For a long time I treated giving and wealth-building as two lanes that met at a stoplight. The wealth lane was spreadsheets, transfers, index funds, freedom math. The giving lane was something I’d get to “later” — after the emergency fund, after the investing was humming, after we were “secure enough.” It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice what I was actually saying: that generosity was a luxury item, priced above the life we were building, payable only in surplus.
This post is the more personal kind for this blog — about faith, money, and the moment those two stop living in separate rooms. It’s not a doctrine post, and it’s not a tithe-arithmetic post. If you don’t share my faith, most of what’s here still applies as the generosity question: does giving have a seat in your financial plan, or is it waiting outside for a surplus that never comes? My own story behind why any of this matters to me is in how faith transformed my life; this post is about the money side of that.
The Question That Started It
Here’s the question that rearranged things for me: Is giving in the plan, or in the leftovers? Because the answer determines what giving actually is. If it’s in the leftovers, giving is a mood — generous in good months, silent in tight ones, and structurally last in line. If it’s in the plan, giving is a commitment with a line item, the same standing as the mortgage. Same dollars either way. Completely different meaning.
I want to be upfront about something, because this blog runs on real numbers and I’m deliberately not giving one here: I don’t publish the specifics of what we give. That’s not coyness — it’s a conviction that giving loses something when it’s turned into content, and Matthew’s instruction about giving in secret has shaped how I think about what belongs on this site. So instead of “here’s our percentage,” what I can share honestly is the structure — the mechanics that made giving durable in a household that also had debt to kill and freedom to build. Structure is transferable; our numbers aren’t yours anyway.
Give First, Not Last: The Order of Operations
The single most useful change we made was mechanical: giving moved to the first of the month, not the leftovers of the last. When we started, it lived wherever there was “extra” — which, in a commission-based income with a growing family, is a mathematically elegant way of saying “almost never.” The reordering changed everything, and it works for the same reason saving-first works:
- Money that leaves first never competes with lifestyle. A transfer on payday is invisible; a transfer “from whatever’s left” is a fight you have eleven times a month.
- First means it’s a value; last means it’s a leftover. Nobody describes their mortgage as “whatever we had left over.” Placement is the truth serum for priorities.
- The budget flexes around fixed commitments. Households are remarkably good at absorbing fixed outflows — they’ve been absorbing rent forever. A giving line behaves exactly like a rent line, and the budget’s job is to absorb it without drama.
Practically, in our system that looked like the same automation architecture as everything else — a recurring transfer with its own account, decided once and reviewed annually. If you want the full bucket setup, I described the framework in automating financial freedom through bank accounts; giving just gets its own bucket in the same machine.
What Giving Costs a Freedom Plan — Honestly
Let me do the part I wish more finance writing did: put the trade on the table instead of pretending it isn’t there. Giving money away delays the freedom number. That’s just true, and pretending otherwise would make this a sales pitch instead of a blog post. If you redirect a fixed monthly amount from investing to giving, your portfolio arrives at the same number a bit later. That’s the cost, stated plainly, and it deserves to be seen rather than spiritualized away.
But notice what the comparison quietly assumes: that the freedom number is the whole goal. I’ve written before that freedom was never about the biggest number — it’s about the life the number purchases. A freedom plan is a means, and a means that excludes the thing you believe money is for has drifted into being the end. If you believe, as I do, that resources are entrusted rather than owned, then a plan with zero giving in it isn’t a neutral plan — it’s a plan with a belief quietly edited out of it. The delay is real. So is the point.
There’s also a practical middle that neither the austerity crowd nor the prosperity crowd talks about: giving doesn’t have to be only money. Time given — mentoring, serving, the free labor that costs nothing but a Saturday — is real generosity with a zero hit to the portfolio, and in the early years, when the plan is tightest, it’s often the honest answer. The mix can shift as the plan matures. What should never happen is the all-or-nothing framing where “I can’t afford to give yet” quietly becomes “I will never give,” with “yet” doing decade-long duty.
What It Did to the Rest of the Budget
The unexpected part, and the reason I think giving belongs in the wealth conversation at all: a funded giving line changed how the other lines behaved. Some of that I can only describe plainly and you can take it or leave it — there was a peace about money after the order changed that I never got from optimization. The hoard-and-clench reflex that I’ve written about as a scarcity failure mode lost its grip partly because the plan now had an outflow that wasn’t about us. Releasing money on purpose, monthly, and watching the world not end is a strange kind of training. It did more for my money anxiety than any yield I ever chased.
And some of it is just visible mechanics: giving is the best budget audit that exists. When you commit a fixed line to something outside your own consumption, the rest of the budget has to get honest — the lifestyle categories can no longer quietly eat everything, because there’s a stakeholder in the plan who isn’t you. It’s the same reason a gym partner improves attendance. Accountability to something outside yourself is a financial technology, whatever your theology.
The Part We Do With the Kids
One of the unexpected gifts of putting giving into the plan is what it does for the kids’ picture of money. Kids absorb what money is for from watching, and what they were watching was consumption with occasional mystery purchases. A visible giving line — even at kid-scale, even with coins in a jar — teaches the opposite of what a budget-only household accidentally teaches. The budget shows them that a family’s money has purposes beyond the family, and that those purposes are chosen, not accidental. Whether your version is a church, a food bank, or the neighbor whose car died, the lesson the kids absorb is the same: our money has assignments, and not all of them are addressed to us.
I’m careful not to turn that into a lesson about amounts — kids don’t need our percentages, they need our practices. The jar on the counter, the conversation about where it goes, the fact that it happens in lean months too. That’s the whole curriculum, and it costs exactly what the line item costs.
Where This Fits the Wider Plan
If you’re in the building years — debt to clear, freedom number to hit, automation to install — I’d offer this as the practical synthesis rather than a sermon: build the machine, and build the giving line into the machine from the start, at whatever size your season allows. A plan that gives is harder to quit, because it has a purpose outside your own ledger, and plans with purpose outside themselves survive the boring middle far better. Gratitude helps too, though it works differently than you’d expect — it’s less a feeling than a discipline of remembering what’s already funded, and it pairs naturally with the monthly review habit.
Bottom line: faith and finances aren’t two subjects. The same money that funds the index funds funds the giving, and the order you put them in tells you which one you actually believe in. Generosity inside a plan is not a leak in the budget. Done first and done deliberately, it’s the part that keeps the whole machine pointed at something worth reaching.
One forward step — a journal prompt rather than a spreadsheet: “If someone audited my budget with no words from me, what would they conclude I believe money is for?” Sit with the honest answer for a minute. If the conclusion doesn’t match what you actually believe, you don’t have a math problem — you have an order-of-operations problem, and that one’s fixable this month.
