Making peace with high spending

It’s been a quiet few weeks for me. Following knee surgery I’ve had some time in bed, some time off work, and lots of working from home. Now, however, I’m returning to the world of active people, and going into the office more and more often. This has been great in many ways, I was pretty bored of being a hermit, and it’s hard to work properly at home. Unfortunately the downside of returning to the office is...taxis! I am ploughing rather a large amount of money into taking taxis between train stations each day. I was stressed about this for a good few days. Many people feel guilt over large expenses and sometimes we assume that spending less is always better.




This is a bit different though. It’s a completely necessary expense for me (I’m definitely not ready for several thousand people on the tube yet). I have to go to work, and it would be very foolish to risk falling and injuring my still-slightly-broken bone for the sake of some money. It’s really a form of healthcare cost, and certainly not frivolous. So why was it bothering me so much?

Although I knew I had to take taxis, I hadn’t taken the time to estimate the total cost and mentally accept it. It wasn’t sitting comfortably in my ‘plan’ (it would be a bit optimistic calling it a budget yet). In addition, I kept being faced with the expense two or three times a day, so it was difficult to get away from the uneasy sense that it was out of control.

I did some sums, and given the money I save on a tube fare, and the saved commuting costs from when I was working from home, I will be much less out of pocket than I had feared. I also have huge respect for the cab drivers, most of whom I chat to and are skilled drivers who have worked many years, and are suffering financially in the recession. So I know that I can bear the cost, and actually I can enjoy the power of being a part of the economy, able to influence the industry of others in a positive way. Oh, and I enjoy it much more than the tube because London is beautiful, and cab drivers all have advice on recovering from surgery!

I think it has taught me that thinking through a financial decision carefully will make me take heed of money, but then stop worrying about it because the decision has been made! It was also interesting how painful handing over cash was, when I normally use cards as much as possible (no manual entry into my software then). I’m taking out about four times as much cash as I normally would in a week, and seeing it all disappear reminds me how unreal plastic is, and how you lose the sense of what you’ve spent!

Anyway, Happy Diamond Jubilee to the Queen, and to all the cab drivers in London, thank you for being so great at driving my limping self around, and I hope you’re not working on Sunday when they close half the city up!

Image credits [1]

Decorating when you are renting

Recently I have been thinking a lot about decorating. A spell on crutches means I have been unable to take action or make anything really happen, and have lived a little too much inside my own head. This inevitably leads to both dreaming and plotting, and I’ve been thinking about what decorating I’ll do when I can walk again.

God is the great creator; He made the world, and since we are made uniquely in his image, it is not surprising that we want to make the spaces around us more beautiful. Interior design is a huge subject; complicated, subjective, potentially expensive. It can be something that we put off, usually because of the expense, and because we think we will get it wrong.

In the past year, I left home and rented ‘properly’ for the first time (i.e. not a student room). I am lucky to be renting a room in a lovely family home, but much of the owners’ furniture has gone with them, and the result is a little spartan. So, here is my action plan.

1. Dream big!

First, you need to work out your personal style. That way you can ensure you only invest in things that you will be happy to keep with you when you have to move. It is tempting to look at your space and try to fix the problem areas, but if you are driven by your current home then when you leave there is no guarantee that anything will be useful in making that home beautiful too.

Instead, start from a blank canvas. I have been browsing some interior design blogs to get some ideas. My favourite interiors are usually quite feminine, with lots of white and grey, classic furniture, the odd splash of colour, and lots of glass and gold or silver for a light feel. I love the glamourous feel that a few special pieces can give an otherwise quite simple room.

2. Work out your restrictions

Unfortunately, that lovely home is probably not going to tumble straight out of the magazine into your rented corner of the world. What are the limitations you face?

Some properties are furnished or partially furnished, which will significantly restrict the style. Although my home is furnished, there is a bit of space in an attic room, so if I buy one or two items of furniture I will be able to move surplus items up there. Paint colour can be another restriction, but if you ask then most landlords will be okay with you painting a property if you return it to a neutral colour before you leave. Luckily my dream style can work with the neutral paint colours I’ve already got.

