Frugality

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.

By CEO standards, Bob Kierlin had modest needs. The co-founder of Fastenal, an international seller of nuts, bolts and other supplies for manufacturing and construction firms, took a salary of $120,000 a year at its peak in the 1990s, with no bonuses or stock options; that was less than some Fastenal store managers earned. He clipped grocery coupons, and bought some of his suits secondhand, for $60 apiece. On business trips, he stayed in discount motels and often shared a room with a colleague. He paid for his own meals on the road.

Kierlin wasn’t hurting financially: He had shares in the company worth hundreds of millions of dollars from his original stake. And the company’s board was willing to pay him far more. But Kierlin said he didn’t need it.

“I was born into a family that never had an awful lot of things,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2002. “We just learned to live with what we had. I never felt I needed a lot of money.”

Kierlin, who died Feb. 10, 2025 at the age of 85, didn’t have a personal secretary or even his own parking place outside the drab concrete head office in his hometown of Winona, Minn. Much of the furniture inside that headquarters was used.

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.

People living in remote Indigenous communities are as happy as those in wealthy developed countries despite having “very little money,” according to new scientific research. This could challenge the widely held perception that “money buys happiness.”

Researchers who interviewed 2,966 people in 19 Indigenous local communities across the world found that on average they were as happy – if not happier – as the average person in high-income western countries.

According to researchers, “Surprisingly, many populations with very low monetary incomes report very high average levels of life satisfaction, with scores similar to those in wealthy countries. I would hope that, by learning more about what makes life satisfying in these diverse communities, it might help many others to lead more satisfying lives.”

The study found that people in the 19 isolated communities reported an average “life satisfaction score” of 6.8 out of 10 “even though most of the sites have estimated annual monetary incomes of less than US $1,000 per person.”

This is roughly the same as the 6.7 average life satisfaction score for all countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Surprisingly, four of the small communities reported average happiness scores of more than 8, which is higher than that found in Finland, the highest-rated country with an average of 7.9.

The report says its findings proves that wealth – as generated by industrialized economies – is not fundamentally required for humans to lead happy lives.

Susan Mettes, Associate Editor at CT magazine, writes:

I have a clear early memory of first learning to ride a bike. When I had finally found enough balance for a few seconds of forward movement, my beloved brother toddled into my path. There was plenty of room for both of us on the sidewalk, but I mowed the little guy down and we both fell onto the lawn, sobbing.

Now I know that the reason I couldn’t avoid him was something called “target fixation,” which means that we aim for what we’re focusing on—no matter how much we consciously try to avoid it.

Jesus keeps telling us to take our eyes off money. In many places—including in the church today—we see people falling into the trap of requiring more and more of it to feel good. But on the flip side, we too often think that the change we must make is from lusting after money to avoiding money. However, thrift can also become a target we fixate on, disorienting us, and leading us to crash right back into Mammon.

Jesus’ words to his followers showed his disapproval of hoarding money, making wealth the capstone of a life, and believing that money will make us safe. But we sometimes miss another aspect of Jesus’ teachings: the importance of where we focus our attention.

As Christians around the world live through a period of discomfort in their household budgets, even thrift can bring them dangerously close to the errors often attributed to greed. Thrift can make austerity seem like a virtue for all times.

One story of the early church says that a fourth-century monk, Macarius, got a bunch of grapes and sent them to another monk, who sent them to another, and so on. Each craved the grapes, but none ate them. They eventually returned to Macarius, who still didn’t eat them. The monks had proved their ability to deny themselves.

Such denial can be a response to a belief that possessions are hot potatoes, things to be divested of before they ruin us. But far from solving an obsession with money and possessions, this form of living on as little as possible can result in miserliness.

Author Lucinda Kinsinger says, “If you’re focusing on thrift for the sake of being thrifty, you’ll just end up being a tightwad. If our focus is being a good steward, then we’re in a good place.”

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%.”

John de Graaf and his co-authors report in their book, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, that four million pounds of raw material, such as mined metals and oil, are necessary to provide for one average American family’s annual consumption. Americans spend more on trash bags in a year than 90 of the world’s 210 countries spend for everything.

