We are not telling you what to do or where to put your money; that’s your choice. But are you really choosing the path you are following, or are you being led astray?
We all work from conflicted desires.

• Family.
• Friends.
• Fun.
• Work.
• Maybe even still, school.

This is more than knowing where your money is going. What we are wanting to talk about is knowing why your money is going where it is going.

They are a curse and a blessing.
Well, in most cases rarely a blessing.

Banks love it when you just pay the minimum amount.

If you have $5,000 deposited with your bank getting 1.75% a year interest, you will receive $87.50 a year.
If you have a $5,000 credit card debt with your bank at 22.75% a year, they will charge you $94.71 a month!

This is why you will only ever make pennies with your money in a bank, but a bank makes out like a bandit on you.

Of all the things that need to be gotten straight when it comes to money and life, credit card debt is the biggest dragon to slay.

If you have a credit card, a dragon is breathing down your neck.

Stop.

Do not read any further.

We need to slay this dragon.

I love that I can turn my credit card off.

I leave my credit card turned off ALL the time.

Now those pesky auto renewals for services I have forgotten about or don’t want again. They CANNOT be charged to me.

This is a big blow against the dragon.

The piece of pie I have never seems to be enough.

My appetite seems to grow with the more pie there is on the table.

And afterward, I feel like an unwelcome guest at the table did most of the eating, not my family.

Where did it all go?

I started living from paying cheques to paying cheques.

As hard as it gets, and as much as I want to do things differently, the “I deserve this”, demon chats away on my shoulder.

I heard a funny joke one time.

A preacher’s wife comes home with a new dress, and the preacher finds the price tag in the rubbish.

“This dress cost $300 dollars; what were you thinking?” The preacher asks.

“The devil made me do it,” the preacher’s wife replies.

“Didn’t you remember my sermon from the other week, that when the devil temps you, you say to him, ‘Get behind me satan.'”

“I did,” the preacher’s wife said, “and the devil said, “My, this looks very nice on you from back here as well.'”

We will always find a good reason to have the things that our eye has become attracted to.

But I don’t think this is boring.

I see debt as being like the boss at the end of a level in a video game—something to our smart, out-fighting.

While people are not my enemies, I see people in many places being used to try and defeat me, get my money, and rip me off, even while they do not know they are doing it.

I have had car salesmen act like this.

I have letters in the mail offering me loans for my business, up to $100,000. You have got to be kidding me.

It does not matter if it is an impulse purchase at the grocery shop or the truck lift kit.

You have to ask what has been programming me to think “getting that” is a good idea.

So here is the dirty word.

Budget.

Before you can budget, you have to know where the money has already been going.

Here is another dirty word.

Balance

Balance your chequebook.

I do think there are forces out there trying to get us too comfortable with credit and debit cards so they can then take away our cash. But I am going to use a debit card to my advantage.

All my money goes into my bank account.

I only carry $50.00 cash for emergencies.

All my spending is done from my debit card.

I put my spending into a spreadsheet so I know what I have been spending on.

This is work, and it can be very hard to see $50, $150 a week going out on coffee and lunch.

When I find a trip to the movies is getting close to $200, it gives me pause.

A final dirty word.

Plan

500 years ago, we would have been serfs scratching out a living on land owned by a Nobel man. We would have a portion of his land we could grow our food on, but we were required to work to bring in his harvest before our own; we were also forced to pay a tax on the food we grew on the land we had, but he owned, forced to pay a tax at the mill to grind our wheat to flour, and forced to send our sons off to war when he had a dispute with a neighboring Nobleman.

Then, along came the Gutenberg printing press in 1440. Books went from being in their hundreds to in their millions, maybe still in the hands of noblemen, but not for long.

Information begets knowledge, knowledge begets understanding, and understanding creates generational wisdom.

Then came the bible in English, for which Tyndale was tied to a stake, strangled with a rope, and torched. (Outside a castle near Brussels on Oct. 6, 1536.)

The Noblemen knew what was happening but could not stop it; the information revolution had begun.

The Bible, available to the common man, sparked a learning revolution, a literacy revolution, and an individual sovereignty revolution. The Bible broke the back of a church corrupted. Sins went from being forgiven with coins to an outflowing of grace, with scripture alone, the cross alone, Jesus alone.

Salvation is a cooperative experience. It is also an individual experience. 

The printing press and the Bible in English broke open the power of the salvation of the individual, just like in Acts. 

The world became literate. The individual became literate. We started to read the bible ourselves, and we were found by God, transformed by God, and became followers of the teachings of His Son, Jesus, the Christ, and so we were transformed.

If you know what this means, I hope you keep reading.

I love watching YouTube videos and listening to podcasts, but I also read and I also write.

I want to turn the information I have into knowledge. 

