how many of you grew up like i did not rich we weren't poor we just weren't rich i remember about 12 years old i wanted to ride my bicycle about a mile down the road to the local quicksack and i was going to go down there and get me an ic y'all got icees here and i came and asked my dad i said dad i need some money to go to the quicksack and my dad said how old are you i said well i'm your son i'm 12. and he said you're 12 years old you
don't need money you need a job you all know the kind of dad i'm talking about some of you had one like that my dad didn't think that work was a management theory it was something you did it was an activity and so he said you need to get some money where are you going to get some money and i said well some of my buddies are cutting grass i guess i could cut grass so he took me true story down on nolansville road i grew up in antioch tennessee just outside of nashville took me
down the main drag there in nashville tennessee took me to a print shop and printed up 500 business cards said dave's longs i said dad this is a little overkill i just wanted an ic came home and he said you're going to knock on the closest 50 doors here in the neighborhood and you ask those people with enthusiasm if you can have the opportunity to provide their lawn care needs don't you knock on the door and say you don't want me to cut your grass do you so he taught me marketing we had junior achievement
junior best be achieving something so i did i went and knocked on the closest 50 doors and it worked i got 27 yards to cut i was 12 years old this is child abuse i mean 19 of them were right in a row i just went down the street like this made me keep a profit and loss statement on my business my income minus his lawn mowers i tore up equals net profit yeah i found out the difference in gross and net pretty quick it's good to work work is a good thing proud of my
dad for teaching that mean little bald-headed kid that stuff i graduated from high school 18 years old three weeks later passed my real estate license started selling real estate took off to college and went through college in four years which is what you do if you're paying for it um you don't hang out you know it's like every time i stay here longer it costs more i figured this out you know and so i was working my tail off getting all the way through college and i met my beautiful wife sharon and we got married
and we graduated we started off our lives broke how many of y'all remember when you started broke right oh man we ain't got money honey but we got love it's a good thing too because we ain't got no money i mean it was it was bad we were eating off a card table she was driving a 1902 pinto came out of college and i went through a couple jobs i started buying and selling real estate i grew up in the real estate business mom and dad were in real estate business and i was good at
it and starting from nothing by the time i was 26 years old i had about four million dollars worth of real estate a little over a million dollar net worth and my best year ever in that business i made 250 000 cash taxable income one year that's 20 000 a month i don't know where you grew up neighborhood i grew up in that's known as rich i was having so much fun and here's what's weird i do everything backwards y'all 26 years old our bank that we owed a million 200 000 to got sold to
another bank i know that never happens in your town and they look down they said a kid 26 years old owes us over a million dollars let's limit this relationship which is banker talk for ruin his life and they called our notes i had six months to come up with over a million dollars and the second largest lender another bank 800 000 to them heard i was in trouble because i was in trouble and it gets out in the town doesn't it they're not supposed to talk about it but they do and they called another
eight hundred thousand said two million dollars due it's all tied up in real estate and we spent the next two and a half years of our life losing everything we owned we were foreclosed on we were sued we were sued so many times the guy with the sheriff's department that brings the little lawsuit papers we're like on a first name basis with him sharon's making him cookies and finally with a brand new baby and a toddler we hit bottom and we were bankrupt i didn't know what to do i was 28 years old my marriage
is hanging on by a thread pain is not my preferred method of learning but it is a thorough teacher and finally we were bankrupt brand new baby i remember standing in the shower with it as hot as i could stand it in my face and just stand there and cry because i was so scared and there was nobody to talk to because i was so ashamed to tell anybody what i had done because everybody else has got their act together right at least that's what we think until you find out what's really going on behind
closed doors now i've got a finance degree okay i've got letters and licenses after my name you know and i still did stupid with zeros on the end and so i found out the bible has financial principles in it and i thought that's pretty cool if i'm going to be like a jesus guy i ought to know what jesus says i better read this stuff and i started reading in it and i went oh i didn't do that right oh that left a mark ow oh yeah i did that one right oh my finance teacher
actually agrees with that one nobody agrees with that one have you ever done that because i started figuring out this is a love letter to me from my father who's crazy about me and once i figured that out it's my marriage manual it's how we're married and so i found all those places where she has to do what i say and then she found those places that i don't that she doesn't and we started handling our money this way and i got to tell y'all something it worked it turns out this is the truth and
to the extent this doesn't line up with your feelings get over yourself you're wrong to the extent your broke friend doesn't like your biblical financial principle well if broke people are making fun of your financial plan you're on track it's like fat people making fun of your diet okay think about this unbelievable so i started finding these things and there's a lot there's like 2500 scriptures that deal with money and possessions our proper view of them the proper spiritual indication and the tactical actual thing you do with money that god says was amazing and it
gave a guy who was in a puddle hope because i didn't have any i mean i was on one of these i do all these uh tv shows on fox and cnn good morning america and cbs and all these people and they're real sweet people and all that and one of those anchors i was on there doing a thing with one of my books one time and they said okay this is amazing you started with nothing you became a millionaire you lost everything and now you're a multi-millionaire how did you bounce back i said dude
