The Ant Principle: Saving for What? And How?
Vern Peterman · Nov 24, 2002
Personal Finance, No. 07
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/48262250247665

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

wisely, but he who sleeps in harvest is a son who acts shamefully." There is this principle of putting something by for a future need, and we're going to look at it some more, but that's the general idea of putting something away for a future need. It shows up again, even in Genesis. The last part of Genesis talks about Joseph, and here's Joseph, and what does he do?

He tells the Pharaoh, he says, you've got seven years of bad time coming up. That's the bad news. The good news is you've got seven years of good time coming before that. Save up during those seven years of good time so that you'll have something during the seven years of bad time. The same saving principle, isn't it? You have a time when you've got provision, save up for the time when you're going to need it.

Okay? It's pretty basic. Yes. Terribly inconvenient, isn't it? But we'll talk about that. We'll talk about that. I'm not exactly sure you'll find things like Tao and Standard and Poor's in the Bible, but we'll get there. Now, someone might say, yeah, but that's Old Testament stuff. How do I know that that carries over?

Well, that's why we have the 2 Corinthians 12.14 principle that Paul refers to. And he's talking in his instance about his relationship with the church. And he finishes off verse 14, For children are not responsible to save up for their parents, but parents for the children. So the idea is, here's this concept of saving up for a future need. Taking from future income, putting aside to meet that future need.

Similarly, but less explicitly, in 1 Timothy 5.8, the idea that believers should provide for those of their own household. Now, the basic principle in saving is this. It is fully biblical to see a need that is coming up, either near term or medium term or long term, and to save from current income for that future need. That future need is going to show up in one of two ways.

Either it will be because there is low or no income anticipated in the future, and you're going to need to draw from it, or there is a future need that is too large to meet from what you anticipate to be the future income. See the difference there? In other words, one is because you don't have the money coming in at all, or it's not enough. The other is simply because, yes, I expect to have income coming in the future, but when this particular need comes up, it's going to be too big for me to meet it all at one time. So I better start saving up in order to do so. So that's the idea.

You see a future need, whether it's next month, several months from now, a few years from now, decades from now. You see the future need and you save from current income in order to meet that need. The Old and New Testament both reflect that as a pattern. Now, simple enough you say. That's one reason why, do you remember in the budget sheets that we talked about before, the pattern there is that a monthly budget is a good tool, and again it's not a law, it's a tool, but it's a good tool for looking at talking about these needs that you see coming up, especially between a husband and wife, but looking at these future needs and saying, hey, we've got this car here and it's going to need a timing belt change and it's going to need the oils changed and pretty soon we're going to have to do this to it. You see the needs that are coming down a few months down the road, a few years down the road, maybe even decades down the road, And it's a good medium, if you will, for especially a husband and wife to communicate about it, but also just even for a single person to just plan to meet the future need, whatever it is. The budget has a sort of a checklist, if you will, so you don't overlook something or forget it.

So that's helpful. Now, there are some biblical principles that guide us besides just looking ahead and seeing a need. Let's take a look at those. Proverbs 23-27 starts off with, Know well the condition of your flocks, and pay attention to your herds.

For riches are not forever, nor does a crown endure to all generations. When the grass disappears, a new growth is seen, and the herbs of the mountains are gathered in. The lambs will be for your clothing, and the goats will bring the price of the field, and there will be goat's milk enough for your food, for the food of your household, and sustenance for your maidens. Therefore, everybody at Holly Hills must have sheep and goats.

In order to be biblical, I'm afraid that's the way it is. When you have one-tenth, it's going to be real tough to put it in that slot in the box upstairs. No. What's that? Hey, we're on the fifth floor. What do you think we're doing? You know? Peterman's fifth floor dairy. It's out on the balcony. You know? Yeah. Boy, it takes a lot of work to keep the apartment manager from finding out, too. OK. Yes, there we go.

The point being, if you look at that time, really they had a lot of their savings that was invested in their livestock. They looked at the future need being provided out of what they had. Not all of what they would save up would be simply coinage. They would look up at, hey, I'm accumulating some sheep so that when something comes I can sell them and that kind of thing. So this is not just simply day to day. It's looking ahead to future needs. And notice even here it gives a time perspective. Riches aren't forever. The crown does not endure for all generations. There's a long-term time perspective in this too.

