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Are you in debt? Do you need a strategy? to get out of debt? Well, today I've got a guest that's gonna help you do just that so, stay tuned. How do I bring my faith to work how do I tap into the power of God. Why am I going through this adversity? Hi I’m Os Hillman. I've been helping leaders like you answer these question for over 30 years. That's what this podcast is all about. Let's learn and grow together. Welcome to TGIF Today God Is First . So welcome to our podcast this week. It is such a delight to have my daughter as my guest this week and her name is Charis Brown and Charis is in the media and she has a new book out and it's a book that everyone's gonna benefit from and so she is author of two books she actually created a new book when she was working for me called TGIF for next generation and her new book is called Alt Money Choices: Securing financial freedom one choice at a time and she speaks to groups about faith and finance she's also an editor for ClarkHoward.com and managing editor for ClarkeDeals.com daily deals website started by a consumer expert radio talk show host and New York Times bestselling author Clark Howard. She lives with her husband just a few miles from a with their cat in North Atlanta well. Charis great to have you on today thanks for having me dad well you've done a great job with this new book and we're gonna get into some details but before we do let me just tell people that you know this is your second book and you wrote TGIF for next generation which is a daily devotional and you can get it online at your website what website is that if they want to go and sign up for your place oh well if they want to get the free devotional its prison ministry at work but of course you guys have copies so I would encourage people to get copies from you too so yeah it's a it's a 365 day daily devotional and her ministry site is Prismministries.org or prism ministries.org but today we're talking about this new book and Clark Howard you know it's interesting he is a household name in Atlanta and a few other cities. How many cities is he in now? He's in quite a few there's a there's a long list of media affiliates that will air the show in different markets um you know LA it's one of those big cities that regularly air the Clark Howard show so yeah well he's quite a name in different markets and he helps people save money and it evidently has rubbed off on Karras because she now has a book that he is endorsing and he won't endorse a book that doesn't prove it's going to save people money so you can be sure this has been field-tested by a Clark but he gave a great recommendation for the book and today we're going to talk about this and listen to what Clark says about the book I loved Charis’s book. I couldn't stop reading it and I finished it in a couple of hours what I love about Charis’s story is she's so methodical about her process and she's not preaching at people she's teaching how to get their money in order and so that's what we're going to learn today and so we're going to go ahead and shut our video off so today we're going to talk about top 10 financial mistakes people make that cost them money and how you can avoid them you know curious when I looked at that list I thought that was an incredible list of things that you know money just flows out of our pockets so easily sometimes and you put together a list and different aspects of what those ten things are that eat people's money and so we're gonna go through each one and you're gonna tell us what we need to know about it and mistake number one is over buying on a home tell us about that alright well a home you know is probably the biggest one of the biggest financial decisions that will make in a lifetime because a home is generally the most expensive part of somebody's budget if you look at someone's pleasure like a pie you know if the housing cost is going to take up a big portion of that pie and so um you know you really want to think about that and not in terms of what your Realtor is telling you and what your banker is telling you because often they're going to try to get you into something that is at the max of what you can afford but what you really want to do is you want to look at your budget and you don't want your housing expense to eat up you know more than 25% 20% if you can get it down to 15 that's really ideal um but you know people so many people over buy on their house and then they don't have money later in retirement when they need it most and so just to give you a couple of figures you know if you buy a $250,000 house that's gonna end up with interest being over $400,000 if you buy a $500,000 house that's gonna end up being over $700,000 because of the interest and so you can see how much that adds up over time you know one of the things people don't realize is if you just pay a little extra every month you can significantly reduce the overall amount that you're going to spend and reduce the term of your loan just paying an extra fifty or hundred dollars a month can make a big difference yes that's so true yes and that's one of the things that we highlight in the book just about you know it's little changes that you can make that will make a big difference so that's definitely one of those choices that you can make yeah all right mistake number two over buying on a car well we just actually bought a new car new to us it's not a brand new car it's a 2009 Honda but we were really feeling good about this decision because we were able to buy cash and just like you dad like when you helped me buy my first car my dad helped me you know you put 50% down I put 50% down and we paid cash for it which is great so we paid for this car in cash and you know when an expense starts to meet a psychological need versus a physical need that's when we tend to overspend so I don't know about you but like I saw all these Lexus commercials and different brands of cars over the holidays it's like this December to remember event and you know it's like Oh your spouse could be surprised by this forty five thousand dollar car and you know I think for most America that would be a surprise but not in a good way because you know if you're married you want to talk to your spouse and your significant other about any big financial purchase and so you know with cars seeing these table. you at CNBC no it's actually forms so Forbes