Budget

Researchers find one in four people grapple with compulsive overspending during the holiday season. An overwhelming 56% of respondents feel pressured to spend money during the holidays, with family emerging as the primary source of financial strain.

More than 75% of respondents experience what researchers call “money wounds” — emotional difficulties stemming from financial challenges that cut to the core of personal well-being.

The study reveals that low self-esteem, compulsive overspending, and shame from past financial mistakes emerge as the most common “money wounds.” The financial stress takes a significant emotional toll. 68% of those experiencing money wounds report that these challenges hold them back from feeling fulfilled and successful.

Many of those with money wounds admit to avoiding their financial troubles during the holidays. This avoidance manifests in various ways: refrain from buying gifts (37%), declining party invitations (33%), and avoid checking their bank account balances (29%).

Perhaps most heartbreaking is the social isolation that follows. 42% of respondents say they’ll become distant from others to avoid experiencing spending pressure. This distancing comes at an emotional cost, with participants reporting feelings of shame, guilt, and loneliness.

There is a glimmer of hope. 61% of respondents are actively trying to embrace the philosophy that “money and spending don’t equal happiness.” However, the road to recovery is long. On average, respondents believe it takes six years for a money wound to heal. More sobering still, many don’t believe financial trauma ever completely resolves.

As the holiday season approaches, the serves as a powerful reminder of the emotional complexity behind financial stress, urging compassion, understanding, and support for those struggling with money-related challenges.

Budgets are a good thing, but they can also magnify stress, something about which Jesus spoke. Annabelle Williams wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “A little over six months ago, I took a big, adult step: I finally committed myself to budgeting. I’d always had a rough sense of my financial ins and outs, but balked at actually tracking spending.”

So instead of using a free budget app, she paid for one instead. She writes, “I thought paying for the app would guilt me into actually using it.”

“As it turns out, I was right. Having the app so close by has allowed me to stay on budget, watch my expenses and be more careful about my spending. I’m much more aware of how little things add up or what big things I can trim to make sure I’m in the black each month.”

“But in some ways, it has worked too well. I’ve been checking my budget app so often I’ve developed a new kind of financial stress, one that I’ve dubbed my “budgeting anxiety.” I find myself agonizing over every purchase, large or small. A $6 coffee—a luxury I allow myself on days when I go into the office—has become a source of stress rather than a comforting, occasional ritual to start the day. Instead of enjoying the coffee I think: ‘How will this affect my budget?’”

It’s doubtful that Jesus would ban budget apps, but He did tell us to “render unto Caesar,” and he told the religious leaders that they were right to tithe, so it would seem that having a plan is a good thing. But he counseled against the worry, fret and lack of trust in God to provide. We are to consider the lilies of the field, not obsessively worry about money.

Tarryn Pitt loves scouring thrift shops for treasures, from vintage canning jars to velveteen armchairs. “I’ve been thrifting my whole life — it’s one of my favorite things to do, at least once or twice a week,” she said. “Pretty much all of my home decor came from a thrift store.”

She was browsing in secondhand stores where she lives in Prineville, Oregon, when she got an idea about her upcoming wedding. The average cost of a wedding in the United States is about $33,000 — an amount she said she found extravagant and also created a lot of environmental waste.

“I wanted something that was unique and fit my personality,” said Pitt, 25. “A thrift store wedding dinner seemed like the perfect answer.”

She and her fiancé, Holt Porfily, are inviting 307 guests to their outdoor mountain wedding in Sisters, Oregon. All of the wedding tableware and decorations at the outdoor meal will be thrifted.

“It’s honestly not just about saving money for us, though,” Pitt said. “What we’re doing is super sustainable, and I love giving old things new life.”

So far, she said, she has spent less than $2,000 on her wedding dinnerware and decorations, about half of what she priced out to rent similar items.

In late December, she posted a TikTok video of some of the plates she had found during one of her thrift shop excursions. Pitt said she was shocked when the video received more than 3.6 million views and 2,200 comments.

Pitt said the response has been so positive that she now plans to keep only a few plates after the wedding, and she hopes to rent the rest to other interested brides and grooms. She said she will keep the price low for obvious reasons.

If you have money problems, maybe you need to hire a “financial therapist.” A recent Wall Street Journal article states:

Do you worry a lot about higher food and gas bills? Fight with your spouse over spending splurges? Fear you’ll outlive your savings? Some people seek to ease such money anxieties by hiring a financial therapist.