I want to turn the good knowledge into understanding.

And the good understanding into generational wisdom, something that will be useful to you.

I want to help you go from being a serf scratching out an existence to becoming an owner of fields, and then you help others become owners of their fields.

It is sad to think that our literate capacity did not last long, for today, we have become illiterate literate people.

What is hard about CrossFit is when you have never stretched your body.

When you have never had sore muscles from extended use, never had the stitch while running 4 km, never felt your muscles shake as you find their limit, and then find a new limit tomorrow.

All these things are really hard, and your brain, body, and emotions work against you as you push the boundaries.
But the reward is unbelievable as you break barriers, set new personal bests, and give your body an endorphin pat on the back.

Do this more, and the simple things will become easier: climbing stairs and carrying boxes. And your body feels good, looks good.

Are you a kinetic learner? Or visual, audio, or more traditional read-write?

Here is a very important thing I want you to consider: Have you ever said to yourself, “I’m dumb?” Or, worse, has a teacher ever said that to you?

Teachers, by definition, are teachers because they respond to the primary method of teaching that schools have always used: read and write. Read-write is only one of the four VARK learning styles: Visual, Audio, Read-write, and Kinetic. Yet read-write is the most prominent method used in schools as it requires the least amount of resources, it can be pushed at the most amount of students at the same time, and it provides an easy feedback loop (paperwork) and proof of success or failure (the written word). It can be scored and tabulated easily for review and evaluation.

Read-write is its own force feedback loop that perpetuates its strengths and weaknesses.

People who succeed in a read-write educational system will become teachers and perpetuate the read-write educational system (over all other systems). People who fail don’t become teachers, so change never happens. People who learn differently are absent as teachers, which creates an echo chamber of Read-write teachers confident that they are right. The proof of the success of new teachers gives a false confidence that just as they succeeded, anyone who tries can.

We might think of them as being a product we download and put on our phones.

No, we are the product, and they got us to upload our lives to their apps.

No, they are not free.

We pay for these apps with our eyes, which are filled with ads.

With ears, which get filled with curated content aimed at manipulating us to buy and accept ideas that we don’t even know we are being programmed to follow.

We pay for these apps with our privacy, our friends’ privacy, our time, our understanding, our individuality, and even our community’s consciousness as we all change.

Our knowledge is altered, our sense of right and wrong gets reprogrammed, we get subverted by subtle suggestions as to who is a good person and who is a bad person.

they know who you associate with, when, where, how often, even whay you do together. They know what coffee shop you are at, they know what you had, they can even deduce if you treated the other person to coffee or they treated you. Now of course they often get it wrong. They might match the wrong people together. They might falsely assume that two people know each othe that do not. You have been at the same coffee shop as them, twice. You have been to the same movie, maybe even the same church service. But you do not know each other and now Google has falsely created a connection that doesn’t exist.
But they all do know enough things that are true to make it worth while to track you as deeply as they can.
If you know you are the product, you can start to realise that you are being programmed to do things the algorithms wants, to buy according to the algorithms, agree with ideas and opinions that the algorithms wants for you. You will be feed social, political and even religious ideas I accordance to presets in dozens of different algorithms.
An algorithm is merely a flowchart of if this -> do that. It is an array of if statements that are even sometimes in contradiction to each other. Two algorithms can even end up fighting each other, they often give false information, as all of this, AGIs, AIs, algorithms are only dealers in information, and the predictive manipulation of information. The is no knowledge or understanding in an algorithm or AI. They are just fast and trhough and so apper to have knowledge when they don’t, it really is a case of don’t look behind the curtain. The wizard of Oz does not want to be found out, the king does not want you to say his fine clothes are his nakedness

When my kids were young, I asked them to show me an ad on TV that was not after their money.
They said, “The McDonalds happy meal with a toy gift.” Then they saw the need to buy the meal to get the gift, and then they saw there was no gift.
They said, “World Vision sponsor a child”. Yes, that is a worthy thing, and we even did it, but it was still an ad wanting our money.
Start up your financial radar.

Go over your bank statements and see where you are spending your money.
Tabulate it, as painful as it is, and know where you are spending your money.

Don’t get into credit card debt.

If you are in credit card debt, get out of it. (Ask me for help if you want.)

Impulse buying is physiological warfare by your technocrat overlords designed to keep you poor.

Buy now – pay later is another technocrat overlord trap.
Don’t go to the grocery store hungry.

HAVE A LIST; stick to the list.
Never let your kids put snacks in the shopping cart.
Limit screen time for yourself and your children.
Learn how the world works so the world can not work you over.

It is too easy to say we are fueled by prayer without ever doing it or making our prayers insipid.

It is too easy to say we are fueled by prayer without ever doing it or making our prayers insipid.