But here's the thing to remember. It starts off with know well your flocks. And so where this comes in is savings and investments cannot be put on autopilot. You can't just say, well, I put it here, that's it. There needs to be an ongoing knowledge about them. There needs to be an understanding. And so what that says is we need to be careful about where we put the money. We need to be careful about how it's doing.

And we need to be looking at, you know, is this a good place for me to put it? So one of the principles that falls out of it is only invest in what you know about. Don't invest in something you don't understand. Okay? That one principle will keep people from getting in all kinds of trouble. Only invest in what you know about.

Okay, now, second principle, Ecclesiastes 11.2.

Divide your portion into seven, even to eight, for you do not know what misfortune may occur on the earth. We don't know the future, do we? Only God knows the future. But the principle is that there are risks out there of various kinds. Some of them we can anticipate and some of them may surprise us.

But if we distribute what we have saved up, not just so that we have, you know, different piles, but we're getting things away from the same risk. That's his point here. Getting things away from the same risk. Someone might say, but I've got eight different stocks that I bought.

Not enough. Not enough to get away from the risk. 90% of all stocks go down when the market goes down. If the market goes down, 90% of stocks go with them. The rest of them either stay even or go the other way. But what that says is, just having eight stocks is not enough.

So what's the problem? The problem is that you need to have it spread so that you don't have the same risk hitting what you've got saved up. So that's the idea, to look at, okay, if things change, this might get impacted, but this one won't, and this one won't. See the idea there? Not just different places, but spreading so that you're not subject to the same risks.

So that's the next principle there. The next one, Ecclesiastes 3, 1-8, and I won't read it because it's rather lengthy, but this is the one, there's a time appointed for everything, there's a time for every event under heaven. And it's got two kinds of principles for us. One principle is this, that there is a time of sowing and reaping.

There is a time of, you know, different events happen in life. And if you read through the list, there are life events, aren't there? There are different things that happen. In our modern era we have some other events we might add to the list. But life is like that, isn't it?

You'll have one time when one thing is happening and another time when another thing is happening. So one perspective is anticipate those changes of time that are going to create needs. So that's one principle. The second principle is not all times are alike.

Do you remember the chart that we looked at in our second meeting that we had in the appendix there and we saw the stock market over the last 300 years basically? And one of the things you notice is that yes, the general pattern was up, but there were periods of time when the stock market stayed down for sometimes two or three decades. So you can have a trend But within that longer-term trend, you've got to look at it and just kind of ask for any investment, what time is it?

What time is it? Because investments tend to go through cycles. Some of them are very short, will cycle in the middle of the day. Others of them are long time cycles. And we need to just be aware of what kind of investment do I have? It's a part of knowing your flock's wealth, so to speak. What kind of investment do I have here time-wise? We'll talk more about that in a minute.

Okay, the next point there, this is on page 37, looking at Proverbs 21.5.

The plans of the diligent lead surely to advantage, but everyone who is hasty comes surely to poverty. That plans of the diligent, two things. One, planning is just fine. There are some Christians who have gotten the idea and some Christian leaders who will actually teach that don't plan. And what this is telling you, no, do plan. Do plan.

Even the Lord had parables where he talked about planning and counting the cost of things. But the plans of the diligent, and that's the other characteristic, is there's diligence. When you think of diligence, what do you think of? What comes to mind? What's another word that you use? Pardon?

Working hard, okay? So there's hard work applied. Good. What else? It's an industrious character to it. Take your time, okay? Putting into it what it requires in order to make this work out. Good. What else? Yes. Ongoing persistence. Very important. This plays back into the principle where you don't just put the money in and figure it's on autopilot. So just a key principle here. Planning is good. Diligence in pursuing the plan is also good.

And it's biblical. And then it shows the opposite. Everyone who is hasty comes surely to poverty. That's the flip side of this thing. Forget get rich quick. Forget get rich quick. Typically what happens, those are high risk deals. Of course, with a high-risk deal, what that means is there's always a good chance you're just going to lose your shirt, too. So that's the flip side of this proverb. One, plan and diligence. The flip side of that is try to get rich quick. And why would you want to get rich quick? What would be the temptation in that? Why would that be a temptation? It doesn't take a lot of effort. No, I'm not going to plan diligently. I'm going to just make it up all this week. So not a lot of effort.

