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They got at least one. I trust the Holy Spirit. Let's do this just for the sake of time because we don't want to now, as you go home and continue that conversation, there's a lot of, if you actually do it, there's a lot of gold that can be mined out of that conversation. You can see each other's hearts. Things get to get revealed and pulled back. So please, if you actually do the conversation and dig, there's a lot that'll be present there. Can I add? And so one of the things that we did is we did it individually and then we compared what ours looked like and then came up with one core value sheet as a couple so that we can govern our, make sure we're governing our lives according to that. That's correct. Actually, and next slide should be values of verbs. And we have a multi-generational home. So not only does it, just us, but we have four generations in one house.
So we did the same thing, not just for us, but for our household, all four generations sitting at the table, seeing, okay, God, what is in each heart? And you're drawing a string. There's something there. Let's discern and see what God is doing. And so getting aligned value-wise with everybody that's underneath the roof, there's a lot of gold. So the key is now we want to empower your values. And you might say, Jeremy, what does that mean? This is really hard. Turn it into a verb. Because it's easy to say integrity. What is integrity in a verb? Turn it into a sentence and use integrity as a verb. Make it measurable. Say it again. Make it measurable.
Yeah. How do you have accountability with something if it's not measurable? So this is why it probably took our family of four generations a good four hours or more to wrestle through our five. Yes, ma'am. No, we literally have a 93-year-old down to a seven-year-old in the house. So in our household, we have my grandfather, my dad, us, and our children. And at one point, we also had our granddaughter. So we had five generations at one time. It was tight. It was tight. But it was good. It was good, though. It was fun. It was. It was family. You get to brush up in there. But with that being said, I'd love to show y'all an example of how to actually empower it.
Next slide. So this is from ours. The first one was faith. And so what it looks like, core value, faith, value-aligned behaviors, which is your values turned into a verb, your actual behaviors. So we pray. We listen to God's word. We obey what he shows. He shows us. And I take small steps consistently. That's what faith, for us, what we want to do. Just be consistent in the small steps. With that being said, now, here comes the part. From that, we want to make decisions through that value. So it is the faith filter. Out of our top five, when we're trying to decide something, and does this align with the heart of the father? And does this compromise any of the values that we're trying to get at? So with that being said, like that family filter or faith filter, does this, so family is the next one, does this strengthen our bond and peace in our home? Whatever financial thing we're getting ready to do, is this going to strengthen the bond in the home, the relationship, it's all about the relationship.
I want to protect the relationship, promote the relationship, and those things. Those who are with me, they know, hey, my number one primary thing is, I want the home protected. Like, we can go do a lot of investments, but I don't want to compromise the home to try to get it. Because now I'm gambling, I'm consuming, I'm trying to predict, and I'm riding the household, trying to figure out the next thing. That's stressful, y'all. Don't, I don't know if anybody been there, but that's stressful. So it's not that we're anti-budget, like it's not like we're anti-planning, but every financial decision, every single one has to go through all five of our values that we said were our core values. And if it doesn't, something's wrong, and we have to pause and figure out why. We got to stop. We got to stop. We got to drop. And we're going to have to roll to something different. Yep. Because, what'd you say? I'll give you that example. Perfect. I'll give you one that really rocked us. It was my daughter's gymnasium. Gymnastics. Oh, sorry. You said, repeat it one more time, so I. In the mic. What would be an example of something that didn't align with the values for you guys? Perfect. That one's easy, because the first time this was tested, there was a lot of tears. And the brother had to stand strong, y'all. It was rough. I'm glad he taught me that submission thing before, because. It was gymnastics.
I told you, we went through a season where it's like, hey, we don't have any money coming into this household. What we going to do? Well, gymnastics is $1,000 a month. And it's not just gymnastics. Our daughter is on the junior Olympic team, and really, really good, like national level good. And she's been doing it since she was three. So let me say it like this. Let me give you some numbers. If I got $2,500 coming into my household, and my insurance, because I was in the private sector, was $1,762 a month. Yeah. And gymnastics cost me $1,000 a month. Minimum. I got a problem. I didn't care. And so we're talking about, OK, God, daily bread. I didn't give my daughter this gift. You did. I didn't choose this salary. You did. I definitely, and my old employer called me consistently offering me six figures every quarter. Hey, man, I just want you to know you can come on back any time you get ready. Do you know how hard it is? How hard it is to hang up that phone when you pissed? But God, I'm sorry. Can you go back to that first one, faith, core value? Yeah.
