Episode 100 - Episode 100 Wow!

In this special 100th episode, Paul reflects on the incredible journey of Catholic Money Talk — the small beginnings, the faithful encouragement that sparked it, and the grace that’s carried it forward. Hear stories from listeners around the world, lessons from top episodes, and one simple challenge: start. Whatever dream or mission God has placed on your heart, the best time to begin is today. 

Transcript

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Paul, Welcome to Catholic money talk, where we talk about all things money and finance, and we try to do it through a lens of being Catholic, where our ultimate goal is to one day be in Heaven with the Lord. I am your host. Paul Scarfone, thank you for being here today. Welcome back to Catholic money talk today. This is my 100th episode. Well, not technically last time was my 100th episode, but as I've numbered them, the first one being intro to Catholic money. Talk just talking about what I was hoping to do. Then I numbered them. I started numbering them after that one. So this is number 100 and it does cause me to stop and pause and think about all that I've done, but not just what I've done, but what I started with. And I hope this can serve as an encouragement to others. So that's my thought today, to encourage you to start whatever thing that is that you've been putting off and to go for it. But before we talk about that, let's say a prayer in the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit. Amen, Heavenly Father. We thank you for this day. We thank you for all the ways that you love and bless us, Lord. Lord, we know that you have an awesome plan for us, and your hope, your wish, is for us to respond to you in everything we do. Lord, to say, Yes, Lord, what are we going to do today? I'm here to serve you, Lord, just fill us with great courage and diligence pursuing you. We ask this all in Jesus name, amen, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Well, it's funny every time I load a new episode, and I, several months ago, I changed everything to have numbers, because when I refer episodes to people when I'm talking to someone, or maybe emailing them or having a conversation, it's very helpful to be able to say, Hey, listen to episode it's helpful to be able to say, hey, you have questions about saving effectively for retirement. Listen to Episode 81 right? And I can just give them the episode number, and they can find it pretty quickly. Pretty quickly or or look at episode 59 about how faithful the Lord is, right? So I numbered them, and so when I got to 100 it made me like triple digits. Whoa. That's really cool. But years and years and years ago, when I first started helping people with finances in this way, right on my on my own, not working at the bank, but trying to put a faith lens on answering people's financial questions and helping them just create plans and execute their plans to achieve the goals that they've prayerfully discerned. My good friend Justin Anderson, encouraged me and said, Paul, you should have a podcast. Like, there's not a lot of Catholics. There's no Catholics that are out there doing this. Like, there's Catholic people that are talking about finances, but there's not one that's putting a lot of emphasis looking at all these transactions from a faith perspective, right? And for so many of us, we, we find it awkward or challenging for faith and finances to intersect. We, we like them to stay in their own lanes, right? And this is what we do here. You know, I love to say, Why did God make us to know Him, love Him and serve Him in this life so we could be happy with him forever in the next but how do we do that with our finances? Right? We want to make Jesus the Lord of our finances, and that's what my hope is, to help you do that. And Justin encouraged me to do something like that. It took me a while. This is not something I'm good at, like the tech part, the editing part, the hosting part, the posting part, all of that. It's, it's, it's, it's a challenge for me. And I see other podcasts or YouTube channels or different things that happen, they look very professional and polished, and I'm just that's not my gift set. I don't think like the sound engineer, right? That's not how my brain works. But I remember when I finally said, You know what, let me just do it. Let me just do it. And and that was almost three years ago, in January. It'll be three years. And when I think about it, I'm so grateful I just started one of my favorite little sayings is, when's the best time to plant a tree? Right? 