Why else? It's amazing, the stories of lottery winners is not a good story. Self-help groups they have groups. They'll get together and you know share their woes So yeah, the get-rich-quick thing just isn't great one of the things that happened during the late the late 1990s is there was this telecom bubble and in the telecom stocks did you know way up and then way down and I was showing Nancy a few weeks back a list of these guys who had who lost two to four billion dollars in in the telecom bubble. It was like it all went up and it all went down. So they were multi-billionaires and it all just shrank down to nothing. That kind of come and go phenomenon can happen real easily.

It goes back to the dividing your portion issue as well, that principle. Just to show it by example and not so much by principle, even the Lord tells a parable in which he talks about the stewards, and he says, hey, you should have, to the steward who took the one talent and left it, he says, you should have put the money in the bank and at least got interest. So that principle is out there. Now, I would suggest here that you consider four elements as kind of measuring criteria of anything you're going to save with or invest towards.

First one is safety. Again, safety has to do with the return of your money. Little two-letter word, the return of your money. Not on your money, but the return of it. We've got this issue of safety and that is a part of what this dividing your portion is going to help with. But having some funds that are safe and assessing the safety of things that you're investing in is important.

The next one is liquidity. How quickly can I get at this money if I need it? Some things I can just decide, okay, I need to get this and I can get access to it and I can get it in minutes. Other things, say a piece of property, Some people sell things quickly, but sometimes property can take a while to get unraveled from. So that's something that's non-liquid. And there are things kind of at both ends and it shades in the middle in terms of liquidity.

Next thing, volatility. The value of some investments goes up and down. When we put our money in a bank account, we typically don't expect volatility, do we? We sure hope so, hope not. But there are things that go up and down substantially, or can go up and down substantially. Stocks is one of them. Even bonds can fluctuate in value. How about real estate? It can change. Some markets have a volatility that will change several times in a day. Others, it may be once in a lifetime.

Take for example, it's pretty much been within our lifetime so far that we saw the gold market back in the early 80s that peaked up. Remember that? It went up to around 800 plus bucks and it was like up there and then down. Around the same time, Silver went up to about 50 bucks an ounce and now it's less than five Okay, so I mean some markets go bang and then down and you don't see them come back for years The rare coin markets is another example Just numismatic coins went through the roof and then back down and they haven't recovered since some markets have a once-in-a-lifetime kind of a you know, peak in their price. Interestingly enough, just within the last month, the head of the NASDAQ, I was amazed to hear this admission, the head of the NASDAQ says, we will probably not see a boom in the NASDAQ again in our lifetime.

Interesting. He was calling that a once in a lifetime market. Interesting. So that's important to keep in mind though. That kind of volatility, is this the sort of thing where it's going to jump up and down through the course of a day? Or maybe not for another lifetime, outside of my lifetime. People frequently get taken, I knew one fellow that had half a garage full of silver bars that he bought at 50 bucks an ounce. It's now worth less than 10% of what he paid for them. He may still have a garage full, I don't know. Or half a garage.

But this issue of what's the volatility like? We have to be careful we're not jumping on just something that's going to go and disappear. The next one is this rate of return. When we talk about safety as the return of your money, this rate of return is the return on your money. Is there an interest rate or an increase in value and what is that expected to be? So those are the four kind of variables you want to ask about any investment you're looking at dealing with.

Now, based on the biblical principles that we've laid out and these considerations here, what I suggest that I think is helpful to think in terms of is this triangle, the saving and investing triangle. The idea is that at the bottom, at the base, you've got a foundation of safe investments that are liquid. And even among those, it's not a bad idea to split it up. Remember Solomon's advice here, divide your portion to seven and even of eight. Split it up if you have very much there.

This conservative base is where you're primarily concerned about the return of your money. That's your primary concern. If it has a low interest rate, You may say, well, for this, I'm not going to be too worried about it. I'd like to get more, but the safety of it is going to be your primary concern. The next section there is the investment segment. Oh, excuse me. Page 39. Let me not jump ahead here. Let me give you an example of what might be considered a conservative base here.

I give examples of money market funds, bank or credit union deposits, U.S. Treasury money market funds, and maybe a small amount of cash on hand, something of that sort. Some people would throw gold in that. I'm not too big on piling too much of that stuff up. The idea is that you have safe liquid funds here that you can count on. That's this conservative base. The next thing, investment. This is where you're starting to shift more to a return on your money versus a return of your money. I'm not saying you're forgetting safety. But the idea is you're looking more to get some return here.