when you fall that far you really don't bounce it's more of a splat and so i was splatted man and we took these principles and everything i could learn about them and understand them from an academic viewpoint a spiritual viewpoint historical viewpoint a socio-economic viewpoint a psychological viewpoint an emotional viewpoint a relational viewpoint and i started to really understand how money works not what your broke brother-in-law's theory is because everybody's got an opinion in america today thank you internet everybody's important now everybody's opinion matters now sorry but it doesn't so we started applying these principles
to our lives and it changed our lives and you know what happens when your life gets changed people ask you a question i have a good friend of mine i was with him last night in the last year he has lost 56 pounds everyone sitting around the table talking to him a bunch of guys sitting out there you know what we ask him we ask him how did you do that when you see someone's life gets changed you always say their marriage gets saved their children get turned around their finances get turned around their career
goes on a trajectory that's unexplainable and you always say how did you do that when people started asking me i started telling them if you've made mistakes with money you know what that makes you over 12 every one of you have probably this week and so have i and i teach this for a living and everyone listens to me but i make fewer mistakes now than i used to make because i found god's word and i applied these devastatingly simple but profound concepts to my life into my money now there's a lot of stuff we
could talk about but we don't have time but i can boil it down to five things and the devil hates it when you take notes so get your pen five things five things if you do these five things that the bible says with money while earning an income you do them over and over and over and all that they imply over a period of 15 to 20 years you will prosper it may happen faster it may happen slower but you will prosper with the possible exception of a devastating calamity hitting your life that we can't
control we can't control tsunamis in cancer but those kinds of things aside if you apply these five things the cause and effect the sowing and the reaping always happens 100 of the time and i will go ahead and tell you these are tough they're hard they're easy to understand they're hard to do and if you're really smart you're going to act like you don't need them smart people have the most trouble with this that's why i was good at it first one you have to have a budget you have to write it down on paper
on purpose before the month begins every dollar has a mission every dollar has a name not sorta kinda in my head not it's on my iphone app write it down on paper on purpose before the month begins every dollar has a name and if you're married you agree on that with your spouse jesus said don't build a tower without first counting the cost unless you get halfway up and you're unable to finish and all who see you begin to mock you and say this man began to build and was unable to finish listen if you're
not going to drive it right don't put a fish on the back of it there's a cause and effect thing going on here write it down if you manage money for a company called you incorporated and you manage money for you incorporated the way you manage money for you now would you fire you don't answer that my friend zig ziglar used to say if you aim at nothing you'll hit it every time john maxwell says a budget is people telling their money what to do instead of wondering where it went we're gonna build a four
million dollar house you would have a blueprint every detail mapped out where the plugs are gonna go where the heat and air is going to go how the roof structure is going to be everything is laid out before you break ground you don't roll up for a 4 million house on the hood of an old boy's truck and go put it over there and kind of make it like this you'll build a pretzel don't do that you have a blueprint you have a plan around a company with hundreds and hundreds of team members multiple profit
centers within the company every one of those folks has a plan for the revenue they're going to produce in this month this quarter and this year and the expenses they're going to spend to do that in this month this quarter and this year thereby we do annual projections it's really not rocket science it's sixth grade math what are you going to do with your money don't get to the end of the month and go where to go because you end up being a rat in a wheel and you work your whole life run run run
run run run run run run and you get to the end of your life and there's nothing and you earned four to ten million dollars in your working lifetime and you have nothing because you didn't write it down it's a serious principle the second one is you got to get out of debt and stay out of debt now everybody knows dave ramsey is going to say that the borrower is slave to the lender when you don't have any payments you know what you got money that was hard i need nothing but i want a lot
of stuff there's nothing wrong with getting you some nice stuff but the problem is when your stuff gets you when you've got a student loan that's been around so long you think it's a pet when master card is your master when you have discovered bondage or american distress well you can't live without that that's what my finance professor said too and he was broke what's wrong with that picture a broke finance professor broke finance professors like a shop teacher with missing fingers have kind of a dr phil moment with some of these people how's that
working for you because all these people are running around these quote-unquote experts and all of them that taught me i was in the real estate business we used opm other people's money we were taught leveraging all the sophisticated views of leverage and all this stuff and i can unpack it for you and i can pencil with you i'm a math nerd i it's what i do but at the end of the day there's nowhere in scripture god used debt to bless his people it's not in there one time as a matter of fact there's not
even one positive thing said about it it's not a salvation issue it's not a sin it's not any of those things biblically speaking it's just stupid the third one first one is you got to do a budget second one is you got to get out of debt because we don't have any payments you got money the third one is quality relationships now this is kind of weird but think about it marriage is grand divorce is 50 grand dysfunction in the family costs you money straight up crazy parents drunk brothers if you let them come into
