Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

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How Can You Tithe When You Can’t Pay the Bills?

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Most Christians believe that you should tithe, specifically 10% of your income.  While this can be a sacrifice, many Christians are devout in doing this.  But does this rule also apply when you have no money?  Tithing when broke is possible, but you may need to be creative in how you do it.

Tithing When Broke

Start Small

If you’re determined to tithe, start small.  Give what you can.  For years, my husband and I lived in the suburbs of Chicago and made less than $40,000 a year.  We always gave to our church, but we definitely didn’t give 10%.  Now that our income has improved and we’ve moved to a place with a lower cost of living, we have increased how much we give.

There’s nothing wrong with giving what you can and increasing that amount little by little as your financial situation improves.

Tithe Your Sacrifice

We all have areas of our budget where we spend unnecessarily.  Maybe you spend money on a case of beer every month or a Netflix subscription.  Tithing when broke may be in part just a matter of finding those little extravagances in your budget and cut them.  The money from those items becomes money that you tithe.

Find Free Ways to Give Money

There are also free ways you can donate money such as signing up for Amazon Smile.  If you shop through AmazonSmile, .05% of your purchase total goes to the charity of your choosing.  (There are over 1 million charities to choose from!)  I found our church there and signed up.

Likewise, some grocery loyalty cards also have a charitable component.  I signed up for our church through my grocery store’s loyalty card, so a part of every purchase is tithed to my church.

There are other ways you can give for free.  For instance, I signed up for Swagbucks.  I use it sparingly, so I only earn one or two $25 gift cards, but I use those in December to donate a toy to a needy child.  Every year, our church puts up a Christmas tree with gift requests from needy kids.  I always take one and buy something using the free gift cards I’ve earned.

Volunteer

Tithing when Broke
Photo by Anna Earl on Unsplash

If you don’t have any money to give to the church or you can’t give as much as you would like, consider volunteering instead.  There are so many opportunities to volunteer within the church such as serving as an usher or singing in the choir.  The office may need help or you may have specific training such as accounting that you can use when volunteering with the church.

There are also other ways to tithe such as volunteering your time in the community working on houses for Habitat for Humanity or working in a soup kitchen.

Final Thoughts

Tithing is an important part of being a Christian.  However, you may not financially be able to give as much as you would like.  Luckily, there are many others ways to give.  Tithing when broke may require you to give of your time instead or find organizations that give a part of your purchase price to your favorite charity.

Read More

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How We Save Money With Ting as Our Cell Phone Provider

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For the longest time, my husband and I had simple Tracfone flip phones in case of emergency.  We mainly used them just to keep up with one another, if necessary.  We didn’t even have texting.  But then my husband found it necessary to have a cell phone for work.  We didn’t want to be strapped to a cell phone provider who would charge us a hundred dollars a month or more, so we decided to go with Ting, which has no contract requirement.  I love to share with people how we save money with Ting as our cell phone provider because it helps us maintain a modest budget.

How We Save Money with Ting as Our Cell Phone Provider

We’ve upgraded to smart phones.  We can now text, call, search the internet, etc. just like most people in the United States.  However, by using Ting, we’ve found several ways to cut our costs.

Basic Ting Services and Charges

Ting is a provider who charges based on your usage.

Phone Line Charge

Each line that you have on the plan costs $6 a month.  So, for my husband and I, there are two lines.  We pay $12 a month for these.

How We Save Money with Ting as Our Cell Phone Provider

Talk Minutes

There are also base rates for the minutes that you use to talk on your phone.

  • 1 to 100 minutes = $3,
  • 101 to 500 minutes = $9,
  • 501 to 1000 minutes = $18, etc.

Texts

And there are base rates for texts.

  • 1 to 100 texts = $3,
  • 101 to 1000 texts = $5,
  • 1001 to 2000 texts = $8, etc.

In addition, you will also pay taxes and regulatory fees monthly.

Limit Our Usage

Since Ting is basically a pay as you use provider, we try to limit our usage to keep our bills low.  From October 2019 to February 2020, our monthly bill averaged $63.  The highest bill was $84 in October when I was traveling, and the lowest was $46.

Once the pandemic hit and we began to stay home most of the time, our monthly bill dropped to $30.

If you want to focus on keeping your bill low, you can set up usage alerts, such as an email sent to you once you use 450 megabytes, so you don’t go over the 500 megabyte limit before moving into a different charge rate.

You can also enable settings that don’t allow you to make any more texts after a certain number, etc.  This is very helpful if you have teens on your plan.  This allows you to keep their usage within the confines of your budget.

Basic Phones

How We Save Money with Ting as Our Cell Phone Provider

Ting also sells phones.  My husband and I try to go with the most basic model available.  The current phones we use cost less than $200 apiece.  (We bought them during a sale Ting was having.)

We also use a cell phone case to keep our phones in good shape.  My husband and I have both dropped our phones, but they were not damaged thanks to the cases.