You don't want to do this with the bottom tier, this conservative base that you built. But the idea is when you're venturing into here, here is where the principle of know your flocks really counts. Because you don't want to invest in anything you don't understand.

That's where people can get into real trouble. Something to look at here, here are some examples. Individual stocks, individual bonds, other financial instruments, mutual funds investing in the above, viatical settlements. Now we did this Wednesday and people said, what are viatical settlements? You can get a pretty good rate of return assuming the whole thing works out.

Usually there are funds that deal with that and what they'll do is they'll They'll get a list of people who have, say, a terminal disease. Those people will maybe have a half million or a million dollar life insurance policy. And the doctor has told them, you know, you're going to die in this period of time. And what they'll say is, all right, look, you have a million dollar policy. We'll give you $800,000 now if you'll sign over the value of the policy for when you die.

So what that does is gives them funds to do things with. while they're still living. So they get a benefit out of it and then the investors then get the money at the end of six months, two years, whatever the period of time is that the person dies. So anyway, people can make money that way and numbers like 15 to 20% frequently happen there. Trust deeds. These days with declining interest rates, some of those may not have quite the return that they would otherwise have but people buy and sell those. And I'm not saying these are all things you should do. I'm just saying these are examples.

Tax liens and tax lien funds. People who are behind on their taxes on a piece of property. The government wants to get paid those taxes and so if you'll go in and pay the taxes on there, you can end up getting the property and selling it for the taxes. Rare coins is another one.

Again, that's one I mentioned that's basically peaked out in the early 1980s and has never come back, but again, people buy and sell it. Conservative Real Estate and Real Estate Investment Trust, and this is only a partial list. People invest in all kinds of things. Some people make money just buying and selling Hummels.

But the reality is, you want to only buy what you understand, You don't want to do this at the exclusion of your conservative base, and you still want to do this dividing your portion principle where you're spreading things out. So you're not subject to the same risks. Even if I feel like I understand, for example, the real estate market very well, it's still not advisable for me to put everything in the real estate market. So, case in point.

The next one is speculation. Now, speculation goes beyond the investing area and it tends to be things where you're looking at an even higher rate of return but also higher risk. Some people have done consistently really well with that. Some people have lost their shirts.

I would suggest that you not invest what you can't afford to lose. The riskier it gets, the farther it goes up above on this triangle, the more you need to think real carefully about I'm hoping for a rate of return on it, but it may be with some of the speculative investing that the return of my money might be at risk, and you need to remember that. Okay. Examples of some of these are options, shorting stocks, commodity futures, speculative real estate.

Those might be all in that category. One of the things... Yeah, Bob? Yes. Did you put gambling in that question? That's the very top of the pyramid. As a matter of fact, I would say it is more like standing on top of the pyramid. And the chance that you're going to be split in two is very good. As a matter of fact, Kirk, I think you asked me a question several weeks ago about isn't just putting your money in the stock market the same as gambling. It can be.

And this goes back to if I don't know about that market, if I don't understand it, then yes, it certainly is because I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm just taking a risk, period. The more you know about the market, the more you can have a chance of swaying your return one way or the other. But you're right, it could be gambling if all I'm doing is just saying, gee, I think that might be a good place, and I put my money in it, and it gets eaten up.

I mean, seriously now, I guess in a gambling case, I'm not defending it, because I think that's a problem. But there was a time before the Lord, right? Well, yeah. But seriously now, gambling is legalized, right? There are some forms of gambling that might be ultimately safer if you're educated in the game you're playing than in some cases here.

I'd have a hard time recommending it to people. I think as you go up this pyramid, you're looking at greater risk and what happens is gambling is an element of greater risk. On the one hand, you need to be intelligent about what the risks are. On the other hand, you can be starting to play games with the Lord on these things, too, if we're not careful and justifying risks that we shouldn't be taking, or maybe even arenas of investing we shouldn't be messing with.