Obviously there is also a budget to consider! I really have two budgets; one for items which I will love and keep for a long time, and a second for temporary fixes. On the first category I’d happily spend a few hundred pounds if I find good quality items which are flexible enough to fit into my next home as well. That budget means that things like the green sofas and almost all furniture will stay the same, but cushions and decorative items I can spend money on. Anything temporary, like shelves which I can’t take with me, has to be really cheap, unless the item is from a charity shop, in which case it’s a bit of giving and I don’t mind so much.

There are also practical issues - I have a cat and don’t want to invest in dream bedding since he will probably love it too, and then it will have holes in it (oh wait, that already happened, and there are holes in it, thanks for that cat). I’d like to get a rug for the living room, but given the dog and the fact we eat in there, it will have to be practically disposable!

3. Pick the key elements

Almost all of my inspiration pictures have glass vases, mirrored or glass lamps, and artwork with lots of white and pastel colours. I can therefore invest in them now, knowing they will still fit in to other places I end up living. Top of my list are therefore a better bedside lamp (since I know the kind I really like), and decorative items in my favourite style to fill some of the bare shelves in the living room.

Although a rug in the living room would make a huge difference, it is too likely to get damaged, so instead I’ll look for an off-cut or maybe carpet tiles which are cheaper. For my bedroom, I’d consider a ‘forever’ rug since I’ll take good care of it, but even the non-designer alternatives are so expensive I’ll have to save up for a bit longer, so that is on hold for now. Or maybe requires a lucky ebay find...

4. Keep an eye out

For me, collecting things as I spot them is half of the fun, so I’m not planning to go on a big shopping spree looking for specific items. Instead, I’ll keep popping into charity shops looking for glass or metallic accessories which I particularly like.

The only furniture I actually own is a lovely walnut desk which I bought at auction (much cheaper than the John Lewis ones I liked, and much nicer than an Ikea approximation). I love that it has some history behind it, that it has imperfections. The quality is also far better than a modern alternative, with the top cut with a central seam and folded out to make a lovely symmetrical pattern in the wood grain.

Now that you have your plan, enjoy the slow transformation, and hopefully patience will lead to perfection, a bargain, or maybe both!

Picture credits [1], [2], [3].

Shopping Part 3: Willpower

This is the third post in a three part series about shopping. The first post was about shopping and women and the second was about shopping and emotion

I almost never go shopping just for the sake of it, and am reasonably good at only buying reasonable things rationalising any purchases I make. However, one place I seem to fall down again and again is in Boots where I seem unable to leave without dropping £30 on toiletries. This is despite ‘deciding’ not to buy any more. So why does my willpower always crack in Boots?

Location of purchases

Supermarkets know that slowing people down increases their purchases, and so they place popular items halfway along aisles to force people to walk past more goods. A research company tracked the positions of mobile phones to plot how long people were in the store, and found that as ‘dwell time’ rose 1%, sales rose 1.3%, so this effect is worth pursuing for retailers. I usually go Boots because I genuinely need 2 or 3 basic items such as shampoo or toothpaste, but its supermarket style layout never has those at the front! Once I’ve treked to the right sections, the bombardment of choice often paralyses me for a while, dithering over cost per 100ml, offers, and jojoba oil vs ... who am I kidding, this jojoba conditioner is by far the best I’ve ever found. Unfortunately, all of that ‘dithering’ time quite quickly increases the chance of you me buying more stuff.

Peer pressure

To be honest, I like to think I’m immune to this. I don’t tend to feel pressure to keep up with people, and I buy Vogue which contains fashion so expensive that I see it more as an art book than a magazine of things I would ever purchase. Unfortunately, if I examine myself more carefully, I am influenced by what I see, and unfortunately what I see is quite expensive. The environment I work in, and my tendency to follow the most beautiful blogs means that I start to ‘normalise’ unnecessary items such as a loved aubergine handbag for work. (Unnecessary given that when I bought it I already had a black, a red, a brown and a yellow one appropriate for work)./p>

There is a great article here about spending based on who you are, not who you want to be. As J.D. points out, you have no way of knowing if the Jones have funded their lifestyle on debt anyway, so the notion of ‘keeping up’ really makes no sense. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this at some point...

Sugar!

