Episode Two: Money in your marriage Part 2 of 4: Money - How do you see it?
/Sam and Erica's Marriage podcast
Money in your marriage Part 2 of 4: Money - How do you see it?
Episode 002
January 21, 2019
Introduction
Who we are
How we got here
What the podcast is all about
Discussion
How do we see money
Money is a tool.
Money is not bad or evil.
1 Timothy 6:10 - For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.
Hebrews 13:5 - Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you
Ecclesiastes 5:10 - He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity.
You use it to build or destroy
Build wealth
Bless others
Buy more comforts
Do you want money to:
Live a certain lifestyle
Buy nice things
Nice home
Nice cars
luxuries
Provide security
Emergency fund
College fund
Retirement
Debt-we’ll talk more about that in a future episode
Debt
The Bible warns against debt
Proverbs 22:7 - The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.
Proverbs 22:26 - Be not one of those who give pledges, who put up security for debts.
Hebrews 13:5 - Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”
But we still use debt, why?
What is your attitude about debt?
Some people hate it
Some people love it
Some people accept it as “that’s just a part of life”
The normal American has $38,000 in debt, not including their mortgage.(CNBC)
Is all debt created equal? Good or bad:
Credit cards
Mortgage
Payday loans
Student loans
The Bible doesn’t discriminate
So should you use debt?
The amount of debt you have, as a couple, coupled with the risk tolerance of each of you creates the formula for catastrophe in your marriage.
That’s a decision that should be made jointly.
Debt will impact other decisions. You may not be able to do things the way you would like to because of your debt and the obligation to make those payments. Payments affect:
How you spend
Can’t take that little getaway
How you save
I would have 6 months of expenses saved if i didn’t have all of those little payments.
How you give
I would sponsor a family at Christmas or help my children but...
So what do we do?
Discuss all debts
Only add new debt if both of you consider it and agree
Develop a plan to get out of debt that you agree on
No one would argue that the God’s perfect will is that we, his people, not be borrowers.
ACTION ITEMS
Plan a day to discuss all of your debt-may require getting a copy of your credit reports. Hear each other’s hearts about debt and develop a strategy to address what you uncover.
Pray for our podcast
Leave us a voicemail, let us know what you think, suggestion topics, even prayer requests.
RESOURCES
Budget - Excel spreadsheet
Our Spending Plan (Budget) spreadsheet
Dave Ramsey - Total Money Makeover
The Total Money Makeover on Amazon
Money and Marriage God’s Way
Money and Marriage God's Way on Amazon
NEXT WEEK’S EPISODE
Next week we'll discuss how to save it.
[00:13] Welcome to Sam & Erica's marriage podcast. Here we will talk about practical ways to have an even better marriage and ways to handle the challenges that are sure to come. Regardless of where you are in your marriage, your age, or how long you have been married, this podcast is for you. We will discuss difficult topics from dealing with past hurts and unforgiveness to making date night spicy. Even if you're single, you probably want a better marriage than the marriage is you've seen. Join us weekly as we discuss ways to make marriages better. We invite you to sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.
[01:00] So in episode two, we're going to be talking more about money, again, not because we want to talk about money, but because you guys asked us to. Yes, you did. Yes. So, uh, just like we mentioned in episode one, the entire month of January, we're going to be talking about money, money, and our marriage. And this episode we're going to be talking more about how we see money, our attitude toward money. In the first episode we talked about how we spend our money. We talked a lot about our spending plan
[01:32] Right we did, we talked a lot about the spending plan and I just wanted to back up a little bit and find out exactly how the spending plan worked for you guys. We spent a lot of time talking about it and I want to know if you guys, if you actually got a chance to talk about it, if you got, if you thought about it a little bit more past the episode and if you got a chance to create one. If you did, you can always leave us a voicemail. Yes, and let us know how it went. If you didn't get a chance to create one, that's okay. There is always this evening or going forward, you can sit down with your spouse. Don't forget about that specific date and time to create a spending plan.