Bob is thinking of the blackjack genius, who they throw out and never let come in again because they take over. There are people that do that. I have a hard time encouraging people to invest in that. Nancy and I lived in Nevada. We lived in Carson City, which is the state capital, so it's more dominated by the state government than it is by gambling. Nonetheless, we had gambling within blocks of our house. and lived around it all the time, and we also knew people whose lives were ruined and had to leave Nevada because their lives were ruined, and in many cases it severely threatened the marriage. So I'd have a hard time recommending it, especially having seen it up close as a way of doing things. Now, let's revisit some of these things.

The know your flocks principle. This is in the middle of page 40. Before investing in anything, We're best off to be sure we know about that investment safety, liquidity, volatility, and rate of return and other things that will impact the investment. You may have other aspects of it besides those four, but certainly those four are going to be important. Something else is it's highly recommended that you get an objective input, objective information on what's being presented to you. Frequently, the people who are selling something have something to sell and so you're not necessarily going to get an objective picture from them as to what this is all about. So one of the things we look at here is you want to build that base but you want to build as you go up that base using the know your flocks principle. Start off by building that base and then as you can grow your understanding then you can move into areas of investment. If you don't know about the investment, it does not make biblical sense to move into it. Here's one area of skew, for example.

From 1982 until the beginning of the year 2000, there are people that made money in the stock market hand over fist. It was a period of time where the prices went up and people felt like they could count on it and the mentality that grows is, well, prices are always going to go up. And therefore, even though the market has declined substantially, and you know, you hear various numbers, but estimates in the range of about seven or eight trillion dollars have been lost since the first quarter of the year 2000.

Okay? Yes. Isn't, or doesn't that just exemplify putting two of the principles aside? First of all, people invested in the dog market without understanding it. Yes. And second, They just put it there and left it and didn't watch it to be served and heard that to know when to get out. Right. Yep. Use that know your flocks principle to say, okay, here's what I know and understand and can invest in safely.

Now, from there, as I move up the pyramid, what am I going to do to help increase my rate of return? And the truth is there's so many different options out there. I need to pick what I'm going to study and learn about so that I know what I'm investing in. And like I say, if you're asking me what biotical settlements are, don't buy them tomorrow.

Okay? All right, so anyway, key point there. You don't want to get into the Dagwood syndrome, hence the cartoon there, where you find your stock market quotes on the funny paper. Now, the next one is the divide your portion principle. That's intended to reduce your exposure to risks of the same category. One of the things that people have been advised to do, especially over the last 10 and 15 years, is put everything in stocks.

It's always going to go up. Oh yeah. And I've got a bridge to sell you. And I've got some oceanfront property in Arizona too. The thing is that there isn't anything like that. That what we saw as exceptional is not the thing to build a rule on. Even the guy who has the NASDAQ knows that. He'll tell you straight out, we'll never see a market like that in our lifetime. And he's right.

One of the things that happens is people frequently get over-weighted in one area. One of the recent tragedies we saw financially is the many people who not only had their jobs but all their money invested in Enron. Horrible messes because not only do they no longer have a job, they no longer have any savings. It's all gone.

And let me just add this, the dividing your portion principle doesn't just apply to the things you've saved, consider very carefully whether having a lot of stock in the company that you also work for is wise. It may work out okay. The problem is that you're leaving yourself at risk, not only for what you own, but for future income. And the problem is they're both in the same place.

So consider that carefully. The next one, the plans of the diligent principal. Not everyone can afford to spend lots of time investing and some have more aptitude in this area than others. But each person is well advised to take an approach to this area that is sustainable. This is a marathon, isn't it?

Savings is something that happens over years. We need to figure out, okay, what can I reasonably understand and invest in and I've got to be able to continue to carry this on not something I can just do for a week and kind of pour myself into it and Then forget about it. It needs to be something sustainable something you can keep on doing over time Now the other thing is do you have a plan? Okay, and that's where you know if you have a budget or not that's not you know for me to say but the idea is somewhere somehow you need to have a plan and You need to think about that.

One of the things I've included in the appendix is just a single sheet, and all it is is just a drawing of this pyramid. I've divided it up into about eight portions there, and it's got blanks there. Photocopy it if you want. I would suggest that you might even want to take this, photocopy it, and revisit it from time to time, and talk about, okay, what do we have where, and where is it, and where are we headed, What are we doing with it? And that way you can lay out, okay, I've got this money here.