The biggest Boots I know is right beside my office and is open late, so when I need something I will usually pop in at lunchtime or after finishing work. Either way, my blood sugar is probably low. Unfortunately for me, and fortunately for Boots, self-control is a finite resource, and is depleted with various behaviours, including making many choices, fixing attention or controlling thoughts. This energy model was tested by psychologists who found that just like a muscle, self-control can be strengthened, and gets tired as it is used. Earlier studies showed that acts of self-control caused reductions in blood-glucose levels, which in turn predicted poor self-control. Increasing the glucose in the blood (yay, chocolate) counteracted this fatigue.

This goes some way to explaining my madness in Boots - they confuse me by sending me around the whole store, I’m surrounded by things that I think I need for shiny hair and sparkly eyes, I’m tired with low blood sugar, and so have no self-control. And a large amount of toiletries already at home. Much as I would like to say this means I need to eat chocolate before going to Boots, it seems as though I’ll just have to make sure I go to a smaller shop at the weekend when I’m awake. With a list!

Shopping Part 2: Emotions

This is the second post in a three part series about shopping. The first post was about shopping and women

We may like to kid ourselves that we are grown-ups, that we never suffer from a toddler style temper tantrum in the middle of the shops. Well, we may be better at internalising that emotion, but I think that it is definitely still there in all its intense glory.

Oh yes, whether we are happy or unhappy, research shows that we make decisions based on our emotions. Antonio Damasio, a professor of neuroscience, found that people with brain injuries who become unable to perceive or experience emotions also find it hard to make any decisions. They can’t shop.

Cheering ourselves up

Unhappiness can trigger shopping. 79% of women in this survey said that they shopped to cheer themselves up. Unfortunately for those of us trying to cut back, it really does work; the nucleus accumbens, which is associated with pleasure and reward, lights up as people consider a purchase. A Harvard study by Dr Jennifer Lerner found that after watching a sad video, people were willing to spend more on items, possible as an attempt to elevate their own self worth. Advertisers have certainly tried to push the notion of purchases making people happier, from Starbucks learning your name to this dubious example (guys...a hoover will NOT make her happy)

Happy Shoppers

Unfortunately, whilst we may be aware that we are ‘vulnerable’ to random shopping when we are feeling a little down, that doesn’t mean you are safe when you are happy! Over half of women shop when they are feeling happy. It seems that purchases can help to neutralise our emotional states. I’ve certainly felt a buzz of tension release from buying something as small as a magazine.

Tricks of the frugal

Are you confused? I’m confused. Well if you really do feel like shopping is a problem, think back the the toddler having a tantrum. The ability to regulate emotions is crucial for our wellbeing. As we grow up (shh don’t laugh), we learn how to cope with overwhelming emotions in more acceptable ways than tantrums. But once you realise that you are using shopping as a coping mechanism, you can detach yourself from the ‘stuff’ you are about to buy and realise that you are just about to have a temper tantrum, or to jump for joy. Both of which would be more constructive if you really don’t need that stuff. Not to mention more fun! AAAAAAAA!

Shopping Part 1: Women

This is the first in a three part series about shopping.

Many personal finance blogs, particularly those written by women, seem to focus on the grip of consumerism, and in particular the temptation to buy clothes, toiletries and makeup in unreasonable quantities. For example, the charming Shopping Detox (which I read almost every day) follows one woman’s journey to stop excessive spending for an entire year(+), and in the Uniform Project a girl ware the same dress every day for a year.

Why is shopping frequently more of a problem for women than men? And why did I delay writing this post in order to browse the following G-I-R-L-I-E websites?

There is no doubt that all women are different, but I think that women:
1) long for beauty in themselves, and;
2) strive to nurture others

Longing for Beauty

Beauty is not a bad thing in itself, the psalmist longs to gaze on the beauty of the Lord, and God clearly delights in the beauty of his creation in Genesis 1. The problem is that as humans we misuse beauty.

Your heart became proud on account of your beauty, and you corrupted your wisdom because of your splendor.
Ezekiel 28v17

I can certainly relate to that corrupted wisdom. I know that I want to save for long term goals, but in the changing rooms when something makes me feel beautiful, it can be really difficult to walk out of the shop without it. Mainly because later I will want to do this.