your boundaries their dysfunction will cause you to be broke because you join in the dysfunction and we all got it anybody doesn't have crazy in their family just hadn't been awake lately everybody's got crazy somewhere in the family some of it's behind the closet door some of it's behind over the hill some of it's around the corner at the still you don't know where it is but crazy is in your family and i'm no exception i'm from hills east tennessee when we do crazy we do it big so dysfunction and your personal dysfunction we sadly
get to work with the effects of all the dysfunction because we do financial counseling and coaching and so we've worked for 25 years now with addicts and i just got to tell you that if you're addicted to something whatever it is gambling pornography those are the two big ones right now huge just unbelievably huge and you know certainly the old standbys drugs and alcohol and that kind of stuff but people that are addicted 100 of them are eventually broke and people who stay with them are all 100 eventually broke that's an extreme example of quality
relationships but tom stanley who wrote the book millionaire next door did another book called the millionaire mind and in the millionaire mind he studied deca millionaires people with 10 million or more making 750 000 a year or more and he found 39 correlating characteristics of those people relationships had something to do with the top five the length of their marriage the quality of their marriage their integrity those kinds of things all having to do with behaviors having to do with character having do their ability play well with others because guess who gets ahead in this
world nice people who are generous and love other people that's who you promote if they work for you that's who are glad when they get promoted if they work beside you that's who we want to win well the jerks i always win you watch too much tv and out here in the real world the jerks get punished because we don't do business with them guy comes to my house as a jerk and cusses my wife fixing my heat and there he doesn't get to fix my heat and there anymore hello isn't this simple they throw
your food on the table and go eat it i'm not going to that restaurant again this is not service this is abuse this person's not getting promoted is this how life works say yes so the bible says evil company corrupts good habits your household income your personal income over a period of time not instantaneously but over a period of time will be within 10 to 15 percent of the average income of your 10 closest friends you don't let your kids hang out with juvenile delinquents why because they will become juvenile delinquents little johnny down the
street smoking weed you don't get to run with little johnny you will be a weed head too right is this what we parents do that parent we don't do missionary dating in our house right you come up to pick up one of my girls when they were dating in front of our house and you honk your horn you better be delivering a pizza quality relationships changes everything if you don't let your kids run around with juvenile delinquents because they might become one who are you running with you're gonna become who you hang around with your
mouth your mind i can tell you the movies you've seen in the books you've read of have been influenced by the people you run with and those affect your income and those affect the outcome of your personal financial statement this is stewardship of your life you're stewarding your life number four save money invest money save and invest the bible says in the house of the wise are stores of choice food and oil but a foolish man devours all he has wise people save money if you spend everything you make you're a fool i have been
a fool according to that biblically speaking i have been a fool because at times in my life i spent everything i made there were times i tried to out earn my stupidity because i'm pretty good at making money i just wasn't always good at keeping it wise people save money you know you have to have a plan and we teach people to save for three basic things the first thing you say for is for a rainy day grandma said it right it's gonna rain bear get ready money magazine says 78 of you are going to
have a major negative financial event in any given 10-year period of time you're gonna have a job layoff you're gonna have a car wreck something's gonna happen and you're gonna need some money one i don't understand is unexpected pregnancy what but um something's gonna happen in it you need some money the second thing you say for you to save up and pay cash for things so when you save up and pay cash for them guess what that means you had a plan that means you'd save money that means you had a budget and that means
you don't have any debt because you just pay for it and this interesting thing happens when you pay for it you own it it's over transaction's over otherwise we just pedal and pedal and pedal and pedal and pedal how many of you are like me you bought something and by the time you finished paying the payments on you hated it because you just just hate this thing payment payment payment sick of it save up and pay cash weird dave i know normal's broke i won't be normal weird is my goal last thing you save is
you save for long-term investing so you can retire with dignity and send your kids to college do you know 100 a month invested in a roth ira from age 30 to age 70 and a decent growth stock mutual fund averaging 12 percent 100 a month pizza and cable money latte breath one hundred dollars per month is one million one hundred and seventy six thousand dollars from age thirty to age seventy you retire millionaire it's no excuse to retire bro we just spend it all we don't have a plan we don't save we don't think about
who we're hanging around with we don't play these things in together so the first one is you gotta have a written plan second one is you gotta get out of debt so all your money is not going to other people the third one is you gotta deal with quality relationships and the fourth one is you've got to save and invest and the last one's my favorite we're going to talk about these at length people who win with money always are givers 100 of them are givers always you will not win with money until you learn
how to give 100 and here's why when you give you become a generous person not just financially generous or mathematically generous but your spirit changes you're the person who opens doors you're the person who carries groceries out of somebody's car you're the generous person and generous people fall back into number three quality relationships you see these things all start to blend together and you get this beautiful kaleidoscope and it transforms your life now these are easy principles to understand they're hard principles to implement but when you do barring a calamity 100 of the time it
works