[02:11] Yeah, that's good. Bay and uh, Erica mentioned a voicemail. If you're not listening to us directly from our website, you can go to seasons ministries.org/podcast and you can listen to us from our website. You'll see a tab on the side that says voice mail. If you click on that tab, you can leave a voicemail. That's actually our preferred way to communicate. Uh, nobody else hears those messages is just Erica and I, and, uh, we promise to, to listen to each and every one of them. So back to the conversation about our attitude toward money. As you're developing your spending plan, one of the things that comes up often is that you and your spouse may see money a little differently. We know that just looking around in our lives and in America in general, we have a very different view of money than the view of money found in scripture, right.
[03:09] Like money in scripture is very different than the way we use it. I'm specifically, uh, reminded of a scripture that is probably misquoted more than any other piece of Bible ever. And that is, money is the root of all evil, like that is like old school bad Bible 101. Like money is the root of all evil. When you look in scripture, you know, you see for yourself, that money is not the root of all evil. The money doesn't have an intrinsic value, it's not good or bad. 1 Timothy ^:10 (where people get that bad doctrine from) actually reads "For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. Some people eager for money have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs". So just to set the record straight, right bae, right? We just want to get that out.
[04:04] We want to make sure that we're doctrinally, correct, right. It's not the money that's bad. It's when we have this love for money, that bad things happen. That's where the root of evil is uh, so we take that, we take that as like the place where we begin our discussion this time is that, um, how do we see that, that piece, you know, money is such an important piece of our lives. How do we see it? Do we see it as a negative or a positive? Do we see it as a tool? Because I think that's really closer to what the Bible says, that, that it's, it's a thing that we can use to build things or destroy things. It's a thing we can, we can use it to do things like to a set aside, a secure future. We can use it too, of course
[04:59] Rain, shiny stuff on ourselves. You know, I like some shiny stuff. We talked about that last in last episode and some logos. Yeah, I likes some logos,, right? Yeah. Right, so, uh, we talk about, you know, do I want to use money? Do we want to use money to let's say secure our future? You know, do we want to use our, our money today to invest in our tomorrow, and that's saving. Do we want to use our money? Do we think that the purpose of money is so that we can, uh, leave a legacy or send our kids to college or to a guard ourselves against calamity, you know, to have six months of expenses set aside, you know, what do we think about? When we actually talked about this and when we were preparing it? Um, all of those things came to mind. But another thing that came to my mind was we see money as a status symbol where, you know, we tend to look at if we have more money
[05:58] then we're more important and we have no money, then we're less important. If we have more money than our voice is heard. If we have no money, then we have no voice at all. So that was actually something that I thought about. And then, you know, the scripture that I have is Matthew six 19:20 that says, "Do not store up yourselves treasures on earth where moths and vermin destroy where thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where moths and vermin do not destroy and where thieves do not break in and steal for where your treasure is there your heart will be also" And that actually just lends me, takes me down the path of you know, what do I consider valuable? You know, what do I consider important? Um, is it more important for me to have a lot of shiny things and logos or is it more important for me to say, spend some time with my family?
[06:56] That's really good. And I think we, we baby , that is so good because that really ties to like the end of that 1 Timothy verse I talked about earlier is that when we get, when we get this eagerness for money, we end up hurting ourselves. You talked in our preparation time about that guy that's out there just working. He wants to work over time so he can provide more for his family and actuality he's not at home. Right? He's not, he's absent. You know, we, we definitely can't take that approach to it because that kind of defeats the purpose. Right? The whole purpose in this guy's mind and I've been, that guy is I want to do better for my family, but I'm really taken away the most important thing, my very presence from our household uh, so that's a great point.
[07:50] One of the things too in the, I want to do better for my family, we tend to, or at least I tend to get that mixed up. We tend to think we work harder, we make a better life for our family, but in actuality we really don't make a better life. We create more stuff. But like you were saying before, it's, you know, we bring about grief because the guy's not at home. Uh, there's loneliness that sets in with the wife. The children are primarily being raised by one parent in single parent households. And so, you know, that's just not a, it's just not a good look.
