Character is Priority

I heard a sermon on Character today. I won’t go into all of the details, but the Pastor talked about how Character needs to be a priority. It really does end up making a difference in the way you live your life and I was thinking it makes a difference in the way you handle your finances. As parents you want to build character in your kids. But if you are not an example of it… forget it. It will never happen. I was glad to hear that having character DIDN’T MEAN WE HAD TO BE PERFECT… but it does mean you have to make good choices and look for ways to do the right thing.

It seems that the kids have been with us through the mistakes that we have made and quite possibly they have looked at our lessons knowing that it’s a bit of hypocrisy. It used to be that we weren’t paying our bills on time, or setting aside money in our savings, or paying off our debt, and we were even putting ourselves into more debt, so why would they need to worry about such things. Character is priority, but we weren’t teaching it when it came to finances. We want to change that.

Just the other day we had a good time talking to the kids about saving money and hearing what they think about saving for the future. Since we began Project Money they have been “forced” to be thinking about paying off debt, saving money, paying monthly bills and thinking about what we spend every month. It is building character in them. They are learning how to be honest with money, paying bills on time, paying off debt, not getting into debt that will be too overwhelming, setting aside enough savings to cover at least 2 months of living, and budgeting so that there are no surprises at the end of the month.

Yes, character is priority. It is a great lesson to be learned and it is a great lesson to be taught.

 

Comments

[Kristi]

How true.