a time limit, a month might be a good time limit because most things happen on at least monthly basis. So, um, you go through and you list the item and then you can either write the actual cost and then try to enumerate the actual benefit, which might be hard to do in dollar uh, amounts and then you subtract the cost from the benefit and that gives you the net benefit. What you're going to find is that some of the thing, at least some of the things that you spend your money on don't have a net benefit. They just have a net cost. So, um, usually vices are like that. We could name those out, but you know, there are things that that you spend money on that don't have any worth. And that should bring some scriptures to mind. There are injunctions against this throughout the scriptures, but people do it all the time. If the if the pluses and minuses are still too much detail, you can use something like t-shirt sizes. You can say this is a small expense, a medium expense or a large expense. So like a mortgage payment would be a large expense, a a car repair, a big medical bill. And then do the same for the benefit. This will simplify it even more. So, as you list those things out, um you'll you'll have for each item, you'll have the ability to then after you've listed your list, go through and ask yourself, is there something I can do to reduce the cost or increase the benefit? So, for example, if you have a car, you have car insurance. When is the last time that you shopped around to see if there was cheaper insurance available? Or when was the last time you called your agent to talk through exactly what's on your policy and make sure you actually want those things? Maybe there are things that you can adjust. So, for example, on your homeowner's policy, maybe there's a personal property line item. So, if your home's a total loss, technically they will pay for your things that got destroyed in say say a house fire. Well, you might ask your insurance agent, "What do I have to do to make that claim?" And if he or she says, "Oh, you have to produce receipts for all the things you bought." Maybe you don't need $200,000 worth of personal property protection because you couldn't produce $200,000 worth of receipts. maybe you need like $10,000 because that's all you could do searching amazon.com for your for your receipts on a couple of things. So things like that can actually save you a lot of money. And again, if you weren't going to use that $200,000 worth of coverage, why are you paying for it? That's a net cost, not a net benefit. Anyway, you can get as detailed as you want going line item by line item and and considering what can we do to increase the benefit or shrink the cost. Now, you go through the list again after you've made each item as good as it can be. You evaluate whether it's worth keeping. There will be some things, like I've said twice now, that just don't have a net benefit, and you should absolutely remove them from your life. You just can't that you shouldn't be doing anything just because other people do it. Do the the the calculation to see if it's worthwhile. Now, so, so, and again, this is very specific because everyone has a different system of value, but one thing that I'm constantly on my wife about is is feta cheese. I do not understand how that can be worth the cost. It's not cheap and it's not very good. And she likes it. I said, "Well, how much do you like it more than cheaper cheese? Is it really worth two, three, or four times other cheese?" And if the answer's no, why do we buy it? Right? So you can go through the list like that. Now, uh the the next step is to think about what alternatives might exist. Is there a higher net benefit option? So I've talked about shopping around insurance. That's an example of this. It's you're trading out one thing for another, but the cost benefit might be better. Uh, I've mentioned food. So, I just mentioned the example of feta cheese. Maybe it's going to a different store. Pork at Walmart might be half the price it is at Costco. Is it really twice as good at Costco or does it just cost twice as much? These are things for you to think about. Um, another option, a change that we've made is basically all of the chicken we buy is bone in skin on quarters because you can reliably it's it's it's November 2025 and for the last two years you can reliably buy it for about 87 cents a pound at one store we go to and we just can't justify buying boneless skinless chicken breast for example for three or four times times that it just doesn't make any sense. It's not three or four times as good. So that's something to think about. Now the next step is very important. Now you're going to go through your list and this is where it's easier to have spreadsheet or something that you can easily modify because you're going to rank each item. You rank each item according to the net benefit that it provides. So something that is really important and provides a huge benefit like having a place to live is going to take a much higher place on your list than what kind of cheese you buy, right? Unless you're really really into cheese. To each their own. But what this does is once you've got a ranked list and and don't be afraid to go and make changes because working through this exercise, what you're going to do is you're going to draw a lot of attention to what you really think about things versus your initial thought about it. And you're going to realize that some things just aren't worth what you would have said they were worth. And some things are worth a lot more than you said they were worth. And you're you're going to rank all of this And then what you're able to do is you take your monthly income and you go down the list summing the cost until you get to the end of your monthly income. And then you draw a line. Everything below the line you stop buying because you can't afford it. And so you've chosen what to remove based on how important it actually is to you in terms of net benefit. This is an extraordinarily important exercise. Now, one thing that's really important that I didn't bring up yet, if