[08:26] Yeah, not a healthy approach. Right? It's not, if we sit down and we sit down in front of scripture with our spouse and we really discuss money and really, really kind of hear each other's heart on it, I think those kinds of things will come to light if we just really have the dialogue, really ask the tough questions. I think we really will see things that, that we just not, we're not quite doing, we're really not accomplishing that thing that we're shooting for, you know, where we're shooting for a better life, but we're really detracting from the life that we already have. Uh, and money is just one of those things is one of those ways that we end up in that situation, uh, over and over and over again in our marriages. Another thing that we talked about as we were preparing for this is uh, you can't really talk about your attitude about money without crossing your attitude about debt. Because debt is, debt is a huge part of how we live out our attitude about money. We can say debt is bad, but if you've got, you know, Bank of America and Capital One and three or four other banks lined up outside your door, then that's really not what you believe. It's just kind of, you know, the right thing to say.
[09:50] I also, what I want to do is I want to back up and make sure that it's, that we make it clear that there isn't anything wrong with the guy who, or the woman who's out there working their fingers to the bone to provide for their family. We absolutely, we know that the word says that a man who doesn't provide for his family is worse than an infidel, is worse than an unbeliever. That's one right there. All of them, all of the girls in our house, they all know that scripture. We just want to make sure that we're saying that you know, that it may be possible or maybe necessary to work two jobs to get rid of some debt but not necessarily work two jobs to pay for the Porsche in the driveway.
[10:32] Yes, yes. That's good. And this is such a beautiful, uh point bae, we have, uh, we, we've run often into people that have had this, this problem to one degree or another. We've had some very extreme cases, actually in couples that we worked with where people had just decided that this is the lifestyle they wanted to live. Both people would work two full time jobs, so did they can have a luxury dinners and high end clothing and the children were basically raising themselves and the husband and wife didn't understand why they weren't connected anymore. Right. And that's just not a healthy approach. Like Erica said, uh, there have been times and there can be times where you do have an income issue where you may want to take on extra hours or extra work or a side hobby that's going to be profitable, what have you, but those things are things that you should decide, you know, in, in, uh, conversations between the two of you.
[11:36] And it would only be wise to, uh, to quantify those things, to say, okay, we know we need to pay back this student loan. I'm going to drive Uber until I get the $6,000. And as soon as that's over, then I'm not going to be an Uber driver anymore or what have you. I'm going to work the extra shift until we pay off the credit card that we used for Christmas, whatever it is. But you set that time for definitive purpose and you said it for a definitive time. It's not the way we're going to live from now on. It's with a purpose knowing that it's just a season. Right. So now has a great, that's a great point. Uh, as we get into the debt discussion though, just like people think, or I've heard people say that money is bad. I've heard people say the same thing about debt. That debt is bad. And again, I don't, I don't have an opinion that strongly because the Bible doesn't say debt is a sin. It does, however, warn us over and over and over again, that's not the position God wants us in. So while it's not a sin for me to have a mortgage, I don't think that's the way God wants me to live my life.
[12:54] One of the things, um, when we talked about debt, and we were talking about this in, in our preparation is I thought about bondage, you know, and how, you know, the word tells us that Jesus came so that we can be free. And when we have a lot of debt, we were really tied to the debt. It's like bondage. We can't move. We can't take vacations, we can't do anything because we're tied to this monthly payment that we have to have or that we have to make. So that's something that really, that I have in the back of my mind when we talk about debt. Like it's really bondage and this is not the life that God has purposed for me.
