Arguably some of the most important work I do with clients is integrating their financial and spiritual lives — e.g., how does what you do with your money reflect your beliefs about The World and your place in it? Sometimes, a client says one thing, but their money says another, and I have to gently point out where the two differ. However, what can be more troublesome is when a client’s finances follow their theology completely…straight down a black hole of credit card debt. This is most often the case with the Theology of Abundance.

The Theology of Abundance is a fairly straightforward aspect of the Christian faith in particular; it says that you shouldn’t hoard your resources out of fear, but that you should give freely as God has given to you. The example of Jesus feeding the five thousand with only a few loaves and fishes is given as a prime example. And it’s a great theology; that kind of faith frees you to let go of your money, which in turn releases your money’s hold on you.

You can probably see where such a theology might lead you into trouble: “I shouldn’t worry about my finances, so budgeting is, in fact, something to be avoided. I give to the church, and my family, and my friends, and those I meet on the street…and occasionally buy myself nice things. God will provide, right?” And then the credit card bills come in, and that’s amended to, “God will provide eventually, right?” Despite faithfully following Jesus’ example with the loaves and fishes, there’s a twinge of guilt, and a nagging feeling: does the Theology of Abundance actually work in the real world? But of course that would question your faith, so you shove that nagging feeling down and continue to (faithfully!) ignore your finances. And the debt piles up, until you barely have the cash flow to pay your normal bills, much less help anyone else out.

So, does this mean that the Theology of Abundance is wrong? As it turns out, no. There’s a crucial point here that people overlook when applying the loaves and fishes to modern-day life: Jesus didn’t ask the disciples to give what they didn’t have. He didn’t say, “go get a loan of a few hundred denarii, and feed these people”; he asked, “What do you have?” And he was able to work a miracle with that. The trouble is that with the advent of credit cards, it is ridiculously easy to spend what we don’t have, and there’s where we get into trouble. If you want Bible quotes, here’s one from Proverbs that Dave Ramsey loves to throw around: “the borrower is slave to the lender.” He’s not wrong, either; how can you live your life faithfully as a servant of God when you’re already a servant of your creditors?

If you truly believe in abundance, then the only reason you should be carrying credit cards is for convenience. If they’re a temptation to live beyond your means, throw them away and start using the envelope method — it’s actually more fun than you might think! Once you start giving out of what you have, and not what your credit card company has — once you allow God to work with your small handful of loaves and fishes — then you’ll start seeing the real miracles happen.

Last week, we talked about prescriptive and descriptive budgeting — “I Will” versus “It Is.” I did this because they’re useful concepts, but mostly, because I have a challenge for those I call “100% descriptives”.

First, though: descriptive budgeting can be a wonderful goal to strive for. For many people, financial success is defined as freedom — the ability to spend what they want, without worry. By working to increase discretionary income — in large part by paying off old debt and avoiding new debt — this can become a hard-won dream-come-true. And you’ll know that you got there when all of your nearly spending categories become descriptive — they are what they are, and you don’t need to cut back on them in order to meet your goals.

However, your budget should never be 100% descriptive. I have friends who are pretty much there, and some of them can’t stand the idea of budgeting. They don’t like “putting labels on money”. They have enough, so why bother? Why not just make the choices as the desire arises? I have a few answers for that:

How you budget your each dollar determines where you keep it.  If you don’t have a budget to help you make good choices as to how much you keep in checking, savings, CD’s, a retirement account, a 529, or a traditional brokerage account, you end up with:

• money in your checking account that should be in savings, earning better interest
• money in your savings account that should be in a brokerage account, earning better long-term returns (if invested properly)
• money in a retirement account that should be in a 529, allowing you to save for your children’s college education without jeopardizing your retirement
• money in a brokerage account that should be in a retirement account, not getting taxed
• money in your employer’s stock that should be in checking or savings, avoiding unnecessary risk

and so on. I see a new example of misplaced money every day, and in each case, they’re losing money, and lots of it — in terms of taxes, interest or capital gains lost, unnecessary risk taken, etc. How much is it worth not to even bother taking stock of your values, or what you might wish you had saved for in ten years?

Money that doesn’t get budgeted often get spent for you. By this, I mean that it goes towards things you don’t really value. The thought occurs to you to buy something, and you shrug and say, “I’ve got the money; why not?” So you accumulate stuff and experiences as the thought occurs to you, rather than thinking about what you truly value. (Note: this is not to knock spontaneity — just as long as it fits with your values!) You spend money way out of proportion to the value you get out of it, and still end up with a vague feeling of unhappiness…so you spend even more money next time, and the cycle continues.

