How We Started Giving Money Away on a Tight Budget
Two years ago, we were not in a position to give anything away.
We had a mortgage, two car payments, a credit card balance we were slowly crawling out of, and a grocery bill that felt like a second mortgage. There was no line item for giving in our budget because there was nothing left over to give. Every month, we ran the numbers, and every month, they came back the same way: not enough.
We tithed anyway. I am not going to pretend that was easy. It was not. We gave ten percent before we paid anything else, and there were months when that meant we were eating rice and beans for the last week. I do not recommend this as a financial strategy. I mention it because it is the starting point of the story, and the story does not make sense without it.
What we learned over the next two years was not about the ten percent. It was about the rest of the ninety. And the thing that changed our finances was not the giving. It was what the giving forced us to do with everything else.
Here is what actually happened when we started giving first.
We stopped thinking of the money as ours.
This is hard to describe without sounding preachy, so let me be specific. Before we tithed first, the money in our account was ours. Our mortgage was ours. Our grocery budget was ours. Every dollar was assigned to something we had chosen. When we tithed first, that changed. The first ten percent was not ours anymore, and it made the rest of it feel less like a possession and more like a stewardship. That sounds like a small difference. It was not. When money feels like something you are managing on behalf of someone else, you manage it differently.
We started tracking every dollar.
Not because we are disciplined people. Because we had to. If you give the first ten percent and then have to live on the remaining ninety, you cannot afford to lose track. We got a notebook. We wrote down every dollar. Rent, food, gas, everything. For the first three months, we were stunned by what we saw. We had been spending about four hundred dollars a month on things we could not name. Takeout. Random purchases. Subscriptions we had forgotten about. The money was not going to anything in particular. It was just leaving.
We cut the things we did not miss.
Once we could see the spending, we could make choices. We canceled three subscriptions we had not used in six months. We stopped buying coffee on the way to work - that alone was about sixty dollars a month. We started cooking at home instead of ordering out three nights a week. None of these cuts felt like deprivation because we could see what they were buying us. Every dollar we did not spend on something we did not care about was a dollar that stayed in the budget.
We started giving above the ten percent.
This is the part that surprised us. After about eight months of tracking and cutting, we had a small surplus. Not a lot. A couple hundred dollars. We could have saved it. We could have paid down the credit card faster. Instead, we started giving it away. Small amounts, to specific needs - a family at church who had lost a job, a missionary we knew, a food drive at the kids’ school. The giving grew slowly. It has not stopped growing since.
Here is the number that surprised me the most.
Two years later, our income has not increased much. Maybe five percent. But we give about four times what we gave two years ago. Same budget. Same jobs. Same mortgage. The difference is not that we suddenly have more money. The difference is that we stopped losing track of it.
The giving did not come out of the surplus. The giving created the surplus. When the first ten percent was committed before anything else, we had to build our lives around a smaller number. And building around a smaller number forced us to see where the money was actually going. The visibility created the savings. The savings created the margin. The margin created the ability to give more.
I do not know if that is the way it works for everyone. I suspect it is not, because I have met people who tithe faithfully and remain broke, and I have met people who give nothing and have plenty. The formula is not a formula. It is just what happened to us.
I am not going to tell you this will work for you.
If you have a mortgage in a city where housing costs have tripled and your income has not, this does not apply. If you have a child with medical needs, this does not apply. If you are on a fixed income, or you are unemployed, or you are behind on rent, giving first is not the answer to your problem. Giving first only works if there is something to give. The first responsibility is to keep the lights on and your family fed.
I am not telling you to tithe. I am not telling you to give more. I am telling you what happened when we started giving first, and how it changed the way we saw the money we had left.
If you want to try it, here is the smallest version I can think of:
Pick a number, even if it is small. Twenty dollars a week. Ten. Five. Commit to it before anything else. Track every dollar you spend for one month. Look at what you spent on. Cut one thing you do not miss. Give the money you saved to one specific need.
That is the whole practice. It is not complicated. It is also not easy. It has been the single biggest financial change of our marriage.
Two years ago we could not give anything. Now we give more than we ever thought we could, on the same income. I do not know how to explain it except to say that giving first forced us to see the rest.