[13:36] Yeah, I agree. I agree. And the scripture that comes to mind for those people that have done the money thing with uh, uh, we talked in the first episode about crown financial and Dave Ramsey and a lot of those similar programs, you know, all these scriptures you've heard a million times and I think, uh, that Proverbs 22:7 "The rich rules over the poor and the borrower is slave to the lender" just flat out spells that out, right? That it is absolutely bondage. That you are absolutely a slave to the person that you borrowed that money from that before you consider yourself, you have to consider them, right. That you can't decide to do something on your own because you have a master and we don't like to think about debt in those terms, but that's how Bible puts it, you know, and I'll drive through the drive through at starbucks and put $3 on a visa card.
[14:36] I'm really tying myself to a bank over a cup of coffee. That is not what God has for me. Uh, so if we understand what the Bible says about debt and we see all these warnings all throughout Proverbs, Hebrews 13:5, you know the Bible, God is telling us, hey, this debt thing, you don't want to be a person out there just borrowing and promising the pay. You want to, you want to be the other side of that coin. You know, I like the stuff I like, so I'm down that road now and it's so easy for me to get overextended. It's so easy for me to take something that's virtually harmless and hinder myself with it in a way where it really hurts me. And I think debt works that way for a lot of people. I think
[15:30] In America, and we talked about this a little bit too earlier, that it's real easy. I mean we are bombarded with credit card commercials. Kids the second they sign up for college or even when they graduate college, they are bombarded with credit card applications. They get, em constantly in the mail. They even teach that it's, you know, you need to have some credit. So we are bombarded with credit, credit, credit, credit, debt, debt, debt, all kinds of car commercials, big houses and we have to be very mindful of that. We have to practice some self control and going, nope, that is, that is not good for me. That's not a good idea. I know for me personally, I have to pull back and say, yeah, nope.
[16:12] Yeah, I wouldn't be able to tell Sam about this. I can't do it. The debt, that is such a crazy thing, but, and it's so funny. I remember when we took our oldest daughter to college, I was shocked at how many credit card kiosks there were like everybody, and this is freshman move in day. This is our first experience on a college campus. On the actual move in day, but other than parents moving people in and the only people there were people giving away t-shirts and hats, vouchers, Chipolte, Red Bull. Everybody was given away something if the students signed up for credit card for a credit card, that was like amazing to me. I was stunned by that. They were everywhere to get these 18 year olds with no jobs and no money in debt, in debt, in debt. They are on the campus.
[17:08] The campuses filled, people everywhere, right? Sign up your kids to get them in debt. Right? So I think that goes back to what I was really trying to talk about it in the beginning is what, what is our attitude about debt? You may know what the, we know what the word says about that, but what is our attitude about it? Like some people view debt as like a necessary evil. Like you just can't live in America without having some debt, right? Like I'm always going to have a car payment or a, I'm always going to have a mortgage. Like some people think just debt is a part of life. Uh, other people love debt, like debt is a way to make my life easier. You know, I don't have to make the whole payment now I can do a little something on it, do a little something later.
[17:55] It's like a convenience thing. Like I can, I can live better than I can really afford to live. I'm willing to take on some debt. Right? And then the other people that hate it, like some people can't stand to be in debt. They don't want to owe a dime ever. It makes them sick. It keeps them up at night. So we have to ask ourselves and our spouse, what is our attitude about debt? Like collectively, first, individually, but collectively what? How are we going to move forward with debt regardless of where we were? Because chances are if you're listening to this podcast in America, you've got some debt. I was, as we were preparing for this, I read something on CNBC and they say the average American has $38,000 in debt, not including their mortgage. So you got $40 grand just laying around stuff you can't even find anymore.
[18:49] You got $40 grand on that, right. Not including where you live. So we definitely have some, some debt issues. So, uh, the good and bad, that was another thing that really jumped out at me about debt. Like there's uh, some preconceived things that we have about debt did just don't line up biblically. You know, like we see like a mortgage is like good debt. Right. Which is what I thought that it's, it's, I have to have a house. I mean yeah, homeowner, I should borrow the money from my house. Right. That makes perfect sense. And then we see other things like credit cards, like that's, that's like a bad debt unless you like getting points. Like if you get free stuff, then credit card debt is smart view or like a payday loan. That's bad debt. I like, that's a bad debt. You can have a payday loan, uh, but student loans, that's good debt, but that's good debt, right?