Sometimes it really helps to acknowledge this problem as something good which came from God, which we have twisted into vanity. It is an affliction which we could so easily blame on media or social pressures, but really it is a problem in our own hearts, and focusing on external factors is never going to sort out the real problem. Most of us are just not influential enough to change our entire environment.

The other beauty-related reason that women spend longer shopping is the sheer complexity of clothes. A man buying a t-shirt only needs to fit two dimensions - width and height. For a woman buying a t-shirt, not only does it need to be the right width at the bust, waist and hip, but those widest/narrowest points have to fall at the correct height, giving five variables to get right. And that is just a t-shirt!

Unfortunately, the extra time women spend fighting to find things that fit means that they have greater sunk costs, so when women find something, anything, that fits, they are likely to buy it in triumph, until they get home to realise they have three grey skirts already.

If you want to improve the nature of your beauty shopping, recognising the “female” attitudes which trigger a spending spree are key. For the first time ever, I recently managed to buy a beautiful dress (which I didn’t really need) in a really good frame of mind. I could afford it, and I was so grateful to God that it was something so pretty, it felt like a real celebration of the good things He has given me. In contrast, I have bought plenty of other items purely for vanity’s sake, thinking only about glorifying myself. Even more depressing are the purchases to ‘cheer myself up’, but we’ll get onto those later in this series.

Nurturing others

In a survey conducted by Professor Karen J. Pine, many women said they go on a spending spree to treat others (75%) or to impress others (52%), despite over a third admitting that they had spend more than they could afford in the last week alone! You can see it in they way that women decorate homes and fuss over crockery where men couldn’t care less; making things nice for the people around us is important.

Much as it is wonderful to take care of others, most of the time your genuine attentive presence is far more valuable than decoration. If people really are simply after your cooking and cleaning skills, may I suggest you find other people to spend time with? Can you visualise what your dad/partner/brother would do if he was also walking past that display of scented candles? Hmm, yes I thought so. Put it back.

Hourly wages and the marginal utility of time

Hourly wages and the marginal utility of time

Don’t fear the title, all will become clear...

Sometimes, we are faced with decisions where we can either save money, or save time. For people who are budget conscious, it is tempting to always choose the cheapest option no matter what. Unfortunately, that frugal focus means that people fail to recognise that they are constrained by time as well as by money. In fact, arguably we are far more constrained by time than money, because we absolutely cannot add an hour to our life, but we certainly may be able to increase our earnings.

Hourly wages

If you ask most people what their hourly wage is, they will reply with the amount their job pays them. If you are paid per year instead of per hour, you may find it useful to calculate your hourly wage based on a normal week’s work as a useful tool when curbing spending, since you can visualise spending decisions in terms of how long it will take you to pay for them. However, this not really the rate you should think about when time is also involved in a decision.

Utility of time

Utility is all about the value/joy you get from something. Your time has a value! Imagine yourself in this scenario:
Your TV has broken and you need to replace it. You can either order one online and it will be delivered to your door, or you can travel to the shop yourself which will take two hours in total. If the online and shop prices were the same, you would obviously choose the delivery option as you will save two hours. If the online price was £200 higher, most people would make the journey as they are willing to ‘exchange’ two hours of time and effort for £200. This means that the utility of their time is somewhere between £0 and £100 an hour. As you think about how much you’d have to save for it to be worth the effort, you start to hone in on how you highly you value your time.

It is interesting to think about how little a saving you would travel for. For me, it’s probably around the £10/hour mark, assuming I’m indifferent to the task itself.

Marginal utility of time

Next, it is worth considering that all hours are not created equally. If I have an entire free weekend, I’d probably make the two hour journey even for a £5 saving, meaning a £2.50 rate. However, if I am working weekends, getting home late, and would have to fetch the TV by cutting into sleep hours, you’d have to offer me a much larger saving, and I might decide that even a £50 saving won’t induce me to give up a precious two hours sleep when I am working lots.

‘Marginal’ just means extra, so if all of my hours are spent working (hello weekend accountancy classes), then the first free hour has a high marginal utility to me, which is why you’d struggle to buy it off me even at a high price. If I finish my studying (which might be true, my results are tomorrow), then I will have an abundance of weekend time, and the marginal utility from that extra hour is much smaller (if I have 30 free hours instead of 29 at the weekend, it doesn’t increase my happiness/sanity as much as the first hour did, so maybe I will go to pick up that TV, even for quite a small saving).