wrote a piece about how buying new cars can delay your retirement by years it can delay it 14 years 15 years just because people you know um take cues from commercials to buy their cars and so what you really want to do is the sweet spot in car ownership is buying a two-year old used car because you know once it starts off a lot it's lost a lot of value so and then really being intentional about researching the kind of car that you want to get making sure it's reliable making sure it's good on gas you know because we want to get all the bells and whistles but those bells and whistles can cost us and when we're paying for image when it comes to cars that can really cause us to overspend yeah that's good I know that we recently bought a car and found out that you know we we searched all over Atlanta and we went beyond Atlanta and don't be afraid to look beyond your own city to find the best deal because sometimes it's it's not in your particular city Atlanta is a very competitive market for certain types of vehicles and so you want to really look everywhere when you're searching for a car but that's good advice all right number three is mistake number three is going out to eat too much ooh that one hurts well yeah I mean you know it's just so convenient to go out to eat one of the things that we did in our 11 month long experiment is you know this book is about the little choices that we made and that we journaled throughout 11 11 months timeframe and one of those choices that we made was making different decisions when it came to going out to eat and maybe choosing a less expensive restaurant over a more expensive one and just knowing how much that adds up over time that can make a huge impact in your budget but even you know you don't have to deprive yourself maybe going to Chipotle or chick-fil-a or something like that um you know instead of going to a sit-down more expensive restaurant that can really make a big difference and just to put it into perspective a $50 meal out once a week cost twenty six hundred dollars per year so you think and you think about wow what can I do with that money I could put that money into my retirement account my brought my IRA I could go on a vacation with it and so it's just about figuring out where your money is going and putting it in places where you really want to go because it's so easy to spend that money going out to eat but maybe you know there's something else that you could do with that money yeah and you say habits you know a lot of a lot of times we get in the habit of just going out and don't even think about it so it's I think it's what you're saying is let's be intentional about you know being frugal or being disciplined about how many times we're going to eat out etc exactly well mistake number four is not saving enough for retirement yeah that's a big one and unfortunately it's it's one that affects so many Americans um you know most of us don't have enough retirement money saved but it is the top financial regret of the elderly and so and that's according to an article by CNBC and so you know if at all possible you know if you're you know even just starting you know start at 1% saving for retirement and then just build up you know year after year and once you get used to a certain amount of income it makes it far easier to live with that income later in life and so um you know I would encourage people whether you're in your 20s 30s you know start now just start with a little bit and see how much that little bit can grow because anything that you put into a retirement savings account a Roth IRA is a great place to start um with a company like Vanguard or fidelity and you know you can see that income really start you know beefing up as it you know works with compound interest and so that would definitely be something that we need to do better at as Americans when you say Roth our IRA why don't you explain what that is for the folks sir so I RA is an individual retirement account and you can use these accounts to stash away money for retirement you can do a traditional IRA or you can do a Roth IRA and a Roth IRA is a better option to many people something that clerk talks about a lot when people are just getting started because you pay the tax now with a traditional IRA you pay the tax once you take it out later but you can stash I believe this year at 6500 dollars in either of those and that's the maximum that you can put in there but if you're not already contributing to a 401k at work the 401k would be the number one place to start because if you have a match that's like free money so definitely want to start with a 401k and then see if you can add them to an IRA probably a Roth IRA if you can yeah and you know saving it's not just saving by putting money away but it's also not spending and you know that's one of the your testimony about writing your own book was about in fact why don't you share briefly with the folks what happened with you and kind of what motivated you to get out of debt yes absolutely and you know this is kind of school of hard knocks for me because dad has always told me not to get into that but I did for school and I started start a business and I was like nineteen twenty and so um I had over thirty five thousand dollars in student loan debt hanging over me and when my husband Justin I got married we had a combined total of three hundred thousand dollars of debt because we had two homes and we bought them at the height of the market and we had to we have credit card debt we had car loans and so we really had to work hard at getting all of those debts out of the way but we kept knocking them out and so the student loan was was the final kind of straw and I really wanted to pay that off as quickly as possible so that's where this whole idea about many choices came from and recording expenses and making a better financial choice and so we were able to pay off that student loan that was $27,000 at the start of the year and we were able to pay that off within 11 months mm-hmm that's awesome so one of those things that you had to do was budgeting and that's mistake number five how important is budgeting that is still hard I think it's always going to be hard for us and many people and you know budgeting is something that you know people hear it and I was chatting with a women's group and I mentioned budgeting and they're all I go it's a groan that will echo throughout the room