You leave a huge legacy that you didn’t intend. Maybe you don’t spend your money…so you die sitting on a pile of cash. Now, again, a legacy can be a good thing — if it’s planned. However, I’d take a serious look at “Die Broke“; in it, Stephen Pollan makes some excellent arguments for building your legacy while you’re still alive. Certainly this is the case if you have children or grandchildren; in the former case, why not help them out with their first house, their first child, their new business, rather than waiting until you pass on? In the latter, why do them and the world the disservice of making them spoiled “trust-fund babies”?

Your money gets burned by inappropriate investments. What does everyone say you should do with “leftover” money? Why, invest it, of course! So you play around with the stock market, or you have a friend who has this great investment opportunity, or you accumulate ridiculous numbers of shares in your employer’s company…but you have no plan, so when you actually need the money, it happens to be at a low point in that investment’s cycle. (Or, worst case, that “investment opportunity” goes up in smoke!) So you “sell low”, defeating the whole purpose of investing in the first place! (Unless you just enjoy gambling, in which case there’s this whole city I know that’s pretty much built around exactly that…)

So do you have to budget every penny? No. You don’t have to become a spreadsheet junkie with hundreds of budget categories who meticulously enters their transactions every week. Just keep an eye on your finances. Think about what you value. Don’t be afraid to put labels on your money — and to move those labels around as circumstances and your values change!

Your money — and your future self — will thank you.

A lot of people shudder when they hear the word “budget”. And why shouldn’t they? The popular view is that a budget is like a diet writ large — but instead of just limiting your eating, it’s limiting every fun part of your life! No wonder virtually no one keeps a budget — trying to actively limit every single aspect of your spending is a sure recipe for burnout!

Luckily, budgeting doesn’t have to be like that. Enter descriptive budgeting.

Prescriptive budgeting is what you traditionally think of when you think of budgeting: “I’m going to write this number down and pinky swear (or, even better, establish a system like the envelope method) that I’m not going to spend more than X amount on Y.” It’s certainly not a bad thing, and it’s often quite necessary, but it’s not the be-all and end-all of budgeting. As I mentioned before, trying to make it the be-all and end-all can quickly sap your motivation.

Descriptive budgeting is simply entering into your budget what you predict you will spend. You’re not making any effort to throttle back; you’re just stepping outside yourself and saying, “Given what I know about myself (or my family), and what YNAB/mint.com/Quicken says we’ve spent in the past, how much will we probably end up spending this month?” You already use this for mostly-constant bills, like auto insurance or your rent, and even bills over which you only have partial influence, like your utility bill.

Note: you can combine the envelope method and descriptive budgeting! In other words, just because you’ve decided to pay cash for everything doesn’t mean that you’re actively limiting your spending everywhere. For example, I know some dedicated Ramseyites who pay cash when fueling up their car — not because they’re trying to cut back on gas, but simply because they don’t want to use plastic anywhere. In most of these cases, they use descriptive budgeting to allocate what they think they’re likely going to spend to that envelope. (A little more, actually, because running out of gas money before you run out of month would be pretty disastrous to most Americans!)

So to summarize: with your descriptive budget categories, you’re just putting down What It Is, while with prescriptive categories, you’re putting down What You Want To Do. “OK,” you say. “That’s an interesting little bit of semantics, but…so what? Why even bother with descriptive budgeting at all?”

Fear not — these questions and others will be answered in next week’s post!

“You Need A Budget”. No, I don’t mean you personally — that’s what YNAB stands for, and that’s what we’ll be talking about today. Got your attention? Good — let’s go.

The basics. In a sense, YNAB is more traditional than mint.com: rather than being free and online-only, it’s a standard, non-free piece of software that runs on your PC. Rather than feeding it your bank information, you have to regularly download your transactions yourself (though you can still teach it to auto-categorize and -rename your transactions). YNAB is very non-traditional, however, in its approach to budgeting itself.

“You haven’t budgeted like this.” That’s founder Jesse Mecham’s tagline for YNAB, and he’s not wrong. Rather than setting up a standard “monthly budget”, his program is built around the “Four Rules”, Rule One of which is “give every dollar a job”. That’s not “every dollar of average monthly income”; rather, it’s “every dollar you have, right now”. You don’t budget for an average month; you budget for this month, or until you get your next paycheck, whatever your situation calls for. People used to Quicken or mint.com often scratch their heads when first faced with this mindset, but once the lightbulb goes off, it can feel like Budgeting Done Right for the first time. (Among other things, this forces you to review your budget each month, which is vital to creating one that doesn’t break on contact with Real Life.)