Does this align with what God is showing us? It would have been very easy to alleviate all the pain and go back and get that guaranteed salary. It would have been really easy. Gymnastics wouldn't have been a problem. Brother could breathe. Wife would have been happy. Would have had no issues. But does this align? This aligns with what God is showing me. And because faith is our first one, it was really hard for me. I was like, where's your faith? We can do fundraisers. Things can happen. He's like, but have we prayed about it? No, because she's really good at gymnastics. Like, Jesus wouldn't have made her this good if we needed to pray through it. She should be doing gymnastics. This was on our front porch having this very Long conversation. And long conversation. I was crying harder than when we took it. And Lily, she took it way better than I did. Took it like a champ. It's like, baby girl, I want you to understand something. Right now, where we are, with what we trust, God. I trust him for our daily bread. And I believe that he gave you a gift. And at the same time, we want to steward the gift and the bread that he's brought into this household. But right now, we're going to have to push pause on gymnastics. Not forever. And I can't give you a break. I can't give you an end date. That was the rough part. Well, because it wasn't just about money at that point. When we ran it through all five core values, it then messed with the family one. Because my mom was extremely sick on hospice. And so if I'm running around to competitions, it's because I'm like, well, if we get the money, it's OK. He's like, OK, well, if we get the money, we'll talk about it. What do you mean we'll talk about it if we get the money? I thought that was the only problem. Well, it's not. We had to run it through all of our core values. And then we both felt like it was struggling, because I didn't understand the no.
But I had to trust the no, because it didn't run through our core values. And what we're talking about is relational economics, that God, I trust you. I trust that you'll give me the right words. I trust the grace. And I trust the grace to speak to my daughter. I trust you. I have to trust you as a man. I have to. Do you need a mic? Mm. Because what you think? I'm telling you right now, I'm the pressure the world will tell you. It's all because you won't go change and relieve this pain. Judges chapter 6. I've been reading that since I was in high school. Gideon. But the children of Israel did evil in the sight of God. And he turned them over into the hands of the Midianites. And they were in the depression for seven years. And one of the things with Gideon that I see in there was God didn't stop the growth that was coming. But what happened was every attempt that I would try to do to free myself, I saw it as a counterfeit, illegal gain.
And the children of... He turned them over into the hands of the Midianites. And so the Midianites, the Amalekites, and the children of the East would rise up at harvest time and squash all gain. And I realized, and I remember standing there on the front porch, because my wife was trying to save me. She was trying to solve the problem. She was like, well, we can do this to get the money. We can do that to get the money. I've got this acting thing going on. That's got money. We could do fundraisers. We could do these. I say all of those are illegal Gideon gains. And I believe in my heart of hearts that God wants to know, do I trust him? Do I value him? Because we overcome the world not by...
I'm sorry. We overcome by the blood of the lamb, done the word of our testimony, and not loving my life even unto death. And that not loving my life even unto death is, God, I value you and your assignment in my life more than my preferences. I prefer in this moment, God, to let my daughter go do gymnastics. I prefer to have a very comfortable salary. I prefer to be able to do all of these things, which are right there. I mean, I could literally do it. One phone call, but I value obedience to you more than my preferences of being out of pain. And I connected that right here. Because we knew Holy Spirit called us to do this. So if we went and did something else, we would have been out of order. And the order of operations is what we're talking about. That stop, drop, and roll, that's what that's talking about.
I'd rather God's order in my life because we didn't know that another story was we all, we had a house. Can I finish that story and say, oh, the good part, so Jesus' son showed out and we had no idea, Lily had no idea, because she had never played before. She was ended up being better at basketball than gymnastics. And we found a basketball program that did, that was practically free. And she went to, and so we didn't go to nationals for gymnastics, but we went to nationals. And it's her first time playing basketball this year. And she's been recruited now. So Jesus worked it out a couple years later. I didn't know. I'm sorry, keep going. We, there are a lot of stories that we can tell. But I didn't know that being obedient and being in alignment with him could produce so much.