20 years ago, the second best time is right now, because that's all we have. All we. Have us right now. We can't go back, and we're not promised tomorrow. All we have is right now. And so when we we take advantage, when we initiate those things that are put on our heart and we actually start working on them, it's fun. As time goes by, we look back and we look at everything we've been able to accomplish right and not by our own strength, but by God's grace. We look back and we say, wow, look at everything he's been able to allow me to do. It's pretty cool. And so when I scroll and I see 100 episodes going down my episode list, that's pretty remarkable. I thought, let me, if you're a listener, let me tell you a little bit about the podcast. So again, started it a little over two and a half years ago. It was January of 2023 and again, a big encouragement with Justin Anderson, Dr Justin Anderson and my wife Taryn. They were the two people that really encouraged me to do this. And one of the other reasons I did this as well a good friend of mine would had been said, Hey, do you ever think of writing a book? And I started looking into writing a book, and it's hard for me to sit down to start typing 2000 words a week. For 20 weeks, you have 4000 words, and now you can write a book. I thought, if I start a podcast, there's a lot of ways to go from a podcast to a book, and the podcast makes it pretty clean chapters, right? So that's something to project I'm working on in the background, hopefully coming to you soon. We'll see. I'm going to try to get it done through a traditional publisher, so we'll see how that goes. But, but praise the Lord. A lot of work has been into this, a lot of prayer and thought, and my goal from the beginning was just to serve people, right? I don't sometimes I'll miss a week. I'll skip a week from putting up an episode, and part of that's because I don't get paid to do this. I'm just doing this to try to hopefully help you find the peace and joy that we have found by making Jesus Lord of our finances. And how do we tackle those, those decisions, financial decisions, transactions. How do we do it, looking through it all, through our faith lines, right where our ultimate goal is to get to heaven. So that's what I'm trying to do here, and I hope you're encouraged by it. So what do we have? We have so episodes, 100 right? Technically, 101 so what are some other stats from the podcast? Well, over the past two and a half years, we've had, oh, over 6000 downloads. I'll get the exact number here. We've got 6874 downloads, which is pretty cool, each month. I get between 203 100 352 is the most downloads we ever got a month. But between 203 152 we get more and more each month. So that's, that's exciting location. So this is pretty, pretty cool. So I'm in New Jersey in the United States, which is in North America. We have downloads in six continents. We've got our top one is North America. 84% of the downloads are there and then tied for 6% but Europe and Asia. Europe edges Asia out by a little bit more, but it still shows up as they each got 6% and then Oceania Well, Australia is what says on my little screen here, Australia 2% with Africa and South America also have some downloads. So I guess anywhere where people speak English, they'll they'll find me, or be able to listen to me. I was surprised by the the countries, so us obviously not surprised. But the next one wasn't like Canada. Is way down on the list. The next one's Australia, Singapore and Germany. And most of Germany is coming from one city, Frankfurt, Omen, Hesse. I think that I said the name of that city correctly, but thank you for listening. In Germany, it's pretty cool. Also had some comments and feedback from people over the years, which is really cool. Tania said from Episode 66 trusting in God and be generous. Yes, God sees the heart, and trusting in Him is key. Thank you, Paul. Let's see. We've got, oh, Fran, Episode 27 I know who that is. Great insight. Thanks, Fran. And then let's see. We've got some other some comments. One was from, I. Lisa, back in April, she sent me something. We actually did a podcast on it, but she found the show her and her husband, they're in their 50s, thinking about retirement, and she was asking if that would be an area that we think of, considering they had raised seven children, home schooled them, stay at home, mom, living on a teacher's income, and they know how to live frugally, but they were trying to figure out the balance between working working themselves to death or having enough money in retirement, so basically, doing it on their own or doing their best, and also trusting God. And we did talk about that a couple episodes ago. I had Anthony from Australia. I'm a Catholic dad in Australia with seven children. Just listen to episode one after searching on Spotify for money. Mindset Catholic. Really love the perspective of praying about finances and making decisions in the light of God's will and His providence. Thank you, Anthony. So there's some encouragements. There might be some other platforms that have some comments on them, but I don't, I don't know how to get to them. We've got a bunch of thumbs ups from different people. So thank you all for that. And I want to thank the different guests I've had. I've had Justin Anderson, Dr Justin Anderson a couple times, my wife Taryn, a couple times. I had Dave and Judy two Hill. I had Rob Lang. I had, I think that's it. So I could, I could look into getting more guests, and I'm going to