Rule Two: Save For a Rainy Day. When you budget, your money goes into “buckets”, in a manner extremely reminiscent of the Envelope Method. And when next month rolls around, any money in a bucket that hasn’t been spent is still there. In this way, you can easily save for non-monthly expenses, like insurance, car repairs, or Christmas, and at a glance can tell exactly how much you have saved up — without having to open a separate account!

Rule Three: Roll With The Punches. On the flip side, if you spend more than what you have budgeted in every given category, YNAB handles it gracefully: the sum of all overspending is taken out of the money available for next month’s budget. So, effectively, instead of it all being taken away from that one category (“great, now I’m supposed to try and underspend on groceries by $100 next month?”), it’s spread out over all of your categories, making things much more manageable.

Rule Four: Live On Last Month’s Paycheck. This Rule is more of a goal than a law, but YNAB is built to guide you towards living on last month’s paycheck, which gives you a buffer for the inevitable hiccups that will occur in life.

Bottom line? If you’re committed to budgeting, I highly recommend YNAB. It’s clean, it’s functional, it does what a budgeting program is supposed to do. However, it’s going to take some work on your part — you can’t get away with not being mindful of your finances, the way you can with mint.com.

Speaking personally, I can’t imagine what budgeting was like in the Pre-Computing Dark Ages. As it is, though, we now have plenty of tools to help keep us on track (though how well we use them is another matter entirely). For this week and next, I’m going to talk about my two favorite budgeting programs: mint.com and YNAB. (Yes, I’m quite familiar with Quicken, but it didn’t make the cut. If I ever get a reason to upgrade to the latest version, I may do a review on it; in the meantime, though, I’ll take a pass.)

So, what’s this mint.com thing? Mint.com is a completely online, free budgeting program. You visit the site through your web browser, give it your bank and credit card access information, and it automatically sucks in your transactions and balance information and presents it all to you in a very pretty format. You can then use it to track your spending, set goals, and otherwise get a handle on your finances.

The key word with mint.com is “automatic”. It was designed from the ground up to make personal finance as easy as possible: it automatically keeps up-to-date with your spending, auto-categorizes transactions as best as it can, sends you e-mails if your spending in a certain category goes over a specified amount, etc. etc. If you hate with a fiery passion the busywork of dealing with personal finances, you’re mint.com’s target audience.

It’s pretty awesome. The aforementioned good design and automation can make personal finance almost enjoyable; when I first got started with mint.com, I would pull it up just to look at the pretties. Automatically downloading transactions makes it less of a chore to actually track your spending, and the automated warnings you can set up can go a long way towards keeping you on your chosen path.

That said, every rose has its thorns. Automation comes with a price: the lack of mindfulness can keep you from really paying attention to where your money is going. All of your bank account information is stored on mint.com’s servers; while mint.com is extremely secure (like, a hacker would have to pull off a Mission Impossible or Sneakers-style break-in to get access), I understand if it makes you nervous for someone else to have that sort of info. Finally, mint.com is (now) owned by Intuit, makers of Quicken; this can be good or bad, depending on your opinion of Intuit, but the general consensus (and my personal experience) is that customer service isn’t quite at the level it was before the acquisition. So if a transaction goes missing or something else goes wrong…good luck. (That said, they’ve got tons of experience in dealing with extremely sensitive data, so there’s that.)

Bottom line? It’s a great program, especially if you’re in a good place financially and just want a program to do the dirty work of monitoring things. Plus, it’s free! However, if you need or want to pay closer attention to where your money goes, and are willing to be a bit more type-A about it, I’ll be talking about another program next week called YNAB (You Need A Budget).

How about you? Have you used mint.com, and if so, what has your experience been with it?

My friend Daniel Hope is presenting a marriage workshop series, and I was honored to give a talk on marriage and money at last week’s session. By all accounts, the most useful piece of that talk was a framework for setting up accounts that I call “Yours/Mine/Ours”, so I figured I should share it with the world at large.

Yours/Mine/Ours is a “middle way” between two extremes I’ve seen in the married world for handling shared finances. On one end, you can share everything between the two of you. It makes things very simple — everything goes in one pot, and everything comes out of one pot — but after a while, things can get…hairy. Maybe he has a habit of overspending on things she doesn’t care for. Or maybe he doesn’t want to spend money on anything, so she feels guilty any time she so much as buys new socks. (Modify genders as you see fit.) Resentment builds, and you either argue about it or, worse, you just don’t talk about it and let the pressure quietly build up to explosive levels.