And literally this morning thinking about this, the question that came to my mind is, what return are you expecting? And I want you to think about that. Whatever you're spending your money on, whether you have a conscious thought about it or a subconscious thought, you expect some sort of return. God expected the return from the steward who buried it. He said you should have at least put it in the hands of the banker so that upon my return I should have got what was owed to me plus the interest. God expects a return and we subconsciously expect a return. The return that I was wanting to answer your question, Derek, was that if I go to church and I love you, God, I pay my tithes. I clean the building. I do all these things. It's not like I'm out there doing the food. I'm sitting here being obedient. But does God owe me something? What return am I expecting? What do I expect? And so those things come out in those painful moments. That stuff rises up. See, it stays way down. It's pushed down, but that layer gets peeled back in those pressure moments. I love pressure now because pressure and pain reveals the default that's inside of me. Just like in football, when I was practicing, I knew what to do. I could go to the board and I could draw it up. I knew exactly what to do. It's not hard to make your budget balance. It's not hard on the board. That's easy. We know one plus one equals two. Two minus one equals one. Like, we know this. But it wasn't when I was on the board in the room and we're talking it through with Coach. It wasn't when we were out there on the field and we were walking through and, hey, when this happens, you're going to do this and you go do this. Like, it wasn't then. It was when the lights came on and you put your hand in the dirt and that guy across from you don't like you. He got a bad attitude and he has destruction on his mind and you have, oh, I better come with it. And so it wasn't until those pressure-packed moments that all the stuff that Coach had done with me got revealed. The game is just revealing what's going on on the inside.
What I see is finance is the source of the circulatory system of your life. Just like your body, the circulatory system does three big things. It transports nutrients everywhere it needs to go. It regulates what's going on on the inside, your temperature, and it protects. It'll send them white blood cells everywhere it needs to go. And the reason why we're talking about values is because your money is doing that right now. Right now, your money is transporting to the things that you feel valuable. It's trans... It's protecting what you think is valuable and it's regulating what you feel is valuable. I bought a 3,500-square-foot house with an acre and a pool just so everybody could be quiet in my house. I want everybody to have their own spot and everybody just be quiet. Because when I came home, all I wanted... Brother, don't... I will fight the lions out there, but when I came home, all I wanted to do was just walk in, everybody say, hello, Father. Say, hello, how are you? How was your day? And we all walk and, you know, we sit down. Can I get your slippers, Father? Yes. I appreciate that. Why, yes. How was your day? And do these things and then we all just relax. That's what I wanted. I just... And I was like, if I could get one more bathroom, maybe that'll happen. Man, if I could do one more, maybe that'll... You know what? That's what I was doing. I bought that big house not because I wanted the house. I wanted comfort in my life. This is when we had teenagers as well and all their friends and all the youth group and everybody else. So I... Instead of regulating, I was regulating what I wanted. You go to your corner, you go over there. I'll go over here. It wasn't... I didn't understand economics of obedience, what it was doing. God had us sell that, moved to a trailer, sold it, dumped everything, dumped debt, did all that.
I thought it was a financial move, but I did not realize that my wife would tell you that she didn't know that that year that she was off, she learned how to be a mom. I didn't know that that year, that next year that she went back to work, that next year I got COVID and I was off, that I stopped treating my family like a project and I was able to learn how to love them. They were no longer a task to me or an obstacle. They were no longer something that I had to endure or get over. The heart began to open. You talk about the tug of war? That's what it was.
I started to get in alignment with Him and my heart opened to Him and my heart could open to everybody else. But I thought it was a financial move. It wasn't financial. He was doing something. He was showing me what was being valuable to me previously. But now I can see what's valuable now. And so we steward differently now out of that. One of the things that I wanted to jump into, go ahead. So we talked about values. This right here, this I see as kind of like, I'm going to just use a four-point stance. The readiness of a steward. That parable of the talents. Empower the numbers. That's where we're going to drive down tonight. The first one. We're going to empower the numbers. And what do you mean, Jeremy? These are your practical tools. The practical tools to be able to empower the numbers.
The first thing is number one, you got to actually hire your budget. And what do you mean? Well, God is the owner of the corporation. He hired us CEO and COO. We don't own it, but we're operating according to the vision of the owner. But I'd be foolish. I need to hire a CFO to go operate according to the vision that's been passed down to us that we pass down to it and let it do its job. Sometimes we can budget like just having one doesn't mean anything. Like that's an exercise. Have I hired it and allowed it to do its job? The CEO does not set the vision. I'm sorry. The CFO does not set the vision. Your budget should not set the vision, but it should operate according to the vision that's been set. That makes sense?