[19:51] Cause you need that debt to, so we, we've kind of crafted this debt thing to be convenient for us in ways that scripture is just not, it says that the borrower is slave to the lender. It doesn't say the borrower is slave to the lender unless it's his mortgage. Your mortgage is your master as much as your payday loan is your master, if you're obligated to them. If you're in debt that way, the, the, the scripture applies. It's no different. So we ask ourselves, should we use death? You know, and I think that's a question that every couple has to answer. You know, I think oftentimes one person in a relationship will kind of make a decision and that, that generally doesn't go well. You and I talked about in preparing again was the whole idea of the credit report.
[20:48] Oh yeah. Really good. Where we, um, I actually, we read in a book over the summer, we've talked about the class that we facilitated Money and Marriage by Howard Dayton. And he had an idea for a couples, um, premarital to exchange credit reports. And I, when I first read that I thought, oh my goodness, that sounds ridiculous. That's so far, so out there. But then as I read the chapter further and started discussing it with the members of the class, it makes so much sense. You really want to know how much debt, you know it first, if there's debt, yes that's important. And then you really want to know how much debt you're getting ready to take on in a marriage. That is definitely something to talk about. And then with married for a married couple in state of Ohio, um, where we live there aren't, I think the, your debt is separate so your debt is separate.
[21:45] My debt is separate, but we still need to know how much debt the each, the other person is carrying. I need to know if there is a $150,000 bill out there somewhere that you have that I don't know anything about and vice versa. So I think, you know, it's very important for us to come to the table as a couple and sit down and talk about that debt and to figure out how if you make a decision as a couple to work through the debt and to get rid of it, how you're going to do that in a way that's practical.
[22:17] I agree. I agree 100% and I really land on that from the perspective of married people because as, as unfortunate as it is and it's just the truth in most marriages there, there's secret debt, there are accounts that the other spouse doesn't know about. You can't figure out why it is that you want to set aside some money to do a certain thing, but your spouse is resistant. It's because your spouse has got Capital One asking them what's in their wallet like is not because they don't want to go on a nice date. It's because they've got a credit card that you don't know about that they've got to make the payments for, you know, those are the kind of things that's the kind of bondage that debt can really have on you and it can really impact your marriage and negatively that way.
[23:12] I um, have a, a personal story that I'm just going to just share and put it all out there. You know, this past Christmas I applied for a card. I applied for a credit card and because I just felt like I work every day, every day, justification. I work every day that I applied with his card and I got it and I felt so guilty like I had to come down and I had to confess to my husband, babe, I apply for this car. I got it. And I really want to appreciate your grace because you know what? He said, okay, we'll take care of it and I thought, Oh wow, we'll just take care of it. Okay. I cannot use this card because I just really felt like that wasn't the best thing for our marriage. The last thing that I needed to do was bring in more debt and so I just want to say in front of everybody, right,
[24:05] that I really appreciate the grace
[24:07] that you gave me in that with getting that card outside of discussing it with you.
[24:12] Well thank you for sharing that with the whole world. You're welcome. We and, and, and I think a lot of that comes from us having had these conversations about that over the years. You know, uh, Erica made a joke in our first episode about not wanting to be debt free. Right? And that's just, she was just joking, right? That was working on our debt has been something that we've really worked at really hard for a while and we really do know that there's a difference between living just in slave to lenders versus the freedom that we can have if we just live responsibly. So to, to go out and to, to start that cycle up again would have only been taken a step backwards. And that's all that was really about. But when we have those little payments and as Erica mentioned, the credit card being like the primary, that's like the gateway drug to debt.