Most resources follow this pattern; the first of anything has a high marginal utility, but as you have more and more, the ‘extra’ value you get is reduced.

Why does this matter?

Most of us are bombarded by choices every day. When we make decisions such as eating out instead of cooking, or buying items without bothering to research cheaper prices, it is tempting to look back on these decisions as wasteful, and regret them. Learning how you truly value your time can help you to build time costs into your decision making process, allow you to see when it is logical to pay more, and to make peace with these decisions.

Working for Go(o)d

Lifestyle inflation

I may as well get this confession out of the way; I like shiny things. Not literally shiny perhaps, but pretty things. As well as our general inclination to sin, I think that many of us have particular weaknesses, and appreciating nice things is definitely one of mine. In fact, part of my motivation to start writing about personal finance is that I have a tremendous talent for justifying purchases of things, and forcing myself to write about the issue will at least ensure that I stay aware of what is happening. One of my biggest fears, particularly living in London and working with very well paid colleagues, is that I will lock myself onto the treadmill, commit to a large mortgage, lull myself into a ‘large’ lifestyle which requires a correspondingly large income, and end up completely unable to leave my job because no other career would pay enough to keep the wheel turning. I have no desire to leave my job by the way, in fact most days I love it, but I have a feeling that God may call me at some point to do something else, and I want to be ready. Called to do what? Well....

God's plan for finance

The financial crisis and subsequent recession have laid some heavy abuse at the door of bankers. Sometimes in social situations I gloss over what I do merely because I don’t have the energy to defend myself against the public bruising sure to follow. I’m sure that there is some truth in much of the abuse heaped upon bankers. I have met people who are greedy and smug, and I understand enough about the crisis to know that greed of bankers themselves was certainly a contributing factor. However, most of the people I work with are quite good, bright people, who want to do their job well and then go home. They want to earn enough to look after their families, and to treat themselves if the opportunity arises. They do not want to read in every newspaper about how hated they are, about how the suffering of others is caused by them, to worry about their job security all the time only to be ridiculed by peers who think they are getting what they deserve. There are some good people in banking.

Don’t get me wrong, there is no doubt in my mind that the banking system does not operate for the good of society as a whole. And God cares about the world; that is why Christian charities provide humanitarian care as well as just missionaries. If the financial system is ever to run in a godly way, we need more Christians in banking. So where are they?

Where are the Christians?

Well, I certainly know of a few Christians in banking. But not many. As I was leaving university, I knew of just one other Christian entering something perceived to be as evil as banking; my old church friends are mostly teachers, doctors, church apprentices, PhD students, work in museums, or generally do other socially ‘positive’ things. The advantage for Christians with careers like medicine is that they have no doubt that they are being "Good People". In finance, it is murky, easy to doubt your heart, twisted and sometimes lonely. It can also silence fellow Christians, who can’t reconcile the young woman stood before them with the evil, cigar-smoking man depicted in the newspapers.

One of the directions I think God might call me is to work on a better financial system, perhaps working for a regulator, or maybe in a front office management role steering the incentive structures and business decisions being made. He has been dropping me hints you see; I ended up doing an economics degree instead of maths, I was unceremoniously dumped in the deep end in a role in liquidity reporting, and I’ve recently been looking at capital and market risk. Everything I’ve ended up doing seems to sit on that tricky margin between business (read ‘the desire to make money’) and regulation (read ‘fear that it will all go wrong again’).

Whilst I cannot pretend that I am changing anything currently, I am certainly learning. I have got the feeling that God is getting me to build up skills for something else. I just don’t know quite what it is yet...

The Money Sparrow

The trouble with budgeting

The simple words 'spend less than you earn' are repeated on many personal finance blogs, closely followed by instructions to track every penny that you spend. That's all very well, but tracking what you spend can frankly be quite boring. Plenty of people seem to really hate budgeting. So how can we make it more fun and achievable?