Based off the values. And so the next one is, I don't care what method you choose as long as it's a zero-based budget and you pick one. Don't matter. You can do an envelope system. Don't matter. You can do it online. I'm an Excel guy. My wife likes the Quicken. Like there's, it doesn't matter. I don't care. I still run my Excel and she has the Quicken. We do both. And as far as just on a daily basis how we utilize money, envelope system does not work for me because I cannot use it with Amazon. Come on, Jesus. It's okay. He already knows my boyfriend is Amazon. He has to be okay with it. It is what it is. Don't set your hands this way. I received it right now. But even household things, I can put it on a schedule. I don't have to remember to get detergent. It shows up at my house at the beginning of the month. I don't have to remember to get toilet paper. It is my, Amazon is my assistant. It does not use the envelope system. So what we do is we have literally, what is it? What are we up to? Like 12 accounts? No. Well, don't scare the people. Okay, don't scare the people. We got different accounts for different things. Exactly. For literally everything.
So if we buy food, I use this card. If we buy gas, I use this card. If we, even my hair and Lily's hair, there's a card for that. So our big things that we know we're going to spend money on every single month, it comes from one of those cards. So there's not really 12 of them, but there's very specific things. And so our regular main card, there shouldn't be a bunch of stuff coming out there other than our bills that are on auto pay. So with that being said, whatever your method, we figured out what worked for us. I needed something. I had too many jobs and I didn't need a job. I know me, that whole value assessment thing, like the diligence, I mean to, I desire to, I want to, but I know if I don't do it immediately, like in a YNAB and code it, if I don't code it immediately, Oh, I'll be, I'll do it. I'll do it at the end of the week. Now I got 600 and I'm paralyzed. And I'm like, ah, this week's messed up. So I knew for me, that wasn't going to work. Can I say something too? I didn't mean to cut you off. And because we have there, we say to you something that works and it doesn't have to work. That one thing for your whole family, the system does, but the one thing doesn't. So like for instance, my dad, he keeps every single receipt, reconciles everything at the app. So we all have the same vision goal. But we might use different methods to produce the same thing. So some people, one spouse might be a great envelope person. Another person might be like me and I need my cards. So the key is we got to figure out what works for you.
Let's do what works for you that you can do consistently. Do it. Carla just touched on it. Assign it. I'm huge on this. Before the money comes, we better give it a plan. We've got to give it a plan before it gets here.
Because once it gets here, man, it feel real good. And I'm like, you know what? We might as well go to Sonic, give us a little slush. You know what I mean? We'd be all right. It's in there. It's good. And next thing you know, $10,000 gone. What happened? Like, so assign it a job before it gets there. Another one we do is we do not have, I don't let the money stay in there because I won't be as vigilant anymore. So I'll take it and I'll literally move it to another account and I'll move it back when it's ready because I will relax. I know me. And so the key is let's drive down there and do what's necessary for you. We talked about the nuclear number. The purpose of the nuclear number, whether you know, that's just your prearranged, pre-negotiated package or a packet. If something happens, boom, we're hitting this button because we talked about it. How much do you need to survive? We talked about it already.
Well, we said, because it's hard to let the cable go in that season because I need it. But if we talked about this, hey, we said we were going to cut this. We said we were going to do it. Are we going to do it? When we go to bare bones, what does that look like? What does that mean? So driving down there, that's what's decided in the flex time. And guard against the robbers. That is the other one, the last one. And I actually got a slide. What I've got is I've got actually 15 fear roots. And I call them the gang because these jokers show up and they don't play fair. It's a gang of folks that's going around stealing stuff. They used to show up on my house on the first, every month. And I said that on purpose from Louisiana. Every month, they showed up. And when I bought that big old house, that I deserve, and I thought I could afford, they showed up, both of them, on the first of the month and punched me in the face. Every month. Like, you thought you had it, didn't you? Yeah.