[25:11] You know, those little payments that those credit cards can make, man, they have such a huge impact on your marriage, your day to day personal finance. You know, when you've got 20 or you've got a five little payments, those five little payments end up zapping money out of your wealth. Like, uh, the things that you want to do. You want to go on a little vacation, a little getaway. Well not when you got those six little payments you have to make, or you know, $20 here, $50 there, $150 here, and you've really just diminished the amount that you could be saving. It ties into the way you give, you know, you could be much more generous in your giving if you didn't have all of those little payments. And I'm not, I'm talking about giving in all aspects, not just at your church, but you know, we have, we talk about our grown children, we have adult children, and there were things that, that I would really long, that I would really love to do for them if I were in a better position financially. Right. Living for the last 20 years with all these little payments, it's put me in a position where I couldn't do some of those things. Erica, your Christmas thing, you talked about this something this Christmas.
[26:32] I have a, um, a goal, a desire. It's really heavy on my heart is I want to be able to just go to Walmart and just pay off somebody's Christmas. Um, you know, I don't have Tyler Perry's money markers. I don't have, you know, big money like that, but that's just a dream that I really do believe that I should be able to do that one day. Um, it's not a, it's not because I want notoriety or anything like that, but it really is because it comes from a place of God has blessed me in so many ways. And what I really want to do is be able to, I want to be in a situation where we could give back as a, as a whole, as a family. Backing up a little bit about that whole thing. When I said I didn't want to be I didn't want to be debt free, I think I should explain that a little bit in the beginning of our marriage.
[27:28] Now remind you, I have to remind you that it's Sam and I, when we first got married, we were 19 we had a small child, we were in the military, we didn't have any money, and it was a struggle all the time. Can I say we didn't have any money. We didn't have it. We didn't have any money, any money, any money. Okay. And we lived in Hawaii for like two and a half years, but it was a struggle all the time. And so when we got to a place where we were, I would say financially stable, we could eat. We get, we got to a place where we were financially stable. In my head, I just wanted to live like I didn't want to constantly have to live you know, be tight on everything paycheck to paycheck. I just wanted to live. And so, you know, fast forward and Samuel decides that we want to pay off the house early. Well that's not anything that, I don't want to do that because I just want to live my life. But I am here to say that I am on board with becoming debt free. It is the responsible thing to do and I understand that it's not, uh, you know, it's not the life that God has for me. He does not want to mean to be tied to Capital One or you know, whoever else card I have in my wallet.
[28:42] That's right. No names, no names. So we know debt is, right? We kind of understand, okay. Everybody walks into their relationship with a perspective about debt. We know that God has a clear perspective on debt and more importantly, he has a ideals for us and how we ought to live our life in respect to debt. So that that lends us to the, what do we do? Part? Erica and I came up with a couple of suggestions of, of things that we could do a, and the first thing she mentioned, you had to discuss it. We got to talk about it. You know, you and your spouse have to sit down and have the conversation about your debt, not just pie in the sky, what we want to do down the road, but what do we owe today? Like, no, not just what do you owe on your favorite card?
[29:38] What do you owe in total? Right? What's the payoff on the Mercedes today? Ooh, what is the, what's the balance due on the mortgage? How much of this house belongs to me? How much of it belongs to them? We need to lay out all of those things. Get them out in the open. The second thing is we need to develop a plan to get out of debt, right? You know, if, if you've decided that, hey, this isn't the way God wants me to live, hey, I can do something about this now, then the two of you together need to come up with a plan to get out of debt. All those plans are, or we can often have a plan that won't work. We've heard about plans that don't work Er. do you?
