00:00:00 Thanks for joining me on episode 735 of the inspired stewardship podcast. I'm Ryan England with core matters and the blue collar culture podcast. I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent and your treasure is to live out your calling, having the ability to grow yourself and your business is key.
00:00:25 And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this. The inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott Mader. What I've seen time after time is that pays off in tangible effects on our money. We tend to get more relaxed. We tend to get more intentional. We tend to focus more on experiences and feelings and values and priorities and stop focusing so much on what we can't have.
00:00:59 We instead focus on what we do have we see our own blessings. Welcome, and thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcasts. 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 will learn to invest in yourself,
00:01:25 invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world. And today's episode about impacting the world through stewarding your treasures. I talk with you about why giving should always be part of your budget. Why there are real benefits of giving and why you should give, even if you aren't really able to give, as we talk about stewarding your treasures,
00:01:56 wouldn't it be great. If you could support this podcast and do it without costing yourself an extra dime, it turns out you can. 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, we'll come back to support the show. If you enjoy the show, when you're ready to buy from Amazon,
00:02:19 just use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. Let's talk a little bit about giving charitable giving tithing giving to different organizations or people in need is something that comes up time after time when I'm talking to people about their budget. You know, if people come to me because they're struggling to make ends meet, maybe they have a lot of debt that they're trying to pay off. Maybe there's other things going on.
00:02:47 They've got variable ability in their income, or maybe somebody lost a job or there's other struggles going on in their finances. The question always comes up. Should we be giving at a time like this, but equally, if somebody is doing well and, and maybe they just come to me because they want to fine tune things, or they feel like, you know,
00:03:09 they make enough that they should be doing better and they really want to improve their financial situation. Then equally, the question comes up. Should I be giving during a time like this? Should I focus on fixing X, Y, or Z before I start giving? And my answer when this comes up is always the same giving should always be part of your budget.
00:03:35 And by the way, I think this includes time as well as money. But for today, let's just focus on giving with dollars giving with your actual money. The truth is we always can find something to do with our income. I don't care if you make a hundred dollars a week or a thousand dollars a week or $10,000 a week, or even a hundred thousand dollars a week,
00:04:01 there's always demands on what we do with our money. And part of what we have to do is align what we get and what we want with our values. And I believe that giving to others, recognizing the privileges that we do have the blessings that we do have no matter how small through giving to others. That for me, that's a world value that I think everyone needs to ascribe to know the truth is there's benefits to giving.
00:04:32 And here I'm talking about two kinds of benefits. There's emotional benefits. And then there's kind of quote, practical financial benefits. You know, you can give, and if you do it and you track it and you pay attention to it, usually you can get various tax deductions and other practical kinds of things. But the emotional side to me is even more important.
00:04:54 See, in giving to others, we begin to recognize what we have going for us. We begin to see the benefits that we have, and we begin to feel good about helping others. It begins to build that habit, muscle of being focused on others first, not on ourselves. And as we do that, it begins to change how we view our money.
00:05:17 See the truth is for most people, let's just take 10%. Let's say you took 10% of the income that you had after taxes. And you decided you were going to give it to a charity. If instead you kept it. What usually happens. It's not like most people use that 10% to pay down debt or to do other activities like that are invested or anything else that would be for their long-term success.
00:05:43 Instead, usually that 10% ends up being spent. And usually it ends up being spent on stuff. And typically it's not like food or shelter. It's stuff that the truth is you could live without, because 10% of your overall income, even if you make a very low income is still a relatively small amount. So even if you feel like you're not able to give,
00:06:09 I would argue that setting aside a small percentage is still doable. And for most of us, the tangible feeling benefits of carving off and being intentional, finding an organization or a group, finding something that tugs at your heart strings, that you feel very, very is important. That you feel a connection to, that you feel is something that in giving to it,
00:06:37 you're helping the world in a real way. When you identify those groups and you give to them, then all of a sudden that begins to improve how you feel about not just yourself, but also your control of your money, how you're doing with your budget. And what I've seen time after time is that pays off in tangible effects on our money. We tend to get more relaxed.
00:07:03 We tend to get more intentional. We tend to focus more on experiences and feelings and values and priorities and stop focusing so much on what we can't have. We instead focus on what we do have. We see our own blessings. We become more thankful. We become more generous. We become more kind. And all of those things pay off in relationships.
00:07:28 And over time that usually shows up in a tangible financial way. It's not magic either. It just comes to do with the fact that as folks recognize that you're a giving person, people begin to want to be around you more. They want to give you more opportunities. They want to be served by you more. And so even if you feel like you're not able to give,
00:07:54 I would argue that it still needs to be a part of your budget and it doesn't have to be hundreds of thousands of dollars to be beneficial. It can even be a very small amount of money. And again, like I said earlier, you can include time in this too. What are you doing to give your time to various organizations? How are you serving them as a volunteer or taking some of the skills that you have,
00:08:20 or the knowledge that you have and giving it to organizations that could benefit from that? All of these things actually have real results because they change your heart. They change your mind. They change how you view things and in changing that everything changes. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast, as a subscriber and listener, we challenge to not just sit back and passively listen,
00:08:58 but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you liked this episode on the stewardship of treasures, you can sign up for our treasures tips by going to inspired stewardship.com/treasures or text in the U S four four two two two treasures tips. And we'll send you five weeks of our best tips on stewarding your treasures until next time,
00:09:32 invest your time, your talent and your treasures, develop your influence and impact the world..