061 - Giving Different, Giving Better
If you're a regular listener, you know generosity is one of our favorite topics. This is Meaning Over Money, and very few things provide as much meaning as joyful and sacrificial generosity. In today's episode, host Travis Shelton discusses a unique way to handle our month-to-month giving that provides so much more freedom, intentionality, and flexibility. This method has changed his life, as well as the way many of his clients view and handle their own generosity. We hope this is the simplest, most impactful information you absorb all week!
Past episode referenced in today's episode:
026 - The Secret Powers of Sinking Funds (As Always, It's Not About the Money!)
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Full Transcript:
As you know, I love generosity. Whenever a coaching client wants to talk about generosity, it's pretty much the highlight of my day or my week. I love talking about generosity and the question comes up and people ask, “how can we do this generosity stuff better?”
Now, part of better for a lot of people is increasing their generosity because more is always better with generosity. It just is. But they say, “how do we do it better?” And there's a lot of nuances that we talk about on that topic. How do we give better? And there's pieces of it, like we need to give for the right reasons.
We need to find out who to give to. We need to make sure that we're not giving out of arrogance or we're trying to gain influence. We need to make sure we're doing the right things for the right reasons, but logistically how do we give better? And so there's a concept that I talk about often, and I'm starting to have clients come back and say, “Travis, this is the best!”
Like this has changed everything. And so I thought, well, we just take a few minutes to talk about it because I think it's worth noting. It changed my life and I suspect it would change others’, but it's really starting to gain some traction with the people that I have the privilege of serving. We talked about sinking funds in a prior episode, and I'll link that in the show notes.
We give a certain percentage of our income to our local church or to you name it, whatever the causes or that thing. But what we don't ever think about is having a sinking fund for giving because giving is something we do all the time. So it doesn't make intuitive sense to have a sinking fund for giving. So I want you to hear me out on this. I am a big fan of this idea. I've done it personally for 15 years.
I have a separate checking account that's just for giving. So every month when my wife and I give, we don't give to our church or into these other organizations. We give it to our giving fund. And then from there, we give to our church or to those other organizations that mean a lot to us. And that might seem like we're splitting hairs in parsing words here, but it's not.
And I'm going to explain why. So we make that decision to give at the beginning. We know how much we want to give. And we're committed to giving it. The problem is once we're committed to doing something, life can still happen. And we may not know who we want to give to. We might know some of it, but we might not know all of it.
So I love this idea that when we say we're going to give we just go ahead and give to our giving account. Now here's the beautiful part. Once we give to this account, now there's really no barriers. All there is is generosity. So when a need pops up, like when our neighbor’s furnace goes out or when somebody loses their job or their kid gets sick or you fill in the blank, when then happens, you don't have to say, “oh, well, can we give, how much can we give?”
Where can we give, where do we give from, how's this going to work out? No, no, no. You've already said because you have a giving account and you've given to it every month. And so you may have some float in that account. And so when the neighbor's furnace goes out or their car breaks down, or their kid gets sick, you just act. You just act. There is no decision, you feel it in your heart, we need to act. And then you act.
This is an emotional game changer for a lot of people. And so I'm a big fan of this idea. And as I'm watching clients, it's becoming more successful than I even thought it was going to be. And for a lot of them, they'll say, “Travis, that's the biggest thing that's come out of this. That feels like it's changed our life. I never expected that for me. It just kind of feels like a little life hack that helps me process my giving and, be a little bit more, be more intentional, so that we can be more impulsive in our giving when those opportunities are.”
And there's something else that can happen. It's easier when we're doing this and we're doing it this way. It's easier to track our giving. It's easier to have an understanding of who we're giving to. And I love the piece of it when my wife and I get to budget for our giving and we just shoot high. We pick a number and we put that into our giving account. Then we just freely give from there.
And I think it's been a very unifying piece of our relationship. I don't think either one of us historically were very generous. I don't want to call her selfish, but I'll call myself selfish. I think I was, and something happened many years ago that triggered my generosity. And so this gives me life. Having money in our generosity fund always gives me life to be able to bless others.
And so that's just something to think about as you're kind of setting up your finances. I always say, we need to set it. In a way that's simple and that makes sense to us. And that doesn't drive us crazy, simple as always. Good. And so that may be one idea.
And so what it looks like for me, and for a lot of my clients, is we have our primary checking account in which our income flows into that. All of our income sources for both spouses flow into that, all expenses come out of that and then connected to that checking account will be a savings account for an emergency.
We want our emergency fund to be close. I don't care if it earns interest or not. I'm not going to dwell on $30 of annual interest when that money is needed, it's needed today and then connected to your primary checking account is a third account called our giving fund. And so that's how I structure it.
And that's how a lot of my clients structure it. I'm not saying it's the right way. I'm just saying it is a very simple way that works really, really well. I just thought I'd take a few minutes to talk about that because my clients are starting to say, “Hey, Travis, this is working so well for us.”
And it's opening up our generosity. And as you know it’s my favorite topic, I wish everybody would violently pursue unhinged generosity. And this is one way in which we can train ourselves to start heading down that road. So I hope this helped, I hope it added a little bit of value and maybe it's something you implement in your own journey. That's all I have for today.