The Oldest Money Curriculum

From Dan's Desk

Nobody handed you a money education. Your father may not have talked about it, school certainly didn't, and so most men I know assembled theirs out of podcasts, half-remembered advice, and a few expensive mistakes. Meanwhile the oldest money curriculum in the world sits on the nightstand with a ribbon in it. This week's lead walks through fifteen verses of it. And for the man whose next big money move is a first home, the second piece covers the mechanical half nobody explains until it costs you.

A quick word if you're new here because a friend or family member passed this along: welcome. You need zero church background to read this newsletter. When Scripture or a churchy term shows up, I'll tell you what it means and why I think it earns its place, and you can weigh it for yourself.

From Wise and Faithful

Proverbs on Money: 15 Key Verses Every Canadian Christian Should Know

The Bible's wisdom book runs thirty-one chapters, and money walks through most of them. Wages, loans, harvests, co-signing, barns. I grouped fifteen verses into five buckets: how money comes in, how it gets stored, what debt does, where wealth hits its limits, and where it is finally meant to flow. Proverbs is short on systems and long on seeing, and the seeing is the point.

The Canadian Homebuying Process, Start to Keys

The mechanical half of buying a first home: which accounts to open and in what order (the FHSA first, and years before you shop, because its 15-year clock starts the day you open it), the nine steps from pre-approval to possession, and the closing costs of 1.5% to 4% that ambush most first-time buyers. If a purchase sits anywhere in your next five years, read this before the open houses do your planning for you.

Worth Your Time

[Article] Bank of Canada Interest Rate Announcement: September 2026
MoneySense
Read
Every one of the 35 economists surveyed called for a hold at 2.25% this week, and a hold is what the country got. The detail worth your attention sits underneath: two of the big six banks now forecast hikes by December, and bond yields have been nudging fixed rates upward while everyone watches the overnight rate. If your renewal lands within a year, build the plan on today's numbers. A cut is a hope. A renewal date is a fact.

[Article] Money and Possessions in Proverbs
Kevin DeYoung, The Gospel Coalition
Read
An older post I went back to while writing this week's lead. DeYoung sorts the whole book's money teaching into a handful of balanced truths: wealth is a creational good, wealth has real limits, and it is foolish to measure faith by either having it or lacking it. A tidy companion to the fifteen verses, from a pastor who reads Proverbs the way it asks to be read.

[Article] More Money, More Marriage: How Breadwinning Matters for Both Men and Women Today
Institute for Family Studies
Read
Research piece: income and marriage still travel together for men, and the men women marry and stay married to out-earn their never-married peers by roughly double. Provision is bigger than a salary, and I will keep saying so. The salary still matters, and this is the honest data on how much.

The Week in One Number

3.7%

The Canadian household saving rate for the second quarter of 2026, from Statistics Canada's national accounts released August 28. Out of every $100 of after-tax income, the average household kept $3.70, and the margin widened only because incomes grew a little faster than spending did. Your saving rate is the rare number in your finances that is almost entirely a decision. The ant stores up in summer without a supervisor (Proverbs 6:6 to 8). Decide your rate on purpose, then automate it so you never have to decide it again.

Run your own margin: Emergency Fund Calculator

Source: Statistics Canada, August 28, 2026

Apologetics Q&A

The question: "Proverbs was written almost 3,000 years ago, for farmers and kings. Why would I take money advice from it when I have an advisor, a spreadsheet, and the internet?"

The answer: Because the instruments changed and the man holding them did not. Interest compounds in a database now instead of a grain ledger, but greed, haste, envy, the itch to co-sign for a friend, and the quiet lie that a little more will finally be enough are exactly where Solomon left them. Notice too what Proverbs refuses to do: it never promises outcomes, and Scripture shelves Job and Ecclesiastes right beside it so nobody turns patterns into guarantees, which is more honesty than most modern money content manages. The deeper claim is simple: if the same God authored both the world and the book, you would expect the book's wisdom to keep matching the world, and after three millennia of economic revolutions it still does. Test it yourself. Try to name one modern money failure Proverbs has not already described.

Good News About the Good News

Alpha's latest annual report counts an estimated 2.8 million people who took the course in 2025, across 158 countries, a 31% jump in one year. Twelve countries ran Alpha for the first time, and the new youth series accounted for 45% of all courses worldwide, more than 47,000 of them run for young people. If you've never heard of it, Alpha is a free series of dinners where anyone can ask anything about faith, with no expectations attached, and there is probably one running near you. Millions of people, many with no church background at all, spent ten evenings last year eating with friends and asking who Jesus is. The gospel still draws a crowd when someone sets the table.

Source: Christian Today

Coming Next Week

Staying with old books for one more week: the most useful thing I have ever read on money anxiety contains no charts, quotes no rates, and was published in 1648. Next week, my full review of Jeremiah Burroughs and The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, including an honest answer on whether a working man can survive the 1640s prose.

The Close

You were handed a money education by accident. The old book on the nightstand offers one on purpose, and whether you have read it all your life or never cracked the cover, the fifteen verses in the lead cost you nothing to test. The hymn at the top calls that Word a firm foundation. Three thousand years of readers have put their weight on it and found it holds. This week, see for yourself.

Grace and peace,
Dan

P.S. If you know a young man assembling his money education out of podcasts, forward him this issue. Fifteen verses will outlast fifteen influencers.