Many Americans are worried about their personal finances. In a survey of about 3,000 U.S. adults conducted in October 2024 by Fidelity Investments, more than one-third of respondents said they were in “worse financial shape” than in the previous year. Some 55% of those respondents blamed inflation and cost-of-living increases.

Similarly, 52% of 2,365 Americans polled for Bankrate.com said money negatively affected their mental health in 2023. That is 10 percentage points higher than in 2022. Financially anxious and stressed individuals are less likely to plan for retirement, prior research has concluded.

The goal of financial therapists ultimately is to help people make good financial decisions. This is typically done by raising their clients’ awareness of how their emotions and unconscious beliefs have affected their sometimes messy experiences with money.

Needs for such help often arise following a job loss, bankruptcy, or marital partner’s financial infidelity—when one spouse hides or misrepresents financial information from the other. Even something seemingly positive, such as getting a big inheritance or winning a lottery, can cause financial anxiety.

“Folks are craving help with financial well-being,’’ says the president of the Financial Therapy Association.

The hottest travel amenity is getting your time back—because we all hate to wait!

In November 2024, Walt Disney World began piloting a new paid service that allows visitors to the Florida resort’s four theme parks to bypass regular lines for popular attractions. Vail Resorts introduced a gear membership program meant to let skiers skip rental lines. More hotels are charging for perks like early check-in.

About half of the more than 650 theme parks, zoos, aquariums, monuments and observation decks surveyed by the travel-research firm Arival offered skip-the-line or VIP access tickets in 2024. Of those not offering these options, 18% said they would introduce similar access in 2025.

The trend highlights how cost and comfort are becoming more intermingled for travelers, especially those hitting crowded destinations. And how those with tighter budgets risk ending up worse off.

These offers are often aimed at families. Rochelle Marcus, a stay-at-home mom in Oxford, N.C., says parents have extra incentive to pay up for a pass during school breaks, when crowds are larger. “That way everyone’s not tired, cranky, and grumpy at the end of the day,” she says. And as someone else in the article concluded: “Life is too short to be spent waiting in line all the time.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

You can approach this illustration from two angles: 1) Impatience; Waiting – This shows the negative side of human nature that is impatient and wants favorable status. This status is gained by payment. 2) Advocate; Invitation; Rights - The positive side is that we have an advocate who gifted us with priority access to the Father (Eph. 3:12; Heb. 4:14-16). This status is all due to God’s grace. You cannot buy your way into access with God.

“Most of us will live an amazingly long life and should not worry so much about dying young.” Those are the words of Jonathan Clements, 61, who wrote more than 1,000 personal finance columns for The Wall Street Journal between 1994 and 2015. Plan on living past 90 and save accordingly, he advised, when he wasn’t running marathons or riding bicycles.

In May of 2024, he saw a doctor about some balance issues. Two days later, he received a devastating cancer diagnosis. Scans revealed a golf-ball-size tumor on his lung, and the disease has spread to his brain, his liver and elsewhere. Anything beyond 12 decent months would be a victory. “I’m definitely on the clock here,” he said as we sat at his kitchen table this week.

Clements said, “The No. 1 thing money can do for us is to give us a sense of financial security, and the way it does that is not to spend it and to hang onto it.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Clements did not know that there is only one source of true security, and it is not money. “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble” (Psa. 46:1).

The New York Times unearthed a surprising trend in the wedding industry: Many couples are now choosing cemeteries as wedding venues. It’s a way to highlight an eternal commitment by choosing a place of eternal rest, and after all, many wedding vows include the promise “until death do us part.”

“Every year, we get more and more requests,” said Richard Harker of the Historic Oakland Foundation, which runs Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery, the oldest public park in the city. According to Harker, Oakland hosted more weddings in 2023 than funerals (36 to 25, respectively).

Some couples choose them for personal reasons, such as to honor a loved one who can’t be present in the flesh. Others simply find the combination of outdoor décor appealing. In some cases, the cost is lower because of less demand, and often restrictions on the size and scope of the gathering make it easier for couples who want a smaller gathering.

Cemetery weddings are nothing new. Jews living in Eastern Europe and in the United States sometimes held weddings in cemeteries during times of mass disease, like during the 1918 influenza, in the belief that having the ceremony in the presence of the dead might bring about better times.