[30:26] The only thing that I, um, you know, as far as I would actually suggest, one of the favorite, my favorite get out of debt plans is the snowball by Dave Ramsey and his, I think it's in his Total Money Makeover, but that really, I do know of couples who have lived that snowball effect where they have paid off the smallest card first and then the second smallest and so on and so on. And they landed in a place where they were debt free in about, you know, 24 to 36 months, two to three years. And it was a huge financial mountain that they had to climb, and that's really a good thing. I know of a, you know, a couple who's wife is no longer working and you know, they took those necessary steps to get debt free and so now they're able to live a couple of years on just one income. So I do know that it definitely
[31:25] works. We've had, uh, people have talked about that, Dave Ramsey, since we're talking about that, uh, he had, his slogan is live like no one else. Right? So you can live like no one else. Right. And you know, to go down to just eating beans and having one light on that might work for you. Uh, it won't work for everybody. So don't feel like you have to, it's all or nothing. It's either I'm going to just live in poverty until I'm debt free or I'm just going to start spending because there's nothing I can do about it. Those aren't your options. If you can't do something that's really few frugal, really strenuous, then you and your spouse together sit down and come up with something that works for you. Make the cuts where you can make cuts and you may not be able to do it in 24 months, maybe it's going to take you 48 months.
[32:18] You know, maybe your tolerance for this thing because of all of the things that have happened to you up to this point won't allow you to scale it back to beans and rice. If Erica were to suggest to me beans and rice, I don't think that we would have much of a conversation because I'm not willing to do beans and rice, but I do, I do plan to go at it aggressively, but beans and rice I'm not willing to do. And that's okay. Every couple is different. Right? And the, your experiences, the things that have brought you to where you are today, your income, the amount of debt you owe, all of those things factor in and you should consider each of them when you're determining what kind of plan. And uh, lastly about to plan in is that there needs to be buying from both parties, right? If one of you wants to be debt free and the other one don't, doesn't, guess what? You won't be debt free or you won't be married because you're going to fight or you're not going to pay off the debt.
[33:21] One of the things too that I want to add as far as, um, you know, setting up a lifestyle so that you're debt free. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to get rid of cable. It means that maybe a lot of people probably don't have cable anyway now, but it doesn't mean that you have to get rid of it. You can scale back and take that, you know, extra 10 or $15 and put it on a credit card or put it on a car payment or you, you know, you may not have to go out and have a $100 steak every week for date night, maybe just twice a month. You know, just take that money and put it someplace else. That's the scale back a, it doesn't necessarily mean all the way down to bare bones.
[34:05] So understanding that we come to the table with debt understanding that we come to the table with attitudes about debt and understanding that we don't have to remain that way are things that kind of call us to action. Like, okay, we get that. We understand. We're going to talk about it. We understand we're going to develop a plan. We know we're going to put this into action. What we are going to ask you to do between the time you hear this episode and maybe the time you hear our next episode is to kind of set aside a day for you and your spouse to actually do this thing. Set aside a day in a time where the two of you are going to sit down and have the debt talk, you know, to really get it out there in the open to really talk about, you know, your goals as far as debt is concerned.
[34:53] That's a good idea to uh, to really talk about how much debt you really have to really see those numbers. Uh, this may even require pulling some credit reports. Nothing wrong with that, right. But to really to to take some action. We also want to ask that, uh, you guys would, uh, continue to pray for our podcast. We had some challenges between episode one and episode two. We did, but prayerfully, we made it through, we did so episode two, right on schedule, right on schedule. But we asked again that you guys continue to pray for us. Uh, this is a new thing for us and we're excited. We're having a lot of fun. We are, but we're experiencing some challenges. We are so, uh, continue to pray for us and lastly we really want to ask this week that you would hit us up that voicemail tab. We really want to get some feedback.
[35:43] Really want to hear what you think about the podcast. If they're, uh, show ideas. If Sam talks too much or whatever it is, hit that voicemail tab. You go to our website, seasons ministries.org/podcast wherever you scroll on the page, the tab stays right there on the right hand side. You just click the voicemail tab and you leave us a message. We'll listen to them and maybe we'll even have some comments that are appropriate for the show. Absolutely. All right. We want you to share the podcast too with family members and friends. We want to definitely make sure you know, we're asking that you guys get the word out and share. That's right. Check us out on Facebook. Check it out on Instagram, Twitter. Uh, we're all over. All of those places and every place that you listened to your podcast can't wait to talk to you again. In our next episode where we'll continue our conversation about money. God bless. God bless.