I'll see you next week. And I close the door and sit down. That gang is nothing to play with. They are birthed out of fear. Fear of missing out. Fear of not amounting up to. Like those fears, we have to understand what typically is operating based on your temperament and who you are. I call it financial socialization. Whatever is going on based on your upbringing, you have tendencies. Just like we know the big three, your big three, hey, Satan tried to hit me with pride and hit me with this. You need to know what robbers typically try to show up. These are our robbers. And my wife knows I will not go to a car lot. I don't go to a car lot because the day I go to the car lot, I'm going to buy a car. I'm going to walk out of one of them. So I don't go. I'll research online. We'll do all kinds of things when it's that time. But I will not walk in a car lot because I know I'll buy. So my wife knows if I say, hey, babe, I think I want to just go to the car. No, baby, I don't think that's what you should do. Like we're stewarding each other. That make sense? But that had to take trust. Because before I would, I can say the exact same thing now that I said years ago. But because I didn't have that heart change, it comes out so differently. It does. And so now I have permission to be like, that's not what you want. Yeah. And these are now almost like cuss words in our house. Like if I say I can, we can afford. Who said you could afford? Who's the owner? Made it smell like I deserve. Is that what we're saying? Like it smells. I think I, I think I smell him trying to come in this room right now. Is that? And she was like, yeah, you know what? You're right. I guess you're right. And because we've done this as a family, our kids know like they don't use words like I deserve anymore because they know they're going to get a lecture probably and a whole bunch of questions and talk about the roots and. Fair. That's another one. Yeah, fair. We don't do what's fair. Is it just? Is it moral? Next one is the next slide, please. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay. Name your pet. Name your pet. I apologize. Name your pet. This came actually out of talking to Dacia Morton. Name your pet. When I'm hungry, I'll eat that catfish. If I'm hungry, I'm less likely to eat Nemo. Does that make sense? Like to walk in when I've named it because when you name it, I've given it an identity. I've given it a purpose. I've given it a place in the house. This is now a part of the house. So I'm not going to eat Nemo anymore. But if that was one of them catfish swimming around that I just in that one name, let me be hungry. Get that one. So it's important that you name the pet. The money that comes in, you've got to name it. And I think there's five things.
Next slide. The first one that you just had with the buckets. Thank you. I see there's five things that we're going to do. I can give it. I can store it. I can share it. I can spend it. Or I can invest it. There's five things that I can do.
I've got to name that thing and give it a purpose when it comes in my house. So give it. That's my honor bucket. That's my ties. That's my offering. That's honor to me. The return I expect out of that bucket is gratefulness. God, I'm grateful. Boy, when I tell you, I said the other day, I am grateful to be able to pay my tithes. Because there was a season where it wasn't coming in. And Father, I thank you. Just like it was 115 yesterday and I walked out there this morning, I was like, oh, Father, I appreciate this 89. Thank you, Lord. Hey, that's all right. When you haven't had it, you get real grateful. Lord, I thank you. You are my source. And honor comes out of that bucket. The other one. Share. This bucket for me is generosity. Set aside a portion. Because even when I didn't have it coming in, I could set $3 aside. Because somebody might need these three worse than I do. That anti-greed, that makes me wrestle with, as Dennis Peacock would say, how much is enough? Like, you've literally got to wrestle with that question. How much is enough for me? And so creating the margin and making space, I have intentionally made space because I've only had one person any time I've gone around and done this and asked, who in here wouldn't want to be a blessing, want to go help, want to be able to help the people in Venezuela or help the guy down the street or help this person? Who in here doesn't want to? Usually, everybody does. So let's create the margin for it.
Let's make it intentional. And let's set a percent. You and the Holy Spirit work that out of what you see, because it's intentional generosity. I'm actively making a choice to be generous. And so what we do is I have an account and that money comes in and Carla, there are times she'll be like, hey, babe, when she was working at the job, she'd say, hey, my employee had their house burned down. Say it's over there in the account. Knock your socks off. Between you and the Holy Spirit, whatever you see, let's go. It's there. And so all kinds of things, it's available. It's available for generosity. And that boundary helped us so much because we're both givers. Thank you, boo. And so imagine two givers. We would be broke because we would give it away and then be looking like, oh, we need vacation. That was a real thing. We were stressed out. We would need vacations. We would need all sorts of things.
But because we would give so much, we, and we didn't follow the principle of giving to us because we have an account for that. For a vacation or for a night out or whatever. So that boundary of giving helped. Yes, it did. Bless our socks. Talk about it. Jeremy taught what he's teaching now.
