Spend on What You Love, Including Others

A lot of men fit the same description: mid-thirties, two kids, good income, a colour-coded spreadsheet. Gives almost nothing, and he would tell you he believes in giving. He has just never quite gotten around to building it in. Every category has a number. Travel is on, dining is on, the mortgage is obviously on, and generosity gets whatever is left, which is rarely anything.

He is a thoughtful man. He has organized his spending around his preferences and called it intentionality.

That man is not hard to find.

There is a personal finance writer named Ramit Sethi (you may know him from I Will Teach You to Be Rich or his Netflix show) who has built a large following by arguing, correctly, that most budgeting advice is joyless and shame-based, and that almost nobody sticks with it. The standard budget worksheet, with its 47 categories and its implicit message that you should feel guilty about anything enjoyable, makes people feel worse for a while and then gets abandoned.

His alternative is what he calls "conscious spending." Figure out what you actually love, spend extravagantly on those things, and cut ruthlessly on everything else. Don't apologize for the $400 dinner if experiences are what make you come alive. Drive the used Civic without guilt if cars mean nothing to you.

I find this genuinely helpful. I'll say it again before I push back: it's genuinely helpful.

He also has a concept he calls "money dials": ten categories of spending that represent what people commonly value: convenience, travel, health and fitness, experiences, freedom, relationships, generosity, luxury, social status, self-improvement. Each one is a dial you can turn up or down based on your actual values. A man who loves to travel and hates maintaining a nice home should have a great travel budget and a simple apartment. Turn up what you love. Turn down what you don't.

That is a useful framework. And to be fair, generosity makes the list. It sits there at number seven, right between relationships and luxury. Ramit is not an ungenerous man.

The pushback I have is small, and it is about placement. Generosity is on the list. What I want to question is where it sits, as one preference among ten, dialled up or down the same way you'd dial up dining out or dial down social status. That framing assumes your personal values are the right starting point for deciding what you give.

For a Christian man, it is the wrong one.

The Framework Does What It Claims, and Nothing More

Sethi's conscious spending model is doing a specific job: helping people stop spending by habit and start spending by intention. It names a real problem, that most people's spending bears no resemblance to what they actually value, and offers a real solution. If you say you care about your relationships but you spend $80 a month on a gym you never use and $12 on the one dinner out with your wife every two months, something is misaligned. The money dials concept gives you language for that.

That is good work. I have recommended his book. I will probably recommend it again.

What the framework cannot do, and does not try to do, is answer the deeper question. Sethi's whole architecture is built on self-knowledge. What do you love? What brings you alive? The framework assumes your preferences are the right starting point for your spending decisions, and that dialling them up based on your values is what good stewardship looks like.

For a secular personal finance writer, that is a reasonable assumption.

But the Christian tradition asks a different prior question. Before "what do you love?" it asks "what are you for?"

Those questions lead to very different spending frameworks, and the difference is sharpest in how each one handles the generosity dial.

Why the Rich Farmer's Strategy Was Sound, and Still Got Him Called a Fool

In Luke 12, Jesus is asked to settle a dispute over an inheritance. He declines ("Who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?") then uses the moment to say something that cuts deeper than the money question: "Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions."

Then he tells the parable of the rich farmer. The man had an exceptional harvest. His response was entirely reasonable by any modern standard: plan for abundance, maximize storage, secure the future. "Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry." The strategy looks sound, and the man who built those barns was careful. He was doing exactly what Sethi's framework would produce for a man whose top money dials were freedom and security.

Jesus calls him a fool, and the verdict follows: "This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God." The farmer had treated the abundance as his to configure.

That phrase, "his to configure," is what I keep coming back to. The conscious spending framework is, at its core, a configuration project. You have resources. You configure them to maximize what you love. The dials are yours to set.

Scripture gives you a different job description. You are the manager of what you hold, and God is the owner.

This frame leaves enjoyment intact, good coffee and family vacations included. What it moves is the centre: you hold resources in trust, on behalf of something larger than yourself.

Think about what that actually does to the spending decision. If the money is mine to configure, then the question is always: "Am I getting the maximum satisfaction out of this?" Every dollar is a vote for myself. But if I am a steward, the question becomes: "Am I deploying this well on behalf of someone else's purposes?" The second question is harder, and it produces a very different kind of person over time.

What Changes When Giving Is Decided Before the Dials

I want to be careful now, because this can tip into exactly the kind of joyless moralism I just criticized.

Grim budgets are nobody's calling. I own money dials. I have things I love spending on and things I don't care about, and I think it is wise to allocate accordingly. A man who loves hospitality can run a generous food budget, and a man who loves hiking can put real money into gear, and both of them can be stewarding well while they do it. Stewardship has room for pleasure in it.

What I am arguing is that generosity belongs in a different category from the other dials altogether. It is a prior commitment, decided ahead of everything else, the lens you look through before you ever get to your travel budget or your dining-out habits.

There is a moment in 2 Corinthians 9 that I find more practically useful than almost any financial advice I've encountered. Paul writes: "Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver." What strikes me is the sequence. Decided in your heart to give, before the collection plate comes around. Before the appeal is made. Before the need is presented. The decision is made in advance, from conviction, and it shapes what is available for everything else.