Whilst I was living at home, I didn't worry much about budgeting. I knew my rough bare minimum expenses (cost of travelcard plus work lunches), I had a flexible amount of 'fun' money on top, then the rest all went to savings. It wasn't too difficult to keep an eye on how much I had spent on 'fun' as I knew my income and my minimum expenses, so the bit in the middle was my discretionary pot. It was also small enough that breaking it down into categories could just be done in my head.

Now however, I'm unwilling to be so casual. Unfortunately, my attempts at budgeting so far have been somewhat extreme. There was the time I kept all receipts (resulting in scary shoe boxes full of paper), the time I spent going through credit card bills, the problems trying to work out where cash went when I just had an ATM withdrawal to begin my detective work, the time I used mobile phone app to try and track spending, the pen and paper I carried around....all boring!

However, I've finally discovered a method that I think will work in the medium term at least. The first trick was realising that my spending actually falls into three categories:

1. Spending is definitely allowed, and will not be affected by behaviour changes. Not many things fall into this category, but rent, medical expenses (why are glasses so pricey?) and fixed charity giving are in this category.

2. Spending is work related and mostly allowed. There might be room for some savings by changing my behaviour, but the impact means it is not worth worrying about. My commuting bill, plus food for work are the main items in this category.

3. Flexible expenses; where I have a lot of power to change my behaviour and the amount I spend.

The key to the categories is that 1) I will not lose any sleep over, 2) is not worth paying attention to unless I have time on my hands (which means it won't happen), and so 3) is the only thing I need to pay attention to.

My second trick is to separate these three categories out in the least painful and boring way possible. I chose to put:

1. As a standing order (or I use my debit card)
2. On one credit card
3. On a second credit card

This means that sorting expenses happens at the till, as I choose which card to use. If I'm buying a work travelcard, I use a different credit card to when I am buying clothes. Then at the end of the month (or maybe later...), I just look at one bill with all my category 1 expenses, and they should all be pretty expected. Next I look at a credit card bill with all my category 2 expenses and just eyeball the shops and the bottom line to check that it is reasonable and dump the whole big figure into my budget as 'work related'. I don't have to worry about the breakdown particularly, and I save lots of sorting time.

Finally, I look at the credit card bill with category 3 expenses 'properly'. To make things even easier, this card is with a provider who will display the bill online, and export the entries as a .csv file, which means I can download all of the details straight into Moneydance (the software I use). Moneydance will then have all of the entries and the date they happened, and I can assign each one to sections of my budget. The software even starts to learn which part of my budget shops fit into, so that it will suggest groceries for 'Sainsbury's' which makes the process a bit more bearable.

I've been doing this for about 3 months now, and I wouldn't say the last stage has caught on yet, but I am separating my purchases as I make them automatically now, and I feel like I've saved a lot of future sorting time at least! I'll let you know how this method works.

Peacocks and Ostriches - The misery of communication day

Where I work, promotions, salary increases and bonuses all happen on one day, officially called ‘Compensation Day’. I’ve only been through three so far, but I hated all of them. 

I am in the curious position of feeling overpaid as a human being (I am well into the top 1% of earners globally and I’m in my early twenties, which really is absurd), and yet at the same time feeling underpaid for the industry. A few weeks ago, I was asked to interview for a contracting job which would have more than doubled my salary. Of course, there is a premium for contracting, and I may not have got the job, but the recruiter was struggling so much to find anyone with those skills that he called back later fishing for names of anybody else I knew with the same experience as me.

The reality of being in this position is that I vary throughout the year between thinking ‘I am good at my job, I should get a raise’ and ‘this is absurd, why are they paying me this much’. As a graduate, bonuses are in my dad’s words ‘a token gesture’, with only very small differences based on performance. I didn’t have to worry about what I’d be paid as it is almost the same for all the graduates in my department. What I have struggled with however is my attitude to my salary.

In the UK, we are notoriously tight-lipped about salaries. I remember asking my dad what he earned when I was about 15, and he was very reluctant to tell me. I promised not to ever repeat the figure to another soul, and explained that the reason I wanted to know was that I didn’t really know how much ‘stuff’ I could get for a given salary. So when I heard that  a job paid a certain amount, I had know idea how that translated into the kind of life you could lead. This is the kind of thing that teenagers need to know to motivate them to study!  I had heard that jobs were ‘well paid’ or ‘low paid’, but I wanted to know what my lifestyle would actually be like if I got a job as, say, a lawyer instead of a teacher. Even now, I see plenty of jobs in the UK advertised with the words ‘competitive salary’. Why the big secret?