This has been him for as long as I've known him, which is almost 20 years now. Jeremy taught me and my wife this several years ago. Just this part.
And not too many weeks after that, we had opened up our first set of accounts with, you know, and we just called it for the poor. That's what we called it at the time. And so we had this set of money after we had gotten paid and all the other stuff was paid that we actually got a chance to, God put us to the test right away. We at Burger Street, the whole family in the truck, and my son, Max, has an extraordinarily, I mean, high gift of mercy, super compassionate dude, want to give him everything. I mean, I have to stop him from giving stuff to people all over the place. He paying for dinner and that. Bro, you gonna door dash on my account? You can't do that. But anyway, so he's crying and he's weeping in the back of the truck and we're like, are you hurt? What's wrong? And he points out the front of the window of the truck and he says, that woman, it's hot outside. That woman needs some water. She needs some food. And it's a homeless lady pushing a cart in front of Burger Street. My wife looked at me and the smile face was incredible because we knew we could, we knew exactly what we could give to this lady. And we asked Max to go and do it. It was a life changing moment for my son. That part right there.
We didn't have an account that we knew exactly what we could give until he taught us this. The ability to activate your family and generosity. The ability that they know that we have made margin to be generous to others. It opens our eyes and we're able to see. We were teaching the kids last week about the compassion Jesus had for us. He sees the people and then you go help the people that you see. It opens your eyes wider.
And anyway, I'm sorry, that wouldn't get me fired up. When it comes down, next slide please, sorry. Spend bucket. We usually don't have a problem in this one. This one's take care of all your legal obligations, your taxes, all the things that's necessary. Inside of the assignment, God knows, think of it as sharecropping back then from the context. He knew that the portion of what was given, they were gonna have to live on a portion. So your portion is already allotted inside of what he's given. Does that make sense? And so the take care of the obligations, food, water, shelter. Now the question is, we get into where if there's counterfeit above that line that he sets. And once I go over that, I'm trying, that's counterfeit up there. So I'm gonna run down real quick. Next slide.
The storage ladder. A lot of people, this one is how do I set up to be able to store? Cause you're talking probably to the only advisor that would tell you stop saving. You're probably saving too much. I don't believe in saving. I believe in storing. When you store it, you're working towards something. You've given an assignment. If you save, that's that nameless catfish over there. You've got to give it a name. It's working toward a purpose, but do it's working for a reason. So the first level is we go number one, define what an emergency is for our household. That's the first level we need to do. Like literally write down the definition. My wife knows we're talking today. I'm literal. Let's write it down. And I know what you write down. We're going to stick to it. Like this is not a definition. I'm sorry. This ain't an emergency. We just didn't properly prepare and we don't have to deal with this. That's not an emergency. So you write down.
That's the first level of your emergency fund. Write down the definition. Second level, thousand dollar emergency fund, $500. Don't matter. Set it. Third one began to set the percentage and fund it every month. The little bit. And this is where I want to jump in there. No condemnation. There's percentages on there. Recommended percentages, all those different things for all of the buckets. You don't have to try to get to that percentage tomorrow. That's not the goal. Please don't try to go out trying to stay up all night figuring out how in the world I'm going to be able to now save 10, 20%. I don't have to do this. That's not the goal. But we can save a dollar. Five something. I don't care what it is, but I can find a dollar on the ground somewhere. I don't care. Just start. Please.
Just start. I believe God honors the faithfulness. Just start. There is a seat. Like I told you, we have nothing, but I took $5 and I put it over there. This is all I got right now, but we doing something. Just start. All right. The next thing, when you go up this ladder, we'll go from that thousand dollar emergency fund to, we want the one, you know, we want the one, one month nuclear number. I want to try to save that amount. Once I hit that one month nuclear number, I know if some go wrong, we got at least a month. We'll be all right. Then we'll go up to one month of a lifestyle number. That's where that number comes important. We got at least one month. Then we go up the ladder. We're working toward two to six months. Now the wrong right above that is a risk adjusted. You should adjust your amounts. Based on your circumstance. If I'm a single income home, or we both work at the same company and it is a, you both some wild nuclear physicists or something. And there's a hard time for you to find your next gig. When I was selling cars, I knew if I lost my job, I could walk down the street and get another one. 15 minutes later, it was different. Some jobs. You can't just walk down the street. And grab the next one. You may want to adjust your, your amounts based on that. So based on what's going on in your life, the next one, name the containers and also continue to review.
