Elephant Eater Visits “Bare Budget Guy”
A few months ago, I stumbled upon a post written by Mark, aka the “Bare Budget Guy”, about why he tithes 10% of his income to his church and always had. This concept was totally foreign to me, but his message resonated and I linked the article in one of my own.
He e-mailed me to thank me for the link and we started a conversation about using your money for good. This resulted in a guest post that I’m sharing at Bare Budget Guy entitled “Get Out of Your Way”.
Please check it out and poke around and see what Mark and his wife Amanda are doing while you’re there. They have a great blog that I think many of my readers can relate to. They’re accomplishing some awesome things with their finances while living in a (primarily) one income household with 3.5 kids (congrats!) while maintaining a high savings rate and continuing to give away 10% of their money off the top. Impressive! They also are completely transparent (unlike us), sharing all of their numbers in detail for you voyeurs who are into that stuff. I hope you enjoy and follow them!
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You know, my wife and have always given 10% or more of our gross income through our local church in addition to giving to United Way, needy individuals and other charities. I’m retired now at 60 and though I know that on paper I could theoretically have another million or two in investments had I put that money into savings and not given it away I don’t think life works that way. The fact that we gave generously and freely made us see money in a more balanced way. It made people and experiences more valuable than material possessions, or at least it helped.
You just can’t be greedy when you are giving many thousands of dollars away every year! You become a nicer, friendlier, more outgoing and outreaching person, naturally. And people like you, they want to be like you and you get ahead at work because you aren’t gloomy and stingy and selfish and self absorbed. I think my career success, which has been significant, is due in a large part to not holding so tightly onto my money, but giving it away freely to help others. It isn’t about some kind of spiritual pay back, its about becoming the kind of person who gives because they want to.
Steve,
Thanks for the insightful comment. I think the thing that had me thinking about Mark’s original tithing post is that we don’t share your or his experience with being so generous with our money. Being more generous is something we talk about a lot, but truly have a hard time with. I think that the one down side of being pretty efficient with our spending as we are and hating waste as we do is that we tend to be judgmental of how others are spending money. We have a hard time giving money because we feel that it will not be spent as we wish or have the impact we intend. One thing we look forward to in our ER is to donate much more of our time where we can see the impacts we are able to have. However, this is not an excuse to not give more money now when that is a more abundant resource and until we have more time to make that vision possible.
Thanks again for challenging us to think more about this.
Cheers!
EE