Too many LDS couples get into deep financial water because they forget to figure in their "boat, the USS Tithing," said a financial planning expert at the Brigham Young University Family Expo Tuesday.
Bernard E. Poduska, teaching "Ten Principles of Family Financial Management" on the second day of the two-day conference in Provo, said very often a couple will detail their debts to a bank or loan office without counting in their obligation to pay 10 percent of their income to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.As a result, "as LDS families we continue to qualify for loans we don't qualify for," said Poduska. "Since tithing is not a debt, we don't have to list it."
If it was listed, along with the obligation to pay for missionary expenses and other offerings, many loans would probably be refused because the true debt ratio would be too high, he said.
Poduska said that's only one of the ways LDS people get into financial trouble. LDS people feel somewhat entitled to material reward if they've "been good."
Another pitfall comes in counting income as "gross" but debts as "net." It takes a wage earner $1,000 to earn enough to pay a $600 monthly debt, said Poduska.
People today too often categorize their wants as needs when needs actually are those simple things that have to do with survival, he said.
And 10-cent treats a few times a day for a family of six adds up to a "$22,000 snack" over 10 years.
"We need our snacks, but there's one hole we can plug," he said, "when the money seems to be just floating away."
Poduska said it's critical to assess the cost of a material good against the cost it will put against a relationship, recognizing that joy often comes from those things that represent value of an individual in the relationship.
He said a couple cannot separate finances and feelings and relationships. "If you talk about one, you talk about the other."
He drew an example of a husband who couldn't "afford" the $100 it would cost to ship a wife's family heirloom trunk to her but would easily spend $100 on three dinners out.
To the wife, dismissing the value in shipping out the trunk told her the husband didn't value her.
Poduska said a husband and wife must sit down and define what their values are. "Is it the building of temples and lives?"
Without items of value in the financial picture, it can be discouraging to keep working for nothing, he said.
But to continue as an American society that's $1 trillion in consumer debt is foolhardy too.
Poduska cited 10 principles of Family Financial Management:
1. Financial problems are usually behavior problems rather than money problems.
2. If you continue doing what you are doing, you will continue getting what you are getting.
3. Nothing (no thing) is worth the relationship.
4. If your money is going toward something you value, then you will usually feel a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. But if your money is going toward something you do not value, then you usually experience a sense of frustration and futility.
5. We know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
6. You can never get enough of what you don't need because what you don't need can never satisfy you.
7. Financial freedom is more often the result of decreased spending than increased income.
8. Be grateful for what you have.
9. The best things in life are free.
10. The value of an individual should never be equated with an individual's net worth.
He said too many people are impatient and become indentured servants to their material goods - especially those bought on credit.
"Most of our needs are well met," he said. "If you own more than one pair of shoes, have access to personal transportation and expect to eat more than one kind of food each day, you're in the top 10 percent of all the human beings who've ever lived on the earth."