Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hoffney bankrupted his family's future because he felt like his money choices didn't matter.
Does that sound familiar?
Okay, dad, you earn some money. You've got a job, you got some work.
The bills get paid, barely. The card balance creeps up and up, and you avoid looking. You tell yourself, and maybe the wife, we'll fix it when we earn, but you won't.
Now, folks, this is a short series called Stair Steps to Mastery. We're going to walk you through some biblical archetypes of financial goofball to financial genius.
And this series has five stages. It goes from Hophni, who's drowning, to Lot, who's drifting, to Jacob, who's grinding, to Isaac, who's who's planting, and finally, Abraham, who's multiplying. Today, we're going to start at rock bottom, because that's where the climb begins.
Now hear me. Hophni wasn't broke. He was a priest in the Bible, and he had access to a lot of resources. He had a government job, a secure job, and he just treated holy things like. Like they didn't matter.
And that's what overspending is. So just think of this story. I'm gonna just give you the Bible background on this character that we're using Hophni as this terrible financial archetype. It's the beginning of our process. And in second Samuel, chapter. Sorry, First Samuel, chapter two, the Bible says that the sons of Eli, of whom Hoffney was one, were worthless men who treated the offerings with contempt.
So again, this is a guy who. He works at the local synagogue. People bring in offerings. He's like, whatever. Shoulder shrug, takes the money. I don't know. Put it over there.
Yeah, somebody's got an offering. I don't know. Put it over there.
But the people's offerings are holy. They're holy things, and he treats them with contempt.
That's what a father does. When money comes through his hands and he gives it a shoulder shrug. He's treating something that is sacred, which is the income and the dollars that are coming through your hands. And he treats them as common.
He treats them as. With contempt. He doesn't give them what they deserve.
So, guys, when money comes in, see, if this sounds like you, the first thing you do is you grab your part of the money. Here's what I wanted to do. Here's the toy that I have in mind. Here's the trip that I wanted to do. That's the first thing.
If God gets any of your money with regards to giving it's leftovers. You're in the church house. Occasionally the plate comes by. I don't know. Do we have anything left over this month? Sure. Let's throw a $10 bill in. So God gets your leftovers. If there's any giving at all. Your wife gets silence.
That is, she is out of the picture. She does not know what's going on. The family finances are a black box.
Your wife gets silence and your future and the future of your family gets nothing.
None of your attention and none of your resources are aimed at what are we going to look like following 5, 10, 20, 50 years from now. No thought to it. So the idea is secrecy.
I don't want to look under the hood of what's happening because I don't really know the numbers. I don't want to look at them. I definitely don't want the wife getting into it. Keep her out of it.
So she's in a cloak of darkness. It's the wizard of Oz's curtain. You don't need to see behind the curtain.
And the kids, they're not being trained about stewardship. Nobody's talking to them about money.
What they get is stress. They get the stress of not understanding. Why don't we feel like we're in a place of confidence with money, all we see is the stress and squabbling over it.
The financial situation, the symptom is that you're cash flow negative.
You don't have a budget.
You pay the minimums only. So debt is accruing and you overspend on comfort to numb the guilt of the situation.
So you feel like we're always catching up. I don't know. I'm robbing Peter to pay Paul here. And what if we maxed out that credit card so we could pay this credit card and you're playing this shell game of your money and you feel the stress and then you go, you know what, let's go to the lake. Let's take a weekend to Disney. And you get to feel like a big shot for a couple of days. And everyone kind of feels like, are we okay right now?
I guess we're okay. And you just kind of keep the story going again, it's clouded in secrecy. The wife doesn't know. The kids don't know. You really don't know either.
It's all about.
I don't take this very seriously. I don't want to actually look at what's going on.
So let me ask you this. I'm looking right at you. Dads are your Money choices, a secret if they are, you're in a bad spot.
You feel and smell like the Hoffney archetype.
If your wife saw every swipe of the card this week, would you flinch?
Because she might know more than you would even know if she was just paying attention.
Yeah, that's Hoffney.
So there's two sides of Hoffney. One is the sort of spiritual or family component. And as I said, he treats this with contempt, not curiosity.