Whatever the reason, couples looking to choose a cemetery for their nuptials must be prepared to abide by a lot of logistical rules that govern the locale; no matter how joyous the affair, cemeteries are still the resting place of the dearly departed. Many of the more historic cemeteries have rules in place preventing, for example, dancing or loud music.

Still, for the right couple in the right situation, a cemetery can be a great choice. There’s so much love [there],” according to Laura Lavelle of Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, D.C. “It can hold sadness and happiness. It can hold grief and joy.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

While this trend may seem unconventional, it offers a unique perspective on the meaning of marriage and the human experience. 1) Marriage; Commitment; Vows - It invites us to consider the deeper significance the sacredness of vows, and the reality that love and commitment persist even in the face of death and sorrow. 2) Remembrance - The Bible often emphasizes the importance of remembering the past and honoring the dead. A cemetery wedding could be a way to honor loved ones who have passed away and to keep their memory alive.

As 29-year-old Neha Wright checked her mailbox and brought in the latest batch of bills, she realized the moment had finally arrived: Her childhood love of receiving a letter in the mail had officially been replaced with a very adult fear of receiving a letter in the mail.

Neha’s parents recall that as a kid, she would teem with excitement when she got a letter addressed to her and would run to open it. Neha’s mother said, “Most of the time it was something boring like a postcard from a cousin or a school paper. She’d check the mailbox every evening after school if she knew a letter was on the way.”

Now that she’s reached adulthood, seeing a letter in the mail sends a chill down Neha’s spine, and its sort of up in the air whether she will open it at all. She continued, “It’s almost always my electric bill or a notice from my bank, two of the scariest things a girl can receive. I’m pretty sure that if I don’t open it, I can’t be legally held responsible for the contents!”

According to her bank, this is untrue, but when reporters tried to inform Neha of this, she simply closed her eyes, held her hands over her ears, and said, “Lalalalalalala.”

Neha said, “It’s hard to imagine there was once a time where I loved receiving mail, because it meant $20 from my grandparents. Imagine opening mail and gaining money? That must’ve been awesome!”

Neha’s adulthood disdain for mail does not, however, apply to packages, which have retained their childlike wonder. If anything, Neha’s joy at receiving a package has only grown. “Oh, yeah, letters and packages are very different,” Neha continued. “Letters are scary and packages are tiny little glimmers of hope that carry things like clothing and skincare products. I’m super pro-package.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Obviously, this is a humorous, but not so hypothetical, situation. How many of us overspend during the holidays, or put an expensive trip on our credit card, only to be shocked when the bill arrives whether by mail or email?

The number of Americans carrying a credit card balance is climbing, with many using their credit to cover unexpected or emergency expenses, a new Bankrate report reveals.

The share of credit card holders that carry a balance has increased to 49%—up from 39% in 2021. This is likely due to the increased cost of credit card debt over the past two years. The average interest rate has climbed from an average of 16.45% in 2021 to 24.37% as of March 2024 according to Investopedia.

Of those with credit card debt, 43% say they carry a balance because of an unexpected or emergency expense, most commonly medical bills or car and home repairs. However, financial experts don’t recommend financing these costs with your credit card, if you can help it.

Credit cards tend to have high interest rates compared with other types of loans, which makes them a terrible option for debt financing. This is why experts recommend keeping your outstanding balance at $0 each month, if possible.

Paying only the monthly minimum payment is better than nothing. However, those payments only cover a fraction of the balance owed. The longer you take to pay the balance, the more interest you’ll be charged, since it accrues daily.

For some shoppers, the upcoming holiday season may lead to piling on more debt. About 25% of Americans are still paying off holiday debt from 2022, according to WalletHub.

But those already carrying a balance could find themselves sinking further into the red if they don’t get a handle on their credit card debt. “If you’re in a hole, stop digging,” says Ted Rossman, Bankrate’s senior industry analyst.

One reason you may want to avoid racking up more debt is that higher interest rates are making it more expensive to pay down. As of November, the average credit card interest rate has risen from around 16% to nearly 21%. This is due to the Federal Reserve raising interest rates in March 2020 in an effort to combat inflation.

A higher interest rate means it could take longer and be more expensive to pay down your credit card debt. Rossman says, “Even a more modest $1,000 balance (from last year’s holiday gifts, perhaps) would keep someone in debt for 40 months and cost them $390 in interest if they only make minimum payments at [the current average rate of] 20.72%.”