Again, start from the bottom because you want a foundation. I don't like houses without foundations. You want a foundation to build from. Start from the bottom. If you don't feel like you have the time or the interest or aptitude or anything to get into speculative investments, don't do it. Truncate this pyramid. Don't put what you have at risk by basically violating what the scripture has laid out here as good, solid, sound means of investing. So anyway, that's a tool. And notice in this appendix piece, I put the priority numbers. One, two, three. First priority, build a conservative base. Second priority is those investments where you're looking for a rate of return. And the third is the speculation.

If you need to truncate the pyramid because you don't have the time for it and you don't understand it, then far better to do that. Make a flat pyramid, but keep it solid. Far better that than to be like these telecom billionaires that are now out walking the streets again.

Now, the provide for one's own principle. There's a couple of ways that you need to look at this. One is certainly the savings and investing is to provide for one's own. It's provision, not here's how I'm going to get rich beyond anybody's wildest dreams. It's provision is the intent. Providing for future needs, particularly providing for your own. The second part is it doesn't make good sense, while I'm encouraging you to spend time being diligent, it doesn't make good sense to get so overblown in this area that everything else is out of balance. You see that? It's got to be sustainable.

If you are working to provide for your family, your working to provide for your family is a ministry to your family, but it is only part of the total ministry to your family. So whether a person is working, spending time investing, the sum total of that shouldn't consume them to the point where they're no longer spending time with the family that they're providing for. It's a ministry to the family to provide for them, but it's part of the total ministry that each person is providing. Then there is the time principle, and where we see this come into place is various investments change from time to time as to what's optimum. And just to illustrate that, see this chart that we have in color in the middle of page 41?

One of the things you'll notice is in each of those years, the best investment changes. That's the one highlighted in yellow. The best investment changes from year to year. Do you see that? And not only that, some investments, take for example small U.S. stocks, The first one under 1991, 46.1% return. However, remember the year before that it lost almost 20%. So the idea is, and this goes along with know your flocks, is there is a time for everything and that includes investments. There isn't any such thing where you can just invest and just let it go in autopilot. You need to watch it. You need to decide is this the best place to put it. It takes time, and it isn't something that should consume us, but it's also not something we should just ignore. Yes.

Those are always optimum. They return the best. They get the best return. But you see here how just from year to year that can very easily shift in terms of what's the best. You need to look at different investments and ask yourself the question, what time is it? What time is it? because there is nothing that just always keeps going up all the time. Day in, day out, year in, year out. That just doesn't happen.

A final note in this thing here. We've presented a lot of principles here, haven't we? And you could just take these and just kind of run off of them and say, hey, this is great, I'll just use this for biblical, but this is not an isolated set of principles apart from our walk with the Lord. This is also not apart from the Lord's very process of conforming us to the image of Christ. But it is interwoven with this.

The plans of the diligent is not something I do in the flesh. Dividing your portion is not something I do in the flesh and say, yes, but it's a biblical principle. No. These are intended to be carried out in dependence upon the Lord. We have the truth laid out before us, but it's not the flesh's best plan that's going to accomplish what God wants, and that's key here. The way I've written the last sentence here, these principles will be lived out with the understanding that in our dependence upon the Lord, the life of Christ and the believer expresses itself consistent with these principles. Okay? Make sense? Let me go briefly over, there's a couple other pages in the back that I intend you put in the appendix there. These are some resources, and again, mostly I'm looking at building that solid foundation.

One thing is if you're looking at putting money somewhere, one way to check it out, have I got a safe bank? Because believe me, banks will go out and have all kinds of advertisements and they may not be in good shape. Some of the companies that advertise out there may be in horrible financial condition. It is amazing to find out. Here's one source where you can check out everything from banks, brokerage firms, insurance companies, mutual funds. Check those out. Credit unions they don't cover, so Veribank is one that I suggest and have used in the past. So you get a hold of either of them to check on the safety of your bank.

It hasn't been a big issue of late, but do you remember back in the 1980s when we went through the savings and loan fiasco? They were buying up savings and loans and sucking them into something else. If you had money in the savings and loan, you were lucky to have the name stay on the savings and loan for six months. And what happens is the banking and savings industry goes through those cycles of tight times.

Think about how extreme the interest rates that we're having right now are. How long has it been since we've had interest rates this low? Decades, right? We're talking a long period of time since we've had interest rates this low. They may well go lower. And fluctuations in the middle of that is what puts banks and savings institutions in trouble. So, good thing to check it out. We've been through a fairly stable period of time in that regard, but that could change. Anyway, that's one thing. Another thing to check out is U.S. Treasury money market funds is another option.

