Proverbs 22:26-27
Do not be one who shakes hands in pledge or puts up security for debts;
If you lack the means to pay, your very bed will be snatched from under you.
I have always been afraid of debt, for some reason. (Maybe the fear of having my bed snatched from under me!) Buying the home Tom described in an earlier post this week made me extremely anxious. It was still fairly early in our marriage, and although we had the earning potential, we had also started a family. We were in over our heads, and by God's grace we escaped unscathed, to settle into our present "forever" home. God led us safely here, to this home, to this community. I think we learned many lessons about money and debt in our journey to Contoocook. God was teaching us, and giving us the wisdom to raise our family.
Holy Lord, I am so thankful for the life you have led me through. I try to learn from you, from your Word. Help me to continue to follow your teaching about money and debt. Amen
Becky, transforming
Pic by Kay
Proverbs 22-26-27
We live in a credit card driven world. Too many people are not mindful of when the time comes to pay things back. Some are never without debt! My Dad would not understand this. He was very frugal (he had to be) and hardly ever used credit and I don’t remember him owning a credit card. It is more difficult today for many reasons: the cost of items, the lure of advertising, and the future seems so far away. I thought we had taught our girls these same values and yet while in college they built up debt they could not pay and we had to do it for them. But it was a lesson learned …
Friday, February 16th, 2024
Proverbs 22:26-27
Be not one of those who give pledges, who put up security for debts. If you have nothing with which to pay, why should your bed be taken from under you?
Don’t borrow what you are unable to pay back. It seems like reasonable advice, yet each year millions of Americans sink deeper and deeper into debt with no realistic plan of how to be free from it. We all may need a line of credit to pay for a home, perhaps a car, but the temptation to overextend ourselves with no plan on how to repay what we owe is a real problem in our society today. The Bible is clear that when something…
Proverbs 22:26-27
We will never see a CapitalOne or American Express commercial using these verses as its theme. Credit card debt is a relatively new phenomenon. I don’t recall my parents having a bank credit card until I was 10 or so. Credit card debt in the US between 1970 and 2018 rose by 24,500%. When we lived in NY, I had over ten credit cards with balances on all of them. Following the advice of our financial advisor, listening to Larry Burkett and Dave Ramsey on Christian radio, and responding to Becky’s anxiety by turning our finances over to her, we eliminated all that debt and learned to carry one card for each of us and paying them off…