A Wall Street Journal article begins with this story about the increased debt load many Americans are carrying:

Danielle Smith and her family thought they had finally escaped the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle they had fallen into. They saved money during the pandemic while they were stuck at home. They used stimulus checks to chip away at $20,000 in credit card debt and enjoyed a reprieve from monthly payments on their $160,000 in student loans.

Lately, they have been hit with one unexpected expense after another, from an out-of-pocket MRI to a broken water heater. They also took trips with their four children that they had put off because of Covid, including to Walt Disney World, local museums, and the zoo. By 2022, their credit-card debt had doubled to nearly $40,000. Ms. Smith said, “It’s just a never-ending cycle of playing catch-up.”

The article noted that American millennials in their 30s have racked up debt at a historic clip since the pandemic. Their total balances hit more than $3.8 trillion in the fourth quarter, a 27% jump from late 2019. That is the steepest increase of any age group. It is also their fastest pace of debt accumulation over a three-year period since the 2008 financial crisis.

The New York Times published an article explaining large numbers like a million, billion, and trillion. The article was titled “Just how long is a trillion seconds?” In a letter to the editor, Dorothy C. Morrell from Seattle explains a trillion in terms of time.

I asked myself, why not think of it in terms of seconds? A trillion seconds would have to be years, probably many years. I made a wild guess. As it turned out, I wasn't close. I found that 1,000 seconds ago was equal to almost 17 minutes. It would take almost 12 days for a million seconds to elapse and 31.7 years for a billion seconds. Therefore, a trillion seconds would amount to no less than 31,709.8 years. A trillion seconds ago, there was no written history. The pyramids had not yet been built. It would be 10,000 years before the cave paintings in France were begun.

Was I alone in not knowing how long ago a trillion seconds was? I asked some of my neighbors what they would say if they were told they could have $1 trillion in one-dollar bills, so long as they agreed to initial each bill. Their answers were very similar. ‘No!’ they said. When I asked why, they said, almost without exception, '’Because it would take me the rest of my life!’”

Preaching Angles: 1) Forgiveness; Justification; Redemption - This illustration is good for explaining just how much we have been forgiven by Christ Jesus as in the story of the ten thousand talents (Matt. 18:21-35). 2) Debt; Finances; Money - It can also use it to explain any type of large number, like the national debt. 3) Eternity; Heaven; Time – Our short time in trials on earth will fade compared to the eternal rewards that are to come.

If you've ever had to wait in a long line at your local Starbucks, you probably already know—millennials spend a lot of money on coffee. But it turns out many are spending more cash on caffeine than investing in their future. According to a reports from Acorns Money Matters, 41 percent of nearly 2,000 millennials—individuals born in the early 1980s through the early 2000s—surveyed admitted to spending more on their morning brew than contributing toward their retirement plan.

One millennial from Phoenix, Arizona put it this way:

I'm not putting money away because I'm not making money, so maybe that shift toward more people in school longer and going back to school is connected. We live in the moment maybe more than others, so that concept of thinking about the future or retirement isn't necessarily as big of a deal as it was in the past.

But it's not just coffee where millennials are making poor financial decisions. The survey says that just five percent of young millennials (ages 18-23) are investing at all. But on the flip side, 39 percent feel anxious about their financial future. According to the report, the average American spends approximately $1,100 a year, or $3 each day, on coffee.

Possible Preaching Angles: The point of the story is not a negative portrayal of millennials, but the fact that we all need a heavenly focus in our daily life. 1) Rewards; Self-denial; Christians should give serious thought to storing up treasures in heaven by giving up fleeting pleasures. 2) Inheritance; Security; Earthly savings are no guarantee of financial security due to these uncertain times, but anything entrusted to God is absolutely safe.

There might be good reasons why many of us feel stressed by financial challenges. Economists have a term for our rising costs—they call it "Cost Disease." Here's how one researcher summarized all the stats about this "disease":

So, to summarize: in the past fifty years, education costs have doubled, college costs have dectupled, health insurance costs have dectupled, subway costs have at least dectupled, and housing costs have increased by about fifty percent. US health care costs are about four times as much as equivalent health care in other First World countries; US subways are cost about eight times as much as equivalent subways in other First World countries.