you don't have savings and investment, you are making a mistake. There is something that you're putting ahead of that that you absolutely should not. Now, maybe all you can save is 25 bucks a month. Okay, fine. The fact is that surprises require surplus. And by not saving and not anticipating the unanticipated, you're guaranteeing that you're going to pay a lot of money for it when it happens. And by force, it will dis displace not the things at the bottom of the list, but the things at the top of the list. This happens all the time. And like I said, it's a sign that you're not doing this right. There's a better way. All the stress that comes with that, it's optional. You don't have to deal with that. So, what you do is if you don't have savings or investment in your list, you inject it in and you say, you know what, we're going to save $250 a month. You know what? we're going to save $2,500 a month, whatever it is. And then you have the discussion about how to save or invest that. A very easy way is a highinterest savings account. Very easy to set up on PayPal. If if you have an account through Erade, you can do it. Your local bank might do it, but probably not because banks are really cheap. But just find a savings account with with a relatively high interest rate that you can get your money in and out of easily. There are a lot of options for that today. And there are much better options for saving money, but this is just a baseline that anyone can do. You don't need to know anything about anything to do it. It's a piece of cake. And inject that line item into your budget and put it up high enough that there's money for it because you're going to need that money. See that money isn't an end. It's a means to maintaining the things above it on the list. So if those things are really important, you need to set aside money to maintain them in spite of surprises. And that's what you're doing with savings and investment. So, um, anyway, if you do this exercise, what you're going to do is you're going to take control of your financial life and become someone who makes decisions and acts instead of someone who's just acted upon. And your your financial life should not be you tossed on the waves of the sea. Okay? Now, you might say, "What the heck, dude? You got cancelled and you live off of donations. Yeah, it's true. You know, I started a foundation. We are funded by donations and those donations fund videos like this and mostly the books I write, which I give away all of that for free. But what you're not seeing is how me living my life like this for like 20 years solid set me up. so that that didn't absolutely devastate my life. And you should think about that. What would happen if you spent 20 years working your way towards a highpaying set of jobs and your career was completely taken away from you against your will for no good reason. Actually, especially because you were doing good things. Would you be able to weather it as well as I have? Probably not. Very, very few people would. Why? Because of this mentality of, "Oh, what I'm doing is good enough for right now." Good enough for right now is not good enough. And you see this with people because these things that were totally predictable, not even surprises, totally predictable things come along and completely wipe them out financially. We have to be wiser than this. You know, Paul told the people back in his day, hey, you guys believe that one day you're going you are going to judge angels and yet you can't work out these simple problems between yourselves. You can't judge each other. What the heck? Why do you think that you're going to be doing you're you're obviously on the wrong track. If you can't even manage the finances for yourself and your family, you are on the wrong track to be a basic Christian. You have to have a base level of of not even wisdom, just common sense and honesty and self-control. And if you lack those things, it is such a severe problem. It's not just some side thing of, oh, like one day I'll get my life together and whatever. It is a major problem and it is a spiritual problem. The temporal effects are just the downstream effects. Now, finally, the last thing I'll talk about here is what if you set all these things up and you draw your line and you're like, "Ah, shoot. I can't pay for food there. There we have food requirements that are below the line." Then you have to start asking yourself, what more are you going to do to set yourself up in a better financial situation? There are people out there who are just way too comfortable in a job that doesn't provide what they and their family needs. There are people who think that they can live a life, they wouldn't describe it as a life of luxury, but if you have one working person in a in a in a couple, so a marriage where only one person works and there's not enough money to pay the bills, guess what? person number two needs to get a jobby job or person number one needs to get a second jobby job. That's just reality. And for some reason, people just are like, "Oh, not possible in today's world." Uh up until very recently, this was a common thing for people to have more than one job. It's it's if it's necessary for you, it's necessary for you. And the alternative is pretending like everything's going to be fine without it. Well, do the math. Is it true? If you don't have savings, if you're not prepared for unexpected expenses, then it's not true. Now, the sad thing about this though is that for most people, everybody's situation is different. For most people, they're actually bringing in a good amount of money. Uh most people who are going to watch this are actually bringing in a good amount of money. The problem is they spend all of it on dumb things, things that do not provide enough of a benefit to justify the cost. So, I I invite you to be wise and to think about these things and really put yourself through the ringer of honesty and think about the benefits that you're getting out of the money that you're spending and rearrange that money to provide yourself and your family with greater long-term benefit.