So one thing we kind of need to do is start changing that attitude about contempt and secrecy to curiosity. Simple curiosity. I wonder, you might ask yourself, I wonder, if we turn down that area of spending, we would. We have more available here. I wonder if we could shop our insurance a little bit. I wonder what the numbers actually say. What do we actually spend on coffee and fast food in a month? I wonder. Just having some natural, healthy curiosity would be great, and it would get you back to the place of reverence for what God has entrusted again. Think of Hophni taking people's offerings that they're bringing to. To the temple to God and going, ah, I don't know, throw it over there on the other side, whatever next, keep it going. And your home is out of order because there's no truth in the room. That's the magic word that is kind of removed from the Hoffney equation is truth.
We don't know the numbers. We don't know the truth. And you lead by hiding. You don't really want to be known. You don't want to look under the hood, and you don't want anybody else to either. So there's no truth going on financially.
The math says you're drowning, so your lifestyle is greater than your income. And dealing with your debt, you put those two things together and your lifestyle is eating up all of that space.
And what you're actually doing is you're bankrupting your future.
So you can play the shell game for a little bit, but you are murdering your future. You're just bankrupting the future.
It feels like your choices don't matter, so you just stop choosing and just kind of, I don't know, we'll just do whatever we want to do. And if we feel like going out for burgers tonight, I don't know, maybe they're $20 burgers each. Ah, that's what it costs, you know? What can we do about it? Well, the answer is you could do a lot about it, but you don't know the truth, so you feel like your choices don't matter, and that is this contempt for the sacred.
So I sit with guys like this. I know what it's like for guys in this situation. Mark, as a financial planner, I know that you look at these things too. What do you see?
[00:08:22] Speaker B: Normally, I've sat with hundreds of families who are at this stage.
My insight here is it's almost never about income.
It's that no one is willing to take an honest look at the truth together.
So the couples who turn it around aren't the ones who start with a complicated budget and track every penny. They start with, call it seven days, maybe a month of total honesty. And if you need to know how to do that, I mean, pick a tool that does it for you. Go plug your credit cards into Monarch Money or some other tool that's going to just give you a report.
We're not trying to hit any targets here. We're just saying, tell me the truth about what I spend and what I bring in. If you have that information, you're set up for success because you can now become one of those families who looks at things the way they are and is willing to face the truth.
[00:09:20] Speaker A: Yep. So, guys, we're going to give you one killer move so that you can move out of this Hoffney stage and you can move on up the stair steps. That's what we want for you, is to get out of this place and start moving.
So here's. Here's your one killer move. You ready?
We want you to do the seven day truth ledger. Seven days.
Want you to pull out paper somewhere. We want it with a pen and paper.
And we want you write down every dollar that gets used.
If you hand a $20 bill to the guy at the gas station to buy a pack of gum, I want you to write that down in the truth ledger. If you use Venmo or the cash app to pay for babysitting, write that down. If there's automatic payments that happen, write it down. If you're eating out, write it down.
One truth ledger. Just seven days that you're simply writing down. Here's what's actually happening. I'm not going to judge you for whatever's on that paper. You shouldn't judge yourself. That's not the point of the exercise. It's just we're going to find out what's really, really there. We're not trying to fix it. We're just tracking.
So on day seven, I want you to sit down with your wife. I want you to put that piece of paper on the table. You don't even have to have looked at it or come up with subcategories or anything. Just sit down with the wife, seven days of truth, and you say, here's the truth. I want us to face this together.
If you'll say that the wife's respect for you will be climbing up in that moment. I don't know what kind of attitude you might get in the moment, but to simply say to your wife, I'm not treating this with contempt anymore. This is a sacred thing. I'm going to start taking this seriously. Let's face this together.
Here's the thing. Fools die in secrecy.
Patriarchs start with confessing the truth.
I got to say that again. Fools die in secrecy.
Patriarchs start by confessing the truth.
Now, if you're thinking, I'm not Hoffney, I earn money. I know what the money's doing. I want you to stick around because next we're going to talk about the next step up the ladder. We're going to talk about the lot archetype, subscribe so that you can get the whole picture of the whole stair step.
Now, you leave the Hoffney stage when you can say, here's exactly where all the money is going without flinching.
You don't need more money to leave this stage. You need more truth.
So as we said, Hoffney, his whole deal is, it doesn't matter. I don't want to know the truth. No matter what he's earning, Lot is earning, but he's drifting, as we'll see. Jacob hustles, but he strives alone.
Isaac starts planting for the future and start thinking about those around him. And Abraham multiplies with a map that actually goes into his great grandkids. And that's where we're going in this series. So we'd love for you to comment. Are you hophni right now? Be honest with us and next week we'll talk about lots of why good income with no direction still loses your family. We'll see you then.
