Episode 1245: The Best Way to Money

[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: Thanks

[00:00:00] for joining me on episode 1,245 of the Inspired Stewardship Podcast.

[00:00:06] Matt Ham: Hey, I'm Matt Ham, author of Redefined Rich, and I challenge you to live richly by listening to the Inspired Stewardship Podcast with my friend Scott Maderer.

[00:00:17] Scott Maderer: So the better question to ask yourself, is it, what's the optimal way? What's the right way, What's the perfect way? It's what way will I actually do? What will it take to get me started? What will it take to keep me moving? What will it take to get me back on track? Whatever something inevitably goes. And I go off track.

[00:00:40] Welcome and thank you for joining us on the Inspired Stewardship Podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be. Then you must learn to use your time, your talent, and your treasures for your true calling In the Inspired Stewardship Podcast, who will learn to invest in yourself, [00:01:00] invest in others, and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.

[00:01:07] In today's episode about investing in others through stewarding your treasures, I talk with you about why there is a best way to do anything with money, but it may not be what you think. I also share why we often obsess about the best way to pay off debt, to invest, to earn, or to save, but we're missing the real point.

[00:01:26] And I share why there is a better question to ask yourself as we talk about stewarding your treasures. Wouldn't it be great if you could support this podcast and do it without costing yourself an extra dime? Turns out you can't. All you have to do is use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. When you're ready to make a purchase via Amazon, and a small commission will come back to support the show.

[00:01:52] If you enjoy the show, when you're ready to buy from Amazon, just use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. A lot [00:02:00] of times whenever I'm working with clients on their finances and on their. They wanna know the best way to do things with their money. They wanna know the best way to budget. What's the perfect budget?

[00:02:12] What's the perfect app that I can download and put on my phone so that I can do better with my money? How should I invest it? How should I earn it? How should I save it? What is the absolute best way to manage my money to do anything with. And the ironic answer is the best way to do it is the way that you will do it.

[00:02:39] And what I mean by that is there are a lot of tools and techniques and ways of doing things. There are apps, there are different kinds of budgets. There's budgeting, using percentages. There's budgeting by just paying the things that you have to pay and then not worrying about all of the disposable income.

[00:02:59] There's [00:03:00] zero based budgeting paying off debt. There's the. Avalanche. There's the debt snowball. There's different methods of calculating the most efficient way to pay off the debt. And a lot of times people get into all of that detail and really begin to obsess about what is the right way to go about it.

[00:03:20] They'll read blog article after blog article. They'll work with this person, or they'll download this app and they'll try it out for a little while, and then eventually, They'll get bored and they'll move on to the next thing, but they don't necessarily make a lot of overall progress, and a lot of times it's because they haven't actually stepped back and thought about the why for themselves.

[00:03:45] Why are they doing this? What's important for them about the particulars of their life and how they wanna live? Cash envelopes, let's take that as an example. It's a really powerful way of [00:04:00] managing your money when it comes to things where you have a tendency to overspend like groceries or eating out kinds of things.

[00:04:07] Walking around money. Money that it's easy to just keep spending on it and really lose track of the amount. But if you are not going to be somebody who carries cash, maybe you do all your grocery shopping through online grocery deliver. Because you, it's convenient for you. You don't have the time to go to the grocery store.

[00:04:29] Then cash envelopes aren't necessarily gonna work for you for groceries or the debt avalanche versus the debt snowball. Usually the difference in those two methods in terms of how quickly you would pay off your debt is relatively short. 2, 3, 4 kinds of months of. And yet people will argue for hours about whether you should pay things off in order of balance from smallest balance to largest, which is the debt snowball, or in order of interest rates, [00:05:00] which is the debt avalanche or other ways of doing it.

[00:05:04] The truth is what's funny is they spend all this time trying to obsess about the right way to do it and don't actually make progress on paying off the debt. We obsess about the best way to do it, and we do all of this work to optimize and make efficient the way, instead of actually just doing the work, instead of picking one.

[00:05:27] At some point it's just time to pick one and get started, get moving. It's easier to adjust things once they're moving. Or you can't steer a parked car, but you can steer it. Once it's in motion, that momentum is easier to channel. It's the getting started. It's that initial energy that often is the most difficult.

[00:05:52] So the better question to ask yourself, is it what's the optimal way? What's the right way, What's the perfect way? It's what way will I [00:06:00] actually do? What will it take to get me started? What will it take to keep me moving? What will it take to get me back on track? Whatever. Something inevitably goes wrong and I go off track.

[00:06:14] That's why for a lot of people, it's good to tie some intrinsic motivation, some things that are internal to things like finding your y, finding a deep, passionate reason why you want to do it with extrinsic tools. Like coaching and accountability and even tools like the cash envelope and a budget, those are outside of you tools.

[00:06:37] It's not one or the other that most people need. It's being able to find an effective way to tie the two together, but we often lose track of that because we're looking for the how and not paying attention to the why we're looking for. Best how and not realizing that almost anyhow will get [00:07:00] you there.

[00:07:00] If you just get started and get moving, you can always fine tune it later. Thanks for listening.

[00:07:09] Thanks so much for listening to the Inspired Stewardship Podcast. As a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively. But act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you like this episode on the Stewardship of Treasures, you can sign up for our treasures tips by going to.

[00:07:35] Inspired stewardship.com/treasures or text in the us 4 4 2 2 2 treasures tips, and we'll send you five weeks of our best tips on stewarding your treasures. Until next time, invest your. Your talent and your treasures. Develop your influence [00:08:00] and impact the world.