work on doing that, hopefully, hopefully to help us with some of the I get some experts. I'd love to get an investment expert with a Catholic perspective on investing, and ask them some questions, as well as maybe a realtor or someone from the insurance world. I feel like sometimes we just want to be well prepared for when we're talking with financial professionals. Sometimes we don't feel like we're very prepared to have the conversation. We kind of take the seat of they're the expert. Let me sit back and kind of let them lead. But really, the Lord has whatever we have. The Lord has blessed us with it as stewards, and so we want to make sure we're well educated and well equipped to have different discussions and conversations, to be able to make Jesus Lord of our finances, not just handing the reins over to someone else who might have gotten licensed or went to school for something we we need to still take the initiative and ownership of the stewardship role that Christ has given us. So I started this by saying I was surprised 100 episodes, and here we are. I remember when I first started, one by one, right, trying to get something up close to each week and and it was a lot more work than I originally had thought. I had some great ideas to start. And then, you know, at different times, there's been streams of ideas, maybe a series of two or three or seven, you know, goal setting, or whatever it might be, just different short series that came in pretty good bursts, and other times just trying to think like, Lord, what do you want to put on my heart for me to talk about I've been inspired by mass readings, by homilies, by some current affairs, or, you know, just news current, current news items that might have prompted me to create an episode, and then just examples of different people I've worked with, or people or situations in my own life that have kind of drawn me to elaborate on them and try to share some of the revelations I find with you here. So I hope this has been helpful, having this podcast and creating these episodes for you, and I thought it could be fun to maybe highlight some of the top downloaded episodes, which I'm guessing most people find, or people find the most helpful. So the most downloaded episode is actually episode one, and it's titled a first look into opportunity costs, and that's really I started with that one, because I think it's really, really important for saying yes to this. What are we saying no to the second most popular episode is just intro to Catholic money. Talk talking about what we do here. And I think most people, whatever episode they come in on and find the show, I think they, many of them, go back and download that first episode just to see what it's all about. The third most popular episode is episode 26 three questions to ask before making a large purchase. And when I think about this episode, it makes sense that it's there and. Because most people, when they see me, call me, email me, they have a question. It's usually having to do with a large financial transaction. And so I think people kind of gravitate towards that, ooh, what could be the three questions that we need to ask before we make a large purchase. So if you want, if you want to know the answer to that question, it is episode 26 then episode 27 actually is the fourth most popular one, and that is the desire for stuff. And maybe people listen to episode 26 and then immediately just download the next one as well. But the desire for stuff. Really talks about, what is our like? What is our goal? It's our goal to get to heaven, or is our goal to get the newest shiniest thing? And the love of things of this earth will keep us from getting to heaven. And so we talk about that and how to balance that and discern that. The fifth most popular episode is identifying lifestyle creep. Most people I meet with and when I look in the mirror, right the guy I see in the mirror, they all struggle with this, including myself, lifestyle creep, when we have a few extra dollars, does it get consumed into our lifestyle? Are we able to kind of keep a tight ship and put those money towards something that the Lord's calling us to? So episode two, identifying lifestyle creep. And then just next in the ranking or two down is episode three, addressing lifestyle creep. So once we identify it. What are we going to do about it? And that's what that next episode is. So if you're if you think lifestyle creep is been kind of causing you some pain, episodes two and three, identifying lifestyle creep and addressing lifestyle creep. The one in between those in our sixth spot, our sixth most popular episode is how to live below your means, and that is episode nine that's going to help balance lifestyle creep, if you're if one of your goals is to live below your means, to create excess, to do other things with, to be outrageously generous, or maybe to plan for the future or tackle some of these goals, right? I've talked about the goal that Taryn and I had the reason to live below our means are so we could pay off our house