but budgeting is you know not necessarily constraints it's just kind of guidelines and a plan and so you know there's plenty of free budgeting out there budgeting doesn't have to be hard there's you know clarity money there's mint there's all kinds of apps that you can just plug in you know your info and it'll spit out what you're spending and then you can kind of decide where your thresholds are for different categories so another way to do it is cash one thing that we did is and we continue to try to do is especially with food expenses and grocery expenses we try to use cash because you have that set amount and we treat cash much differently than we treat a credit card that one yeah with a credit card it's so easy to swipe and studies have shown that we spend less when we use cash because we have a different relationship with cash because we see it leave our hand and so it's a much different experience even though most of us are encouraged to use plastic because it's so convenient so budgeting is definitely you know one of those things that we want to try to get a hold of when it comes to success with money yeah and I think that you know talking about credit and debt and you know nowadays they're really trying to lure us into the credit cards because of a 2% cash back or 3% and you know all of that that may be good on the front end but it actually encourage you to spend more because you think oh I'm putting a say I'm putting getting money back though and all you're doing is spending more money and but that's so true you know when I go to the grocery store and pull out cash to pay for something I take it more seriously than if I just use my credit card right exactly exactly and one thing that you could do is you know if you want to use credit cards and you want the benefits of the cashback or whatever you can use credit cards for fixed expenses that you'd be paying for anyway and you know use cash maybe for those more variable expenses that you know can get out of hand easily yeah and it's so important for you to not carry over in your spending and kirie debt on a credit card because that will absolutely eat you up with the high interest rates of most credit cards and so you know the the way you beat the credit cards is those recurring incomes or recurring expenses use the credit card for that if you want to build miles or you want to you know bill cash back but the way you beat them is you that thing off every month and that's that's when it that that card becomes your servant instead of you being the servant to that death right exactly exactly I mean if if you can't do that with credit cards maybe just stick to the cash or the debit you know but yeah that's definitely I mean number one roll of credit cards make sure you can pay it off every single month yeah mistake number six falling for scams well you know there are so many scams that steal people's money and Clark's Consumer Action Center gets calls um you know every day hundreds of calls from people who are who have fallen prey to some kind of scam you know there's tons of scams that are happening right now um one of the most popular ones has been the IRS Social Security scam where you get a call from the IRS and they're telling you that you owe money and are threatening you um you know but the IRS does not communicate that way they send letters and mail so security is the same way so what you want to do is if you're faced with something like a phone call or somebody that wants to sell you software or something do a little bit of research about it um don't immediately take action try to stop yourself from taking action when it comes to any of these things and do some research and see if there is a scam out there that you need to be aware of a lot of times there's government websites that have a list of scams that are popping up and greater frequency I say you can check that out um but that's definitely something that you know to watch out for even gift card scams where you know someone might want to sell you a gift card and then it ends up not having any money on it so just be aware of the scams that are out there um Clark coms a great resource for looking for scams and then some of those other websites are really great too yeah and be careful with investments that are promising very high returns you know back in the 90s I got taken I became a victim to a Bernie Madoff type of scam where he was having 20% interest and you know he just you know that interest those those reports came every month saying oh he made this much he made this much then all of a sudden I get a phone call from my manager and he says all of your money is gone the man that we'd been working with was a scam artist and they had fled the country and that was over half a million dollars and we never got one penny back and so be careful with the types of investments that you go into and when they claim to have incredible returns it's probably a situation that you really need to think twice about Wow and I know that was a really painful and I'm glad that you're sharing it with everyone because so many people have gotten taken by scams like that and you know as the slide says if it's too good to be true it probably is you know you just have to watch out and don't use any income that you really need in an investment you only want to use cash that you can afford to lose in an investment that's a very good word their mistake number seven shopping as a hobby okay well this goes back to habits and you know in the book um I just shared that habits are one of our most money-saving assets and that is so true and what you know being in debt taught Justin I was that you know we'd learn to live on less than what we made and so that was something that I think will just you know have such an impact on me for the rest of my life just trying to live beneath our means and pay off that debt but shopping you know I mean some of us or shopaholics I you know of course I'm looking at deals all the time with my job and it's very tempting but you want to be careful not to make shopping one of those things that's filling another kind of void you know shopping can be fun it's fun to get those deals I love deals deal hunting but we just want to make sure that our habits are not leading us as you said before into a path of you know bondage where you know we're becoming a slave to a certain habit or whatever so that's something that is just good to watch