So next slide. Last one. We're going to drive down. This is the investment bucket. This is where I can talk all day. I wanted to jump in. There are some common questions that I get all the time. Is it too late for me? I wish you could see my notes on here. I got no stretched about that long with exclamation points. It's never too late. No is the answer. It's not too late. The next thing is I hear all the time. Should I be in the market? Should I be in real estate? Should I be over there? I want you to be where God has you to be. He's in it all. So you have a core area of competency. The key is stay in your area. And the other thing I see a lot of people do where we try to, I need multiple streams of income. No, you do what you do. And stay there. You can let your money do other things because I can put my money in other areas and other hands of competent people to multiply me.
But I'm not trying to do something that's not according to what God called me to do. I need to stay right there. That's where I need to be. I'm no need to be over here. So having multiple streams is fine. Send your money to go do that for you. I love real estate. It's not my area. I can call somebody and say, hey, will you go do this for me? Pass that off to them. So the other thing that I hear all the time, well, I don't have access to a retirement account at my job, so I can't save. No No No. There's so many things available for you. As long as you have earned income, you can start a retirement account anywhere, any bank. You can come to any advisor anywhere. You don't have to have it provided. Through your job, there's plenty of things available for you to be able to do. Next thing, if I'm separated from my employer, there are so many lost 401ks and things out there that people just forget about. I found one two months ago. Lady had $42,000 just floating over there that she didn't realize. And we had to go get and bring back into the storehouse. I had another one guy. He worked when he was young. At Sam's. He didn't realize. Oh, snap. He forgot. It was $25,000 just sitting over there. There's I'm talking about these. It's not like, you know, like you, Carla said, it's not like it's rich. No, this is 18 years old working at Sam's, but he had contributed and he had no idea. So there's money floating out there sometimes, and we have no idea. So actually taking care of those things. You have a lot of options. Three main things that you can do when you separate for any reason, from your company.
The four things on this slide investing, you have to be generationally minded. And what I see is that stewards live by faith to be generationally minded. You got to live by faith and you always got to be looking toward those two things. Because when you live by faith, you understand that the assignment is too big for you and that the assignment that God has for your life is not. Over when you die, it takes great faith to go to sleep and rest when you have so much to do, knowing that you aren't the one that's got to get it done. He's doing it generationally minded. Also, they always look toward a city where the architect, they were looking toward the city with foundation, who's the architect and the builder was God. That's what generationally minded people are doing. There's phases of life. The reason why you invest, is because you understand there's phases of life. The first phase of your life, you're accumulating. You're going out there gathering. Oh, and you're gathering as much as you can because you know winter is coming. Then you get into a protection phase where, hey, I'm about to retire. I think I'm almost done. And then there's also a phase where a lot of us, what we call distribution phase where I'm done working. Now that is paying me back. So, you're expanding when you invest because there's different phases of life. And don't fall into the trap that my permanent income, which means what I'm making right now, I think I'm going to be making that for forever. We don't know. We don't have to know. We just get positioned just in case that don't happen. The next thing is portfolio management. This is where I can talk all day. Three phases, strategic vision.
You have to start with the vision. Values is the first part of that vision that I see. And I see the paper normally that I'm doing with people because you've got to steward according to your vision that God has given you. Otherwise, we've got just a bag of tactics that are just collected and they're not systematically working in unison together. You got different things pulling different directions. Next thing, resource optimization. That is coming through and auditing, figuring out is everything that we have pulling in the same direction. Because sometimes it's not that you got to work harder. We just got to make sure everybody in the boat rowing the same way. There's a lot of people that we've helped. It's like, oh, you don't have to add another dime. If you literally shift this, you put 10% back into what you have before you even put it in the market. Just by shifting this. And so the next thing is risk management. And that's another one I could talk all day on. A lot of us are doing more risk than we need to because we think it's got to earn this amount and you're taking on more risk than necessary. And so you are built to handle a certain risk. The others you mitigate. I don't have four men standing with water hoses around my house 24 seven just in case that thing burned down. We have homeowners insurance for that. So you mitigate that.