early. Now that's paid off, we have extra money that we can be generous with and accomplish other things with. It's really it's really freeing. The eighth most popular episode is God's generosity, and that in that episode, it's one of my favorites. I just talk about this aha moment right where it just dawns on me that as humans, we like to make deals. I give you this, you give me that. But with the Lord, he just gives. He just gives because he's so generous. And if we're made in God's image and likeness, that means we're called to be that generous as well. So that's a good Wake Up Call if we're more used to finding, you know, give and take. No, it's just give. Whether we're in a marriage, it should be just give. It's not give and take. It's just give. If we're serving others, or parenting or watching. It's just give. And that is episode number 28 the ninth most downloaded episode is the importance of prayer, and it's one of the greatest gifts. That's Episode Five. It's one of the greatest gifts my dad gave me. One of his legacies is pray before everything. Why? Because that's how you surrender that moment to God, right? If we're trying to surrender our finances to the Lord, make him Lord of our finances. We do that with prayer, the way we make good decisions. We do with prayer. If we're going to start our homework, if we can start work, if we're going to get ready to make a proposal in our work, right in our job, getting ready for an interview. Start with a prayer, just in your mind. Lord, let this be part of the you know, I'm going to put forth my best effort. Lord, if this be your plan, let this go smoothly. Let me have success. And then the 10th most popular episode, Episode 59 the Lord is faithful. And that is just a moment for me to look back and say, Wow, year over year, season upon season, the Lord comes through because he's faithful. And if we're in the midst of a storm, we need to remember that right? That is the rock that our hope is built upon, that Christ died for us so that we could live with Him forever, and he walks with us. He's constantly with us, beside us, because he's faithful. So those are the top 10, right. So I'll just rattle them off again. First one is episode one. I'll look into opportunity costs. Second one intro to Catholic money. Talk. That's kind of episode zero, I guess. Episode 26 three questions to ask before making a large purchase. Episode 27 the desire for stuff. Episode Two, identifying lifestyle creep. Episode Nine, how to live below your means. Episode Three, addressing lifestyle creep. Episode 28 God's generosity. Episode Five, the importance of prayer. And episode 59 the Lord is faithful. He certainly is. And I remember starting this podcast, I would look, how would I ever create that many that would actually people would actually find helpful? And fortunately, through just putting a stake in the ground, saying, This is what I'm going to do through diligence and prayer and remembering that this isn't about me just trying to vent or air out something. I'm really trying to provide a way to help others, as broadly as I think I can, while reminding people like we're trying to get to heaven. And as much as finances might be easier, harder, difficult, scary, challenging, whatever it might be, it's still something we have to be responsible with. And so it's still part of our journey towards heaven, how we manage our finances and so trying to tackle those things with that lens, hopefully I'm helping to draw you closer to the Lord and encourage you as we go. So thank you for being a listeners. Thank you for listening. Please continue to share the podcast with people that you might think would find it helpful. And again, whatever thing you're in life that you're maybe looking at that you're trying to think like, I should start that. Maybe I should do something about this. I just say, start, start today. We have today, and just trust the Lord that he'll keep it going and you'll find a path forward. That's what I've been able to do with this podcast. It's not a, you know, I'm not on anybody's top whatever list, right? I'm not on the top 100 or probably 1000 or 10,000 I don't even know. I don't even know. But if you're listening to it, I'm on a list for you, right? Maybe I'm in your downloaded or subscribed podcast, and hopefully you're finding value, hopefully you're finding peace, hopefully you're finding hope and encouragement here. So thank you for listening. I'm very grateful for all the support from all over the world. And what I'm what I'm trying to do just bring Christ to others by making him Lord of your finances. So if you've got any questions, please click the Get in touch with Paul link in the podcast episode. Shoot me a shoot me an email, shoot me a question. Offer a line of encouragement. I greatly appreciate it. Thank you for listening. God bless. Thank you for listening to Catholic money talk. I hope you join us again next time, please click Subscribe on your podcast app to get notified of new episodes. God bless you and have a great day. Foreign.