out for well I think the other things addictions can come in a lot of different forms and an addiction is anything that you can't lay down voluntarily and if you find that you simply have to shop or have to do something else then you most likely have some kind of an addiction and you need to look at the root cause of that and what need you're trying to meet that that shopping or whatever it activity it is is trying to meet and so this is an area that is very practical and we need to look at it and see what it might be doing to us mm-hmm yeah that's good mistake number eight not having insurance yes and so you know we often think about insurance like car insurance homeowners insurance renter's insurance but other kinds of insurance are often overlooked for example a disability insurance you know Social Security the Social Security government website tells us that one in four of today's young people will be disabled at some point in their lives and so it's really important to consider disability insurance as you're looking at budgeting and monthly expenses because um you know anyone can become disabled at any moment so it's really good to think about short term disability and long term disability I've got a friend of mine she's she's chronically sick and she's been that way ever since she was 27 and so it's just sad for me to watch that because you know she could have probably had a much easier time if they had known about getting disability insurance when they were in their 20s I said that's just something that I would just just plead everyone to look at just because the statistics are real 25 percent of us will be in some you know place where we're not able to work and so it's really important that we are covered not just in our car insurance but also disability insurance and of course health insurance another factor in that is to make sure that you have income that you can live off of two to three months you know set aside in an account on a amount of money that if something happens that you can go to that money to be able to offset what might happen you know you never know it was what comes across our path sometimes and having two to three months of operating income is a wise thing to do and that's separate from your long-term insurance not insurance but long-term retirement savings this is a short-term money that should there be an emergency in other words it's your emergency fund right so if you can't put that much aside yet just start putting a little bit toward that account and set it up as a separate account as a money market or something like that and just put money in there until you get to at least three months of operating income and if you have that money saved up maybe you won't need the short term disability insurance but yes that is that is definitely something that that would be good for everyone to consider mistake number nine not paying bills on time well you know we live in a credit-based society and I know that there's some financial experts out there that you know don't use the credit cards and don't want to rely on credit but you know credit becomes a lot easier if you're looking at buying a car or you need to buy a house and so paying bills on time is definitely a part of that and so when you're looking at a credit score thirty five percent of credit history is based on our thirty five percent of the credit score is based on your history and then thirty thirty percent is the amount owed so that's over 60% of the total credit score and so when you're paying bills on time especially credit cards your credit score is going to go up and you want to make sure that your debt to credit ratio percentage is below 30% overall which means that the amount that you owe is thirty percent is thirty percent of the overall credit that you have if that makes sense because that also has a big impact on your credit score yeah now a lot of times we get these promos for apps that will give us their credit your credit score do you recommend people getting that how important is it for this them to stay in touch with their credit score yes that's a really good idea and when you know the whole Equifax breach happened a lot of people are very concerned about their credit and rightly so so one of the great ways to keep track of that is Credit Karma it's over the K and so you can go on that site and you can monitor your credit and if there's any changes to your credit say if somebody opens an account in your name Credit Karma is going to alert you of that and so you'll be able to catch it in time a lot a lot of things that people or times what people do is they'll actually freeze their credit and if they're concerned about you know stealing their credit history or whatever or opening accountant accounts in their name they can actually freeze their credit you know if you don't have anything that you need to apply for you know you have a house it's pretty much set you're not making any big changes that's another great way to keep criminals from accessing your credit would be to do a credit freeze good mistake number 10 getting into debt this is probably my top mistake and the book you know all money choices this is all about our journey of getting out of debt and making better financial choices you know but that can cost us so much overtime um you know in Proverbs I know you've said this many times says borrower is slave to the lender proverbs 22:7 and so we want to be careful that money is our slave and we're not a slave to money but the cost of financing can be pretty high we think about mortgages they're generally considered good debt because you're actually you know going to get your house but you're still paying a whole lot in interest for example a one hundred and fifty thousand dollar mortgage is going to cost almost five thousand dollars in interest in the first year and so you know when you think about that compared to um you know the tax write-off you're getting most people don't even Ida Mize so it's kind of a wash so you know when people are touting like home ownership you just want to be aware of what you're actually spending an interest because that can really add up over time I remember you know one of my biggest mistakes was you know buying a house with an interest-only loan I don't know what I was thinking but I thought the market would go up and up and it didn't crash just almost as soon as I bought that house and so when I look back at