The reason, I think, is all about comparing yourself to others. Especially with the recession stripping away most bonuses in investment banking, this year all of the gossip was about who got promoted and who didn’t, because that is the socially acceptable way of deducing what people at your firm are paid. Promotions are the outward peacock feathers, even though of course there are variations in salary within each grade. So why are we so keen to compare ourselves to others? I think that the root of our obsession is that we are constantly looking for approval. We know that we are flawed, we often subconsciously know that we are “sinful”, and there is deep place in our heart that wants to be right with God. Modern society will sometimes describe this truth as ‘low self-esteem’ or ‘low confidence’, rather that a brief glimpse of our true state before God. If we label it a problem of self-worth, then one way we can feel better is to get feedback from others about how we are ok, about how they value us. Salaries (in large corporations at least) are therefore merely a representation of approval, and make us feel that we are not that bad, even that we are treasured in the way we are truthfully desperate for God to treasure us. 

So then, if my trepidation about compensation day is to do with getting approval because of that deep knot inside me that sometimes cries out the truth that I am just not enough, the solution must be found in Christ. Because of course my own shortcomings are resolved only by the perfect record of Jesus being offered to me to replace my own tarnished list. 

The problem for many Christians is that God encourages us ‘not to chase after the things of this world’. This can mean that instead of acknowledging our greed for approval from others and looking to God’s love to free us from our greed, we try to bury the desire for more money. I certainly try to ‘will’ myself into wanting less, caring less about money. I try to be less sinful by being an ostrich; burying my head in the sand and hoping that if I just ignore my bank balance for a while, my heart will somehow stop its constant cry for more.

God doesn’t actually ask us to desire less. In fact he wants us to desire more, just to desire Him instead of the tawdry baubles we find on earth. The book which first helped me to understand this, to expand and breathe into myself and understand rather than repress my constant desire for more is called ‘Captivating’ by John and Stasi Eldridge. It’s a book for women, and sounds really corny at first glance (especially as a reserved Englishwoman), but it is worth investing some time in.

As for now, the dreaded communication day has passed, I am still in the top 1% of earners globally, and since next year is the earliest I can be promoted, there are just over 51 weeks for God to work on my pride and show me the truth about my strong conviction that I ‘deserve’ to be promoted next year. Also, unemployment amongst the ‘youth’ age-group I still just about fall into was over 22% last week, so having a job is frankly, pretty great.

The Money Sparrow.

Why a sparrow?

The thing that I forget most often when thinking about money is that God will take care of me. I do not need to hoard money ‘just in case’ God doesn’t come through for me. He has promised “that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28). The image that most speaks to me in reminding me of God’s provision is that of the sparrows (Matthew 10 or Luke 12). Jesus sends out his disciples with the words “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.” (Matthew 10:29-31).

The second reason for using a sparrow for imagery is that whilst a bird relies on God for it’s tree, it still busies itself in doing the actual nest-building. When exploring topics of saving, the counter-argument to ‘God is in charge’ is ‘God has given me building blocks’. 

Finally, as I thought though some possible topics to write about, there seemed to be a great many bird puns to use in titles... I’ll be honest, that settled it.

About me

I am a young Christian who has just flown the nest. I studied economics and mathematics at a lovely university (where I first believed the gospel), and am currently working at a large investment bank in London whilst studying to become a management accountant.

My degree, career choice and current studies show that finance is clearly of interest to me. I believe that many Christians fall into the trap of assuming that money is by definition bad, and in trying to shun materialism they end up never engaging with their personal finances. However, I think that it is important to understand the practicalities of being a good steward of the money God has entrusted you with.

In this blog, I want to explore the tension between the need to earn money and look after yourself, and the snare of relying on it instead of on God for your security and salvation. I also hope to clarify for people some of the myth, conjecture and confusion about financial issues. Many Christian finance blogs are American, and the differences in culture, taxation, product availability and savings regulations left a gap for an English perspective.