"Christian Money Management" Verses Secular Money Management

Anyone who has been reading my blog for any length of time, knows that I hate credit and am a follower of Christian or somewhat Christian money management systems. Especially since, I am a churchgoer.


What Is Christian Money Management?


Christian money management consists of training people to manage their money better, using Christian principles. This is an effective way to reduce misery, save marriages, and even prevent spousal abuse.

It is also of great spiritual importance because how you use your money is how you express your choices in all areas of life, not just church activities.

For example, if you can train yourself to wait to buy something you want, you are also more likely to wait for sex. IE: you are less likely to participate in premarital or extramarital sex.

There are two people or organizations that are considered leaders in Christian money management. A third person is much more about the money and doesn't offer any free information on his website. Of course all three sell their books and tapes as well as seminars, but the two big ones offer "free" advice via their radio programs and websites.

The original idea of financial training at church was vigorously promoted by the late Larry Burkett, whose Crown Financial Ministries is still the leader in the field. Dave Ramsey also has a loyal following; he is a bit more of a financier, and less of a spiritual adviser, than Burkett.

The third, Ron Blue is the founder of the largest Christian CPA firm in the world, who retired in 2003 and started what is now known as Kingdom Advisers.

How is "Christian money management" different from anybodyelse's money management? To a large extent, it's not. What works, works. However, four Christian doctrines loom very large:

God owns everything and we are just His stewards - Put simply, all of our property isn't really our own.

Higher standard of Honesty - We are held to a higher standard of honesty because God is always watching. Ethics isn't just whatever you can get away with.

Marriage is a permanent commitment - I know this doesn't sound like a financial issue, but it is. Secular counselors such as Suze Orman often advise couples to break up when they disagree strongly about money. For the Christian, that is not an option. Nor can marriage be viewed as temporary in the first place

Money does not buy happiness - There is much to be said for the old-fashioned virtue of contentment, the art of realizing that if you aren't happy now, you still won't be happy if you simply acquire more money or possessions.


Who Are the Secular Money Management People


There are a large number of advisers that would fall into this category. However, there are some leaders. Two of which have radio or TV shows (Suze Orman and Clark Howard). One which sells his tapes via radio commercials (John Cummuta). Another, that might be considered a leader, has appeared numerous times on Oprah. His name is David Bach.

All of these people teach reducing your debt load. In addition, they also all teach saving for retirement. However, there are some big differences.

The ones that tend to be Christian all tend teach paying cash for everything. Even business debt is to be avoided by the Christians. One of the secular teachers, John Cummuta, teaches this for personal debt but not business debt.

I personally like Cummuta and his teachings because they so closely resemble Dave Ramsey's. However, as I said there are some differences. Cummuta for example teaches debt reduction mathematically. IE: largest interest rate first.

Whereas, Dave Ramsey teaches that if we were thinking mathematically, we would never have gotten into debt in the first place. It is this reason, that he teaches a psychological method of paying the smallest debt first, regardless of the interest rate. The reason is paying off a debt relatively quickly will motivate you to move on towards your next debt. Both teach paying as much as you can on the first debt, then adding that payment to the payment of your next debt until you are completely debt free.

Wow, maybe I should place John with the Christian Advisers. However, even though, he tends to quote scripture like Dave Ramsey, he isn't considered in most Christian circles as a Christian Adviser.

What's wrong With Suze, Howard and Bach?
To start with Suze Orman worships at the alter of the FICO score. While she does encourage people to get debt free, she is concerned with what your FICO score is. The reason, she believes in, like most of the secular money people, "good debt." She believes in car and home loans, if you can afford it. To her credit, most of the people calling into her show tend to be told they can't afford a loan, at least for something as big as they are wanting.

For Clark Howard, I am not very familiar with him. I don't get his radio program in my area, so I can't say to much about him. However, I have seen his website and one big issue I have with him is he has an article teaching you to use credit cards rather then debit.
The good thing, he seems to be great at alerting his listeners and readers about scams. That is one area that no one can be to careful in. For financial advice, I would suggest, with this limited knowledge of him, avoid Howard. However, listen to his advice when it comes to his scam warnings.

As for Bach, I have so many problems with him. I have never heard him say anything about getting debt free. He teaches reducing your credit card debt, moving everything to lower interest cards, but never close those low interest cards. Additionally, he thinks there is actually something called "good debt." Avoid this guy, he will not seriously help the vast majority of people of have trouble handling debt. He might be ok, for the very small percentage of people who can manage to pay their credit cards in full every month. However this is not most people, and is not most of the readers of this blog.

I hope this post explains why I tend to follow Dave Ramsey, John Cummuta and to a certain extent Crown Financial. I know it only scrached the surface and didn't get into as depth as I would have liked. But then the post would have been extremely long, and very few people would have even finished reading it.

So what did you think? Did this post help you? Do you have anything to add? I want to hear from you.