how much money I was paying an interest it is absurd and how much I could have directed that money in other places like you know saving for retirement or business or whatever and so um that's one thing that you know work generally accustomed to as a society is getting into debt but we you know in order to save more money and you know have more financial stability in our lives we really need to think about and think hard when we are faced with getting into that because that can cost so much in the long run you know over the years I've had people talk about the whether you should pay off your mortgage if you have the ability to pay it off and I have always said yes absolutely you want to do that and some would kind of you know argue that point to say that well why would I want to do that you know I've got my money over here collecting interest and I get an interest deduction on my mortgage and the answer to that is you're presuming upon the future for the first thing now you don't know that you'll be able to pay that in the future when you have the ability now and that's exactly what happened to me back in the 90s when I had that Bernie Madoff situation I could have paid my mortgage off at that time but I didn't based on that logic so then after that happened it was tough for me to make that mortgage for season and so they also that the premise that you're having a tax deduction look you're paying a whole lot more interest than the benefit you're getting from a tax deduction then if you had paid off that completely so there is no better feeling than living in a house that you know is paid for and nobody can take it from you you never know what's coming down the pike and so you know that presumption upon the future is not faith it's presumption so if you have the ability to pay it off paid off if you have the ability to pay an extra hundred a month do that anything you can do to reduce the amount of interest you're paying and to get that house under your belt and not the banks bill right exactly all right so we've been talking about all money choices securing financial freedom one step at a time you can get it on our bookstore at tji at bookstore calm you can also get it on Kara's website at Alton money choices calm and you know some of the practical things you're going to learn in this book are how small choices can really add up and why changing your money habits have a big impact over time and you're going to read about Karis is strategy for paying off twenty seven thousand dollars of debt in 11 months she took small choices that added up over time and how to make saving funny money fun and the science of making better choices money mentalities have separate the rich from everyone else and simple steps you can take I encourage you to get this book so you know Kerris has been on this journey with me for many years and after all these years we've been equipping leaders and we've been thinking about how we can help those that we've been serving for these years go deeper and help them with specific things that they tell us they had help need help with and so we've been listening to some of our listeners and I would encourage you that if you'd like to know about these coming things that we're about to do that we're going to announce very shortly within a month or two about a new program you can get on the waiting list for that it become God's change agent com that's become God's change agent calm and if you get on the waiting list you'll be the first one to be notified you'll get a discount on this new program that we're going to be doing plus you will get a download that's free of my top ten biblical truths for succeeding in life and work and so if that's of interest you just go to become God's change agent comm will cost you anything just to be on the waiting list and that'll be a free download now let me remind you that if you're listening on iTunes we want you to rate our podcast that allows us to encourage others to come to our and subscribe to our podcasts and download the podcast audio and if you're watching us on YouTube we want you to subscribe to our Channel and share your comments at the bottom of the presentation on YouTube and that will allow us also to have more people watching our programs and so let's curious when we come back on the video just for a moment as we say goodbye to our friends and let's see if I can do that there we are there we are both so again the book is all money choices and it's a great read it's not a very big book it's only 118 pages so you you know I like those kind of small books you can read almost in one session but you won't do that in this cuz you need to really study what to do and take the advice that she has there well Kara says we close out today any final words for those that that are out there well I think one of the things that just became such a big theme of the book is you know just realizing how much God gave us choice and how it's one of the gifts that he gave us you know in the Garden of Eden he gave Adam and Eve a choice and so you know one of the most impactful things that I want people to get from the book is just to realize you know you might be in a certain situation or you might be facing a big challenge right now but you know there are choices that that you have that you may not even have thought of yet and you know God has given us creativity as well and so you know even though we might feel like we're in a tough spot um you know he can give us ideas and solutions to those things that we're facing and so um you know he just gave us such a big gift when it came to her choice and so I just want to encourage people with that yeah and that's a good word I think that whenever we are intentional about something like this God sees that it's a it's a step of faith and sometimes when you put your first foot forward towards something God multiplies it and it's amazing how many things can change you know in my own situation although I'd lost a half million dollars at the end of seven years God restored all of it back and I had no idea that was going to happen but I was just seeking God and asking him to help me walk through that season and I paid off all the debts I owed as a result of that crisis and that's important so be faithful in the little things and the big things and God will honor that faith so what cares thanks so much and everybody joining us today god bless you and we'll see you next week