When I began serving in stewardship ministry, I frequently met with individuals and couples to review their financial situation. I was constantly amazed at the disconnect between how people looked like they were doing financially and how they were actually doing.
By Matt Bell
Very often, they were driving nice cars and wearing nice clothes. They looked just fine, but they weren’t fine. Most were deeply in debt.
In just about every case, I was the first person they had shared the details of their financial life with. Few of us share the true details of our finances with anyone other than our spouse (and in some cases, people don’t even do that!).
However, in one important sense, we all share financial information all the time. The choices we make–the home we live in, the car we drive, the vacations we take, and all the rest–gives people a sense of how we’re doing financially. And all of us constantly take in this type of information from others.
The problem is that type of information is often at odds with a person’s true financial condition. You might think of it as fake financial news, and it swirls around us every day, impacting us in ways we don’t even recognize.