Money Problems

When my wife and were married, we each owned a house. We decided to sell both houses and start fresh with a new house that would be “our new house together.” One of the results of selling those houses was that, even after buying a big new home for our now much larger blended family (9 children), we had a nice fat bank account – for a short time.

It wasn’t long, maybe a year or two, when, much to our surprise, we discovered we were then over $20,000 in debt! We decided we just had to do something to get out of debt as soon as possible. First of all, I tried to make more money by working harder and longer. That helped for a while but, guess what, we paid off some of the most urgent bills, but we weren’t able to pay them all off. What we discovered was this: The more money we had coming in, the more money we spent. We felt like we were in a boat with a big hole in the bottom. The faster we bailed – paid bills – the faster the boat filled up with water – more unpaid bills. We sat down together and took a long hard, honest look at our situation and ourselves because we knew some drastic changes had to be made in our lifestyle.

We turned to the Bible and in prayer asked God to help us out of our money problems. Over a period of weeks He showed us more than 800 places in His Word where he gives us teaching and instructions about money and how to handle it. As we began to apply His wisdom to our situation, we gradually learned more and more about what to do and what not to do with our money. In short, we learned how to handle it according to God’s teachings. The basic lesson we learned about money problems - sounds, when I say it here, like a rather obvious solution. But, that “obvious solution” had not been obvious or even recognized by us. Maybe it was not obvious because we simply didn’t want to acknowledge it, as being our personal problem –in other words – it was our fault.

What we learned – are you ready for this? Was that the only way to “have” money and stay out of debt is to always, always spend less than we make! Obvious! Simple! Elementary! But, in our case at least, this was an extremely hard thing for us to do.

Well. We took God’s advice to heart. We put ourselves on a strict budget. We ran toward our creditors. We told them we wanted to pay them back, but because of the need to reduce the size of payments to them, it was going to take us longer than expected. They reluctantly agreed to accept smaller payments – instead of none – and we were on our way to getting out of debt.

It took us eighteen (18) long months to pay off all of our debts, but we did it, praise the Lord for His help! What a great feeling to be debt- free-at-last! In a nutshell here is what we learned: (1) more money is not the solution. (2) Good management of money is more important than the money itself. (3) We had to have a plan, a time-table, to get out of debt. (4) We made a game of our plan to always have money in the future.

So, if you are in debt as you read this, if the creditors are hounding you without mercy, if you think you need more money, do this: begin with prayer, then devise a plan to get out of debt in a specific number of months or years. Stick to your plan. As you go along, you will learn to manage your money so you will never ever again have any more – money problems!

By: Terry L. Weber

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