You decide what you are called to give first, from the heart and with joy, and then you run your preferences through whatever is left.

Sethi's framework has no slot for that inversion, because it was built for a different job.

The Dial I've Turned Up, and the One I Haven't Always

I have a confession. I have dials I've turned up, and I know exactly which ones they are.

I love having people over. I think hospitality is part of what we are called to as a household, and I am glad to spend there without losing sleep over it. I also like good coffee more than is strictly necessary, and I have made my peace with that.

But I have also had seasons where I turned up the dials I love while the generosity category stayed flat. It happened by inertia, and inertia is easiest to catch in the month a raise lands, which is most of what I wanted to say in the letter to the man who just got his first raise. That is the drift the man in the spreadsheet never caught: everything categorized, and the generosity line never moving.

I know the pull of it.

What I've come to believe, slowly, is that the generosity question comes first. You ask it before any other dial gets touched: "What is this household called to give?" That question has a real answer, a finite one, decided in the heart and cheerful, and it shapes the space the other dials are working in.

Proverbs 11:25 says: "A generous person will prosper; whoever refreshes others will be refreshed." The prosperity gospel hears a formula for getting richer in that verse. What it describes is the kind of person generosity produces over time: a man who holds resources loosely enough to actually enjoy them, because he is no longer depending on them to provide what only God can provide.

A man who has decided his giving first has a different relationship to the remaining dials. His travel and his table land differently, because the performance has gone out of them. He is free.

Your Neighbour Has a Prior Claim on What You Hold

The ten money dials on Sethi's list all share one feature: they are about what you experience. Travel: something you experience. Experiences: explicitly. Even relationships, framed his way, is about the meals and the memories you enjoy with people you love. Even generosity, framed his way, is a personal preference, one of your values, turned up or down based on how much it matters to you. The framework is built around your first-person experience of your life.

Your neighbour is missing from it altogether, both as a person and as someone with a prior claim on what you have.

That absence is deliberate. His framework is explicitly about optimizing your experience of your own life. But for men trying to figure out what it means to handle money as a Christian, the question always eventually arrives at the person on the other side of the fence. The family in the congregation who is three months behind. The international student from church who is eating poorly because the exchange rate is brutal this year. These people are concrete, and the money dials model has no place to put them.

Sethi is doing his job well. A Christian framework was never his project, and I'm not expecting one from him.

But I am building one, and a Christian spending framework has to account for the people around you: your neighbour, and the man in your church who is in financial crisis and won't ask anyone for help. You exist for them, at least in part, and in Scripture that claim sits close to the centre.

1 Timothy 6:17-19 addresses wealthy people (and if you are reading this in Canada with a regular income, you are wealthy by most meaningful measures) with this: "Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share." Willing to share. That word describes a settled posture toward what you have, the kind that is ready before anyone asks and before the ask has to be compelling.

A man with that posture has already settled the generosity question, so his travel dial and his generosity dial never compete. Now he is deciding whether he wants a nicer car or a better vacation. Those are real decisions, and they happen downstream of something already decided.

One Question to Ask Before You Open the Other Dials

Try this as an experiment.

Before you touch any of the other dials, before you think about whether you can afford the ski trip or whether you should upgrade the kitchen, sit down with your household budget and ask: "What are we called to give this year?"

The wording matters, because "what can we afford to give" reliably produces the answer zero. "Called to give" requires you to decide something in advance, from conviction, and then organize the rest of your spending around it.

If you have no giving practice at all, if that line on your budget is blank or "occasionally," start with 10% of your take-home income, which is the tithe, and treat it as a starting point. The tithe calculator will show you what that looks like on your actual income. And in Canada, charitable donations to registered charities generate a real tax credit: the federal credit alone is 29% on amounts above $200, which means the net cost of giving is meaningfully lower than it looks on paper. If 10% sounds impossible given your current situation, start with 2%. Make the decision, write it in the budget, and make it the first line.

For most people, the church is the natural first home for this decision; it is the community you are embedded in, the one doing the long work of formation and care that money actually supports. But let the giving question come first, before the dial conversation starts.

Generosity runs deeper than financial discipline, down to the question of where your heart is actually anchored, and the gospel page on this site is where I trace that. It is the ground underneath the money question.

Then open your money dials. You still get to have them: the travel, and the used Corolla or the nicer one. Those preferences are real and worth honouring. The conscious spending plan walks through the actual five-number system for setting them, once the giving line is already decided.

You just hold them differently. Because they are no longer the whole story.

The Man Who Gets There Keeps His Dials

I want to come back to the man I opened with, the one with the colour-coded spreadsheet and a generosity line that gets whatever is left.

He inherited a framework where spending is a configuration project, and he ran it well, like the thoughtful man he is. He just hadn't asked the prior question.

I do not know if he will.

But I know what it looks like when a man does. He keeps spending on what he loves, vacation included. The change is in how he holds his income. It was his to configure; now he holds it in trust, for his family and his neighbour, on behalf of a kingdom he did not build.

The man who gets there still has money dials.

He just holds them in open hands.