I worry that people don't appreciate how weird this is. I didn't appreciate it for a long time. I guess I just figured that Grandpa used to talk about how back in his day movie tickets only cost a nickel; that was just the way of the world. But all of the numbers above are inflation-adjusted. These things have dectupled in cost even after you adjust for movies costing a nickel in Grandpa's day. They have really, genuinely dectupled in cost, no economic trickery involved.

In the early 1990s, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago named Dilip Soman set out to study the effects of consumer credit, on the human brain. Soman, an Indian-born engineer, had become curious after watching how casual Americans were about credit card debt. Not only did consumers here use credit cards for everyday purchases (something almost unheard of in India), but many of us also carried large balances and thus paid high interest. Such behavior was clearly irrational and even risky. Yet, it was the norm in the United States.

In one of his studies, Soman had subjects pay a large number of fictitious household bills using either credit or a check, after which he offered each of them the chance to spend $450 on a vacation. Those who had paid the bills with credit, Soman found, were nearly twice as likely to splurge on the vacation as those who'd paid with a check.

In another study, Soman waited outside the university bookstore and asked exiting shoppers if they could recall the amount of their recent purchases. He then compared their answers to their receipts. The results were almost comical. Of those who paid with cash, check, or debit card, fully two-thirds could recall the purchase amount to the penny, while the remaining third came within three dollars. But those who bought on credit? Even though they'd made the purchases less than ten minutes earlier, only a third of the subjects could get within a dollar of the actual purchase amount. A third were between 15 and 20 percent too low. A third had no recollection whatsoever. Soman concluded. "People who routinely use credit cards simply don't have a good memory for how much they had paid."

If you happened to win the lottery, your financial situation would improve, right? Actually, according to a study, the answer is maybe not. Three economics professors wrote a paper titled "The Ticket to Easy Street? The Financial Consequences of Winning the Lottery." Their research tried to address the following questions: Does a lottery windfall have a permanent impact or does it merely postpone financial pain? Does getting a "boatload of money" solve people's financial problems or just push those problems down the road?

The professors obtained a list of winners for a Florida lotto game called Fantasy Five. Then they compared those names to Florida bankruptcy records to see how many winners filed for bankruptcy and when. In the first couple of years after winning a jackpot, people who won small amounts were more likely to file bankruptcy than people who won larger amounts. That makes sense. Someone with a large amount of money can initially weather a bad time or keep creditors at bay.

But after three years, large lottery winners were more likely to file for bankruptcy than small winners. The people who won larger sums did not use their new wealth to pay down debt. Financial consultant Don McNay concludes, "Winning the lottery did not help people increase their net worth. They needed to have set goals and an understanding of finance to make their lives better. It appears that [the lottery winners] did not have those fundamental tools."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Gambling—the negative effects of gambling; (2) Budgeting; Debt; Finances—Most of us don't just need more money; we need "those fundamental tools" that will help us get out of debt and manage our money wisely.

Neil MacGregor's book the History of the World in 100 Objects chronicles the things that have had the greatest impact on human history. (The items are listed chronologically, not in order of impact.) Here's how MacGregor describes one of the most recent influential objects, the 99th one on his list:

If you were to ask people which twentieth-century invention had most impact on their daily lives today, instant answers might be their mobile phone or their PC: not many people would think first of the little plastic rectangles that fill their wallets and purses. And yet, since they first emerged in the late 1950s, credit cards and their kin have become part of the fabric of modern life ….

The first general-purpose charge card was the Diners Club card, introduced in 1950. In 1958 the next step came with the appearance of the first real credit card, issued by a bank and generally accepted by large numbers of businesses. This was the BankAmericard, ancestor of Visa, and the first universal credit

According to MacGregor, "credit cards have become the ultimate symbol of economic freedom." But there is a dark side. MacGregor writes, "There is little doubt at all that paying by credit card does increase [our] willingness to spend—often more than [we] can afford."

Most of us would be willing to pay as we go if we could just finish paying for where we've been.

I have a friend who has done a very interesting thing. He has lived frugally and saved sacrificially in order to have a cash account larger than his yearly salary. I'm not going to tell you the interesting name of his account. But here we'll just refer to it as his good-bye-to-you account. When he had finally accumulated more money than a year's pay, he took his bank statement and showed it to his boss. He explained it as his good-bye-to-you account. He wasn't quitting his job; he was just saying if ever the boss doesn't treat him right or if things ever go wrong, he's not dependent upon the boss. He has this money, and he can say good-bye. He has independence.

Living below your means is so liberating you won't ever want to go back to the edge again.