by Kate
Someone finally articulated an idea I've been struggling to figure out on this blog for years!!!
In The Principle of Maximums: Living With Enough to Give Away More, accounting professor Roger Stichter lays out a fascinating and incredibly valuable perspective on a Christian approach to making and giving away money.
Stichter's main thesis is that as Christians, we should set a limit on what we will spend in every area of our life so that we can give away the excess. We should set a maximum on how much we will ever spend on a car, a house, entertainment, travel, and everything else. Essentially, we should plan for what we won't buy. We decide ahead of time what kind of car we will always drive (either a dollar amount or luxury level). We decide how much we will spend on housing each month and then never buy a house that is bigger or more expensive than our plan.
Then whatever money is left over from not purchasing the more expensive option - we give away. Because as Christians we are called to be generous, to tithe, and to use our resources to further God's kingdom.
Stichter writes: "Living your financial life by setting maximums is about having a vision for how much is enough and living that vision out. It is about knowing what we need and not being taken in by greed, both with take discipline. Just to be clear, maximums is not minimalism. Minimalists live with the fewest number of things possible and seem to take pride in how little they have. While this certainly can free up resources to increase generosity, generosity isn't always the goal of minimalism. But it is for maximums. In fact, the very goal of living a life of maximums is always to free up resources in order to be more generous."
This is such a straightforward idea, but it's radically challenging when applied to everyday life. There were two areas in which I felt particularly convicted when reading this book:
We are not living a life focused on generosity. Generosity is a top value for us, but this book showed me oh-so-clearly that we have not in any way put our money where our mouth is about this, and it's embarrassing. I neither donate as much as I believe I should, nor do I try to structure my daily and weekly life to allow more moments of generosity (of time or resources). I think Stichter has a strong argument that the very goal of a Christian life is generosity, and this idea feels more shocking to me than I'd like to admit. We need to do a lot of thinking about this.
We might be saving too much for retirement. As we've talked about before - we are quite keen on early retirement. We're not obsessive about it (and make plenty of plans to maximize our current contentment as well), but this large financial goal is the impetus for many of our cost-saving endeavors, our interest in investing as much as we can, and the notion that money now is worth more than money later. For many years, we've had the vague idea that we want to save up as much money as we can so we can retire in our 40s in order to spend our time more directly on what we value and where we hear God asking us to give. However, Stichter argues that you should set a maximum on retirement savings in order to give away more money now. Everyone will have a different amount they want to save for retirement that takes into account how much to save for your children's future, how much you think you'll need to live on, and how long you may live past retirement. But Stichter and his wife have set up a retirement plan that assumes they will have little money when they die (they decided to help their children by providing for education and opportunities rather than through a lump inheritance at the end of their lives). I have to admit that this shook me out of my complacency and inspired me to re-think everything. I think early retirement may still be a great choice for us, but Stichter convinced me to examine my motivations more carefully.
I highly recommend this book. Stichter does a great job of providing a brief overview of money in relation to faith, God, and the Bible and offers understandable advice about re-thinking our approach to finances and living a life of generosity. I also really appreciated Stichter's straightforward manner and writing style. He doesn't romanticize giving or generosity (which I think is annoyingly common in today's Christian culture), but talks about tithing, giving, and setting maximums as really the very least we should be doing as Christians. And I think he's right. God asks us to live generously, and that requires interrogating our own needs and wants and questioning what the secular world tells us we should and should not be doing with our money. Stichter helps get to the heart of the matter and I'll definitely be thinking about these ideas for months to come.
The power of the small amount.