At the other end, you can decide not to share anything, finance-wise. You have completely separate accounts, and you split the check for everything. Not only does this quickly get complicated — mortgages don’t really lend themselves to being “split” — but it doesn’t reflect reality very well. Does one of you really own all the groceries, and the other all the utilities? And of course this sort of arrangement precludes one spouse from ever leaving work (for example, to raise children).

Yours/mine/ours is a compromise between the two that looks like this:

As you can see, all income first goes into a joint account (“ours”). All shared expenses are withdrawn from that joint account (mortgage, groceries, utilities, child expenses). Also, at the beginning of every month, some amount is transferred into separate, personal accounts (“yours” and “mine”). This money is for individual spending; he can’t say boo about what she does with the money in her personal account, and vice versa. He doesn’t even have to be able to see into it.

This method has several advantages:

It heads off control issues. There’s no question as to whose money it is, or who is ultimately in control. Everything is “ours” first, then “yours” or “mine” second. This is especially key in situations involving disparate income, or where one spouse isn’t working at all; even in the situation where one spouse is a homemaker, this method makes it clear that they have an equal stake in the household’s finances. (And yes, each spouse should have an equal stake, if you want a strong and healthy relationship. Income is irrelevant.)

It’s relatively simple. It’s nearly as simple as sharing one account for everything; the only wrinkles are (a) an automatic monthly transfer from “our” account to “yours” and “mine”, and (b) the fact that you now use your personal account for personal expenses.

It gives each spouse their own space. Everyone needs space to be who they want to be, and this is no less true in the area of personal finance. The “yours/mine” accounts allow you to buy whatever you want, without having to run it by the other spouse. (Note: I don’t recommend attaching a credit card to a personal account. One spouse going into debt “on their own” is a great way to freak out the other one.)

It allows gifts to be that much more meaningful. When you buy a gift for your spouse using your personal account, it means something more than if everything were shared. I mean, this is money that was specifically allocated for your to spend on yourself, and you chose to spend it on your spouse! (Not to mention the fact that this allows for you to more easily surprise them, because they can’t see your bank statements!)

How about you? If you have a similar arrangement, let us know how it’s working out for you in the comments. (And if this kind of sharing doesn’t work for you, let us know that, too!)

“Can I afford this?” How do you answer that question? If you’re like many people, you immediately think about your checking account, and whether what’s in it will last until your next paycheck if you purchase whatever it is you’re looking at. Alternately, you think about whether the monthly payments will push your “expenses” line over your “income” line. And that’s not bad — in fact, it’s miles better than the alternative many people followed before 2008, to whit: not asking the question at all. But as is so often the case on this little corner of the Internet, I challenge you with the idea that this is not the right question to ask.

This is no newsflash, of course. You can afford a lot of things! If your child (or your inner child!) asks you for a toy or candy, you can’t honestly say that you can’t afford it, can you? A buck or ten is hardly going to break the bank! But at the same time, you need some measure of determining whether or not spending the money fits in with your finances and your values.

Also, just looking at your checking account isn’t necessarily going to give you a clear picture. Yes, there’s some money in there, but how much of it is earmarked for groceries? Rent? Some portion of the auto insurance you’ll owe in October, or (ouch) the property taxes you’ll owe in December? If your financial situation is anything but the simplest, single-person steady-income scenario, you’re not always going to know the answer. And overdraft fees are a painful way to learn you were wrong.

Monthly payment plans — even at 0% interest! — can be even worse. If you sign up for a monthly payment that will go on for four years, only to find that your situation isn’t quite what you guessed it was or that you didn’t really want whatever it is you got, you’re stuck. And heaven forbid you actually want to make a change down the line — say, start saving for a vacation, or take a lower-paying but more-fulfilling job. Nope — you gotta pay that debt first.

No, “can I afford this?” doesn’t really work. A better question, as you’ve probably guessed, is this: “does it fit in my budget?” Suddenly, answers start becoming much clearer. If you have a budget for toys (or simply “entertainment” or “recreation”), then you can easily and simply answer the question “yes” or “no”. No guilt, no fuss, no muss; if you budgeted for it, why not buy it? You’ve already decided how much you value toys; by all means, follow through with that decision! And because each dollar in your budget has one and only one job, you know that spending money from your toy budget won’t affect your ability to pay your insurance or property taxes. A budget will also tell you how much of your spending is discretionary, which in turn will tell you if a given monthly payment will cause you to give up more flexibility than you’d care to.

The key, once again, lies in asking the right question. Picasso wasn’t just messing around when he said, “Computers are useless — they can only give you answers!” How about you? When it comes to making a purchase, what question do you ask yourself, and how do you answer it?