Final Thoughts

While we wanted more modern cell phones, we didn’t want to pay a lot for them every month.  The strategies given above are how we save money with Ting as our cell phone provider.  Ting is not in every area, but you can see if they’re in your area by entering your area code on their website.

How a Pay Cut Has Affected Our Finances

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The pandemic has hit many people financially.  While millions of people have lost their jobs, there are also millions who have taken a pay cut.  Our family is very grateful that my husband has both kept his job and been able to work from home the majority of the time.  However, he did experience a significant reduction in salary.

How a Pay Cut Has Affected Our Finances

How a Pay Cut Has Affected Our Finances

Essentially, my husband’s pay cut brought his salary back to where it was six years ago.  When we found out the pay cut was coming, we immediately took action.

Practice an Attitude of Gratitude

Before I even set to work altering our budget to adjust to the new income level, I practiced an attitude of gratitude.  Yes, having a pay cut will make managing our money a bit more difficult, but my husband still has a job.  That job, together with my freelance work, still provides enough money to support our family.  The job still provides us with health care benefits and money in our retirement accounts.

This mind set helped me start to tackle the new budget and think of it as a challenge rather than a struggle.  Even with less money coming in, we’re still in a good position.  That alone is much to be thankful for.

Eliminate Extras from the Budget

Next, I looked at the subscriptions that we have.  I had an eight dollar a month subscription to an exercise site.  Sure, it’s not much per month, but I really didn’t need that subscription.  I’ve found plenty of work outs for free on YouTube.

I also had a subscription to a foreign language app for another $7.99 a month.  I deleted that and instead signed up for Duolingo, which is free.

We had about six monthly subscriptions in our budget, and we cut about half of them.

Find Corners to Cut

After I eliminated the easy fat from the budget, I set to work finding corners to cut.

Reduce the Grocery Budget

How a Pay Cut Has Affected Our Finances
Photo by Maria Lin Kim on Unsplash

I had raised our grocery budget in March when it was hard to find groceries in the early days of the pandemic.  Now, I cut that back.  I also changed the meals that we eat.  Instead of having meat at every single dinner, I’ve instituted a two-night-a-week vegetarian meal.  For the other nights, I try to mostly pick meals where meat serves as a condiment rather than the main star.  For instance, we’ve enjoyed bean soup with one slice of bacon crumbled on top per bowl.  By doing this, we’ve found some new recipes we really enjoy.

Reduce Other Budget Categories

We used to have a travel fund line item in our budget.  That one is now gone.  Not only is it difficult to travel safely with the pandemic, but we simply don’t have the money to travel now.

Likewise, we had a spend category for my husband’s interests and mine as well as activities we did with the kids.  I didn’t want to eliminate that one entirely, but I eliminated it by about 75%.

Increase Some Budget Categories

As strange as it seems, while I was slashing budget categories, I also found a few that I thought prudent to increase.

Emergency Fund

Despite the budget cut, I still make emergency fund savings a priority.   Even though our money is tight, life still goes on.  Over the next few months, we will likely need a car repair.  We’ve already had an $800 home repair during the first few months of the pandemic.  We will likely need to see the doctor or buy medicine.

I want to continue to save for emergencies and recurring, irregular expenses.  If I slash those categories to make our budget a bit more comfortable, then when the expense pops up, we’ll have no way to pay it.  That would cause us to go into debt, which we both want to avoid at all costs.

Kids’ Allowance

This may sound strange, but I chose to increase our kids’ allowance.  We have always had our kids’ allowance directly tied to the chores that they do.  Since we’re home so much now thanks to the pandemic, I increased the number of chores that they do.  (Our house gets much messier when we are in it 24-7.)

How a Pay Cut Has Affected Our Finances

Why did I increase their allowance when money is tight?  Simple.  Now, they have their own money and their own budget.  For instance, my daughter wanted to buy some paints, a paint-by-number kit, and some yarn to keep herself busy with crafts.  She used to ask me for those items, but now that she has a larger allowance, she will pay for those items herself.  Now, I don’t have to be the bad guy saying we don’t have money for the items.  Instead, she (and our other kids) get to pick and choose what they want to buy and what is most important to them.  They’re in control, not me.

Ramp Up Other Work

As soon as we learned about his upcoming pay cut, I set about increasing my work.  My husband’s income provides about 80% our monthly income.  While increasing my work load won’t make up for the decrease in his salary, it does make up for a bit.  An increase in my work load makes the budget a little less restricting.

Find Other Safety Nets

I mentioned to our financial planner that my husband was getting a pay cut.  He let me know that for the year 2020 only, I could withdraw from our retirement account without facing the typical 10% penalty IF our pay was cut or we got COVID-19.

I don’t plan on using this option, but I do appreciate knowing that the option is available should we desperately need it.

Final Thoughts

How a pay cut has affected our finances is pretty dramatic.  However, we’re still financially sound.  We’ve taken the important steps to continue to live within our means and weather this storm.  Most of all, we’re grateful that he still has a job and that he has the flexibility to work from home.