Consumption is a major component of the gross domestic product. So, it seems undeniable that Americans, including Christians, will eventually have to learn to live with less. We will have to treat our gifts from God—whether natural resources or material well-being—with reverence rather than abandon.

After Alan Naiman died of cancer at 63, he left most of his estate to a variety of charities serving children with various needs. This came as no surprise to his friends, who knew him as a frugal yet generous soul.

They just didn’t realize exactly how generous.

That’s because the charitable windfall that Naiman orchestrated from beyond the grave was more than a few thousand dollars—it totaled over $11 million.

Though he never married or had kids, Naiman was known to work extra jobs, scrimp on expenses, and invest here and there, eschewing the kind of extravagant spending that other people in his income bracket regularly enjoyed.

“Growing up as a kid with an older, disabled brother kind of colored the way he looked at things,” said close friend Susan Madsen. That brother passed away in 2013, the same year Naiman bought a Scion FR-S sport coupe—moderately priced, as a midlife crisis car.

Most of the organizations that received donations were ones in which he’d made contact over the years while serving the state Department of Social and Health Services for over two decades, handling calls after regular hours. Among them are the Pediatric Interim Care Center which serves babies of mothers in drug addiction, Treehouse Foster Care, Little Bit Therapeutic Riding Center, which provides horse therapy for disabled people, and WestSide Baby, which distributes care supplies for low-income families with babies and small children.

Potential Preaching Angles:

When we’re faithful with what we’re given, God gives us the opportunity to be a blessing to those around us. The world values outward displays of wealth, but God looks at the heart.

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.

Robert Morin, a cataloguer at the University of New Hampshire's library, "lived a simple, frugal life," complete with TV dinners and a car that was more than 20 years old. He read plenty of books—thousands of them over the course of his life—and "loved to talk to students," according to UNH spokeswoman Erika Mantz. Morin passed away in March 2015, but the school announced last week that upon his death, he had left his estate to the school: an estate totaling $4 million. While reading and going about his work, Morin had "quietly amassed" a fortune.

The extraordinary gift was a first for the school: "In our history, I'm not aware of anything like this," said Mantz. Morin's wish was that UNH would spend his money to fulfill whatever needs they had; he apparently told his financial adviser that the school would "figure out what to do with it."

The humble, peaceful way in which Morin went about his life—all the while storing up massive wealth—is reminiscent of Jesus' message on how believers should go about their own lives. Instead of "announcing" our good deeds and acts of charity "with trumpets…to be honored by others" (Matt. 6:2), we are to be a little more secretive about it: "when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you" (6:3-4).

Potential Preaching Angles: Humility; Secrets; Rewards; Giving; Christian Living; Christian service

The lottery promotes the interesting moral notion that if people are inclined to waste their money, the government should make it fun for them. And take a profit.

Wesley limited his expenditures by not buying the kinds of things generally considered essential for a man in his station of life. In 1776 the English tax commissioners inspected his return and wrote back, "[We] cannot doubt but you have plate (silver dinnerware) for which you have hitherto neglected to make entry."

They assumed that a man of his prominence certainly had silver dinnerware in his house, and they wanted him to pay the proper tax on it. Wesley wrote back, "I have two silver spoons at London and two at Bristol. This is all the plate I have at present, and I shall not buy any more while so many round me want bread."

The best way to make your old car run better is to learn the price of a new one.

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.

Ronald Warwick, captain of the luxury cruise ship Queen Elizabeth II, questioned a passenger who paid full fare for his dog to join them on an around-the-world cruise. (Accommodations range from $25,000 to $150,000.) "Wouldn't it have cost less to leave him at home?"

"Oh no," the man said. "When we are away a long time, the dog's psychiatrist fees are so high, it's less expensive to bring him along."

There is no dignity quite so impressive, and no independence quite so important, as living within your means.

Nothing is more controversial than to be a follower of Jesus Christ. Nothing is more dangerous than to live out the will of God in today's contemporary world. It changes your whole monetary lifestyle. ... Let me put it quite simply: If Jesus has $40,000 and knew about the kids who are suffering and dying in Haiti, what kind of car would he buy?