So you don't have to go out and take on all the different risks. That are there. Last one. Compound interest. Next slide. Eighth one of the world. Money making money babies. This is an example. Let me set this up. If somebody put $10,000 in an account that made just 10%, you left alone. You didn't touch it. You didn't add one more dime. In 40 years, that 10,000 becomes $452,592.57. That's not adding one more dime. Why am I trying to say? Start as early as you can. I don't care. Start as early as possible because time is the biggest factor that can work for you without you having to work more. That makes sense. Next slide.
So if somebody did that at 40, the first one at 20 years old, put 10 grand in and they did got that 452,000 at 60. This slide represents. Somebody that started at 40 that put the same 10,000, but they added $1,200 a month. I'm sorry a year. So they put in $100 a month. Just putting it in there. That comes out to $34,000 contributed, which is three times the amount that the other person put in. But it's one third of the return because of the time as early as you can.
Put anything away. Anything away as early as you can. Next slide. This is going back to that first scenario. That's the same $10,000. That's 60 years instead of 40 years. Remember, 40 years was $452,000. That same $10,000 that was just left alone. $3,044,816.40. It's not. I had a guy. My first. Advisor conference. He walked up to me. He's like, man, isn't it crazy? I say, yeah, it's crazy. He's like, it's not magic. It's just math. It's not magic. It's literally just math. Setting it and not touching it. And I think about this. What is required to change a generation?
I think about like, oh, snap. If I take that for my kids, what could they do? And then that's fooling around my grandkids. And then what kind of things can happen?
And one of the things I want you to think about when I was running waste management, I had one of my guys come up to me. He said, man, I just did it. I was like, what are you talking about? His name's Mark. He said, now, today is the first day that I make more money in my investments than I do coming to work. I said, brother, you did it. Congratulations. You nailed it. You did it. Where he's making more now than he did when he wake up every morning and we would be there at 3 a.m. And so it took him a while. It took him 32 years. But he did it. And so at that point, he can literally retire because he's not missing any income. Does that make sense? Hey, babe, I got a question. So for people who may not know, for this one, you used 10 percent. Is 10 percent, is that something that's really risky? Is that something that's not really risky? Because you might say, ooh, I'm doing that. No. No. So it does come up. It does come with some risk. Basically, that's S&P 500. You drop your money in the S&P 500 essentially over the last 100 years. If you leave it alone, average 10 percent a year. So just leave it alone. There are going to be major dips. There's going to be bumps. There's going to be skyrockets. There's all of it. But consistently, you're averaging about 10 percent. Even if you're conservative. Eight percent. Drop it in eight percent. So the key is we just need to be consistent. Because that bucket allows things to go to work for you where you're not having to work for it. Y'all.
And then our last slide just says how to contact us. So we had a lot of people ask what we do and how to contact us. And so we wanted to make sure that people knew as well as we're a part of the family life team. And so it's not just us. If you need help with a budget or if you need someone to walk with you, we can also direct you to people in the family life ministry. That can help you as well. Hey, man. Give them give it up. Give them appreciation. So good. I'll tell you for a very small investment. One of the best investments you could make would be to spend some time with them. We've got some handouts here if you want to come up and get some more handouts that they have. I'll give you just a quick testimonial. My mom and dad, 84 and 80 years old, reached out to me because they were concerned that they only had X number of years left. And what have we done? We live until 90 plus. I scheduled a session with Jeremy and their eyes were like wide open that they could live to 100 with a few minor adjustments in where they were at financially. So it was just like totally opened their world up because they were in fear that they only had so many years left of finances left. So I encourage you to get with Jeremy and Carla. It's a great ministry that they have. Great business that they have. So we also want to ask the elders and the family life ministry team to come up. We certainly want to spend time with you to pray. If you want to pray, we will spend as much time with you as you need tonight. Let's give them one more hand. Thank you so much. And I'll pray over the night and then we can be released. So, Father, thank you for this appointed time tonight. Father, we trust, Lord, that I think of James 417. It says, if you know the good you ought to do and don't do it, it's sin to you. So, Father, we saw a lot of good tonight. We take the accountability of what we've seen. We embrace it, Father, in the family of God to walk out your stewardship principles. Thank you for illuminating and magnifying that tonight for all of us. And the body of Christ said, Amen. Have a great night. Thank you guys so much.