Because the Fed has lowered the interest rate as low as they have, some of these money market funds are down to around 1%. I even saw one that was about 0.9%. So they're not offering a lot in the way of rate of return, but again, these are funds where you're concerned about the return of your money, not on your money.

So anyway, several suggestions to consider. Safe local banks, money market funds. What's going to happen with money market funds is because the rates are going so low, they're going to have to cut back their administration or consolidate if they've got a smaller money market fund. So if you have any money in these or if you're looking at putting your money in these, I would tend to look for one with larger assets because things are going to end up getting shuffled around anyway.

But that's one kind of current warning. The next thing in the area of investments, this is an area so big that there's no way I could possibly give you some coverage on anything. But one thing you might take a look at Let's say that you're looking for some longer term guidance on what kind of investment should I make.

There's an outfit called Holbert Financial Digest. All they do is they rate investment newsletters. These newsletters that say invest in this, invest in that, invest in this other thing. The Holbrook Financial Digest rates them and says, here is how this one has been doing.

Not just what do they claim, but here is how they have been doing. How have they been doing in the last year? How have they been doing in the last five years? How have they been doing for ten years? Some of them may have a twenty-year history, so they will go over that period of time.

That is one way for you to get some objective information. It's not an expensive digest to get, but it will tell you this is the newsletter that's doing well. And there are newsletters now that are getting double digits, even some in the lower triple digit rates of return with the current market. And getting this, if something starts changing, they can keep you posted on that too. I have a sample of that over here if you want to take a look at that afterwards. But this is a part of the general picture. I would say get objective information. Let me just ask you this.

What's the stockbroker going to want to sell you? Stocks, okay? And it doesn't matter whether it's a good thing to buy or not, okay? And frequently that's what you've got to look at and say, am I getting objective information? And frequently the people whose job it is to sell whatever it is are not the ones who are going to give you the most objective information. And some of them are very good people. Don't misunderstand me. But the point is that they're not in the business of really looking at the whole picture.

What's the best way to invest? And so that's why I suggest going to some of these ratings outfits. How safe is this bank? Don't ask the banker at the bank. Find out from somebody else. Even as I mentioned before, outfits like Standard & Poor's, Best, a lot of those companies are getting their fees from the companies they're rating. How objective is that? So you want to get good objective information. You want to have somebody who is not being paid by the people who are providing their income. I'm giving you the info. What's that? Yes, conflict of interest. In a lot of areas, it's something that people raise a big fuss about. It is unfortunately rampant in some areas and right now we're seeing Wall Street firms, they're looking at a total of a billion dollars in fines right now between the various brokerage firms because of all kinds of information like that.

There were 17 analysts with these brokerage firms who are recommending WorldCom up to the day it declared bankruptcy. None of them recommended a sell. None out of 17 brokerage firms that had a report on WorldCom. None recommended a sell up to the last day.

So something's wrong, folks. They're not getting a billion dollars worth of fines for nothing. Be careful, because there's people that have a lot of money to make by giving you the wrong information. And that's where, this is the biblical principle, I'm not selling skepticism, it's the biblical principle, know your flocks. Don't ask the wolf if your flocks are fine. Okay? Alright. Any other questions? I've spent a lot of time, Dave, As far as conflict of interest, is there any conflict of interest there or is it minimal?

Is he part of CBS? He's part of CBS Market Watch. There's potentially some, but I haven't seen it be a big problem. Previously, it was independent. Mark Holbert is still the guy who's heading it at this point in time. I've read some of his columns, and he doesn't mind calling a spade a spade. So at this point in time, I don't see a problem with it. And CBS, I mean, they've also got, I think they're the ones also, Tom Calandra, who's another one that just, again, he'll call a spade a spade. I don't see a big problem with it.

It's something to watch. You should always ask. Good point. Any other questions? Okay, let's call it good and let's pray. Lord, thank you that even these things, savings and investing, issues like that, are things that you have given us guidance on. And we thank you too that these are things that you desire to be done by your life and not our own. And thank you too, Lord, that you are going to use the entire process to conform us to the image of your Son. And even though none of this goes into eternity, it all counts because of what you're doing and what you have done. We just give you thanks in Jesus' name. Amen.