Episode 103 - There’s Always Another Option

 Ever feel boxed in by your finances or life decisions? In There’s Always Another Option, Paul shows how our habits and hurry can blind us to better paths—and how a little patience and prayer open doors we didn’t see before. Discover how slowing down, asking better questions, and trusting God’s guidance can reveal smarter, more peaceful choices. 

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, I want to talk about that. There's always another option. But first, 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 you love and bless us, Lord. We know that you have an awesome plan for us and that you love us so much. Just fill us with great hope, fill us with diligence and perseverance, Lord, so that we may run towards where you are calling us, draw us to you, Lord, God Come Holy Spirit. We ask this all in Jesus name, amen, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. So there's always another option. And why am I saying that? Well, regularly, and this just happened the other day, regularly, when we are looking at our situation, because it's our situation and the path forward requires us to do some work or to make a decision. Sometimes we can settle on the thing that's in front of us, right? So what do I mean by that? The other day, I was at a event at our kids school was a career fair, and I was there as a financial coach to talk to some of the kids. And many of the high schoolers know me, and many of the students know me because I've got so many kids in the school. But one of the parents came up to me and was chatting with me a little bit, and I told her that one of the things we're talking to the kids about, and she has a child in high school that's taking my class. I says, not to borrow money for a car. And she said to me, well, then how they gonna get a car? And I asked her, Well, how much does a car cost? And she responded, Well, at least 30,000 and I said, Why? Why does your child need a $30,000 car? And she said, Well, I want them to be driving a safe vehicle, right? And so, so that was, that was the one option that she kind of saw to get a loan to buy a$30,000 vehicle for her child. But then, those of you listening, it might be easy for us to come up with some other solutions, because we're not the one having to figure out the problem, right? We're not the one that has to tell the child like, this is the car you're getting and sometimes, when we've done things a certain way for so long, we think that's the only way to do it. But there's always another option. Hence the title of the talk, the title of this episode, and one of the questions I like to ask my clients when I look to my right in my office here, this isn't a video, so you can't see me looking to my right, but I actually have a framed picture of some bullet point statements, questions, things for me to prompt my clients with when I'm talking with them, when I'm trying to get my my mind organized, and I'll look and one of my favorite questions is, and what else? That's it and what else? So if they say the only option is to get a car, but get a loan for a $30,000 car, my question be well, and what else? What are the other options? Give me another one, because there are. And once we use our imagination like think of a classroom setting. If I presented this to my I have 42 kids in the class that I'm teaching at the kids school right now on Fridays. If I said to them, each one of you give me an option, a child needs to buy a car. What? What's an option they would have? We'd probably get close to 40 different options, right? Some kids would say, borrow some money. Some kids would say, Save up. Some kids would say, you don't need a car. See if your parents will give you one, whatever it might be. And then if we ask the dollar amount, it'd be a variety. So my point is, in life, when we're in a particular situation, we might think there's no other option than the one that's most evident or obvious to us, and unfortunately, sometimes those evident or most obvious things are just because that's things we always do. So we never look further than that. A great example, when Taryn and I were first married and we didn't have a lot of income, we did. Have a lot of savings. I had a very small student loan that we were paying, and is when we first married. This was before my big student loan of my master's degree. But we had a credit card for emergencies. And so the first emergency, since we didn't own a home, that we experienced was probably, I don't remember, but it was probably related to a vehicle. Maybe it was brakes. And all of a sudden, a $300 expense to replace brakes on a car becomes an emergency, so we put it on the credit card. Well, as life goes on, certain emergencies get bigger, and I remember might have been child number two or three, where we were going to midwives that needed to, they collected their payment at, think 30 weeks. They didn't accept insurance. They it was only like self pay, and you had to pay them upfront at 30 weeks, and I think it was like$5,000 something like that. And we knew that, but we weren't organized with our finances, and so when the time came to make that payment, we put it on a credit card because it was an emergency. That was the only option we saw. Why? Because that's what we always did and then, unfortunately, it probably sat there for a while as we slowly paid it off, we eventually were able to, once the baby was born, submit that expense the insurance company, and then they probably reimbursed us, you know, out of network, whatever the our you know, our responsibility was, they took and then they gave us the balance of it. But we learned. We taught ourselves to use a credit card in case of emergencies, so that when emergencies came, and this went on for probably the first 10 years of our marriage, yet for the first 10 years of our marriage, we went to debt, we went to our credit card, a personal loan, and eventually a home equity line of credit if we had an emergency, that's what we taught ourselves. We didn't think that we should stop and save up money to create a emergency fund to help tackle emergencies, we taught ourselves to use credit. And so when emergencies came and we looked at our options, we only saw one option to use a credit card. And so I wish I was better at listening to people back then, and I wish I had more voices surrounding me that said, there's always another option, right but, but many times when we're in the midst of it, we're just trying to think straight. We don't want to take time to sort through options and to find a better way. We just want the pain to end right now, and so we grab the first thing or the closest thing we see. And so as I was talking to that parent the other day, and we're talking about purchasing a vehicle for her child, we went on in the conversation, I and I asked her, I said, Do you think there's other vehicle options besides a$30,000 vehicle that might be suitable for your child? What are some of the things you're looking for? And she started mentioning different features. Well, I want it to be safe, I want it to be comfortable. I don't want it to break down. And I said, well, of all these features, what is the most important what are the most important features? And she said, Well, I want it not to break down. I want it to be safe. And so we quickly agree that like comfort and the looks of the vehicle and things like that, the name brand or whatever it might be, were very much less important. And then I asked her, I said, Do you know different situations? Can you tell me of situations of other parents that bought vehicles or helped their child buy vehicles? And she said, Honestly, I don't. I just assume everyone just goes and takes their kid to the dealership and buys them a car. And I said, Oh no. I said, so ask me, what did we do for our challenge? She did. She's like, What did you do? I said, our child saved up money, and a particular amount, up to $3,000 we matched it, and they went out and bought a vehicle. And my son, when he bought his car, it was like, three grand, I think exactly. So he saved three grand. We gave him three grand. He only spent three grand. He only spent three grand. He had three grand emergency fund for his vehicle starting day one. My daughter, we're doing the same thing. She's already got way more than three grand saved, but we've capped them. We will match up to three grand. And she's already looking for cars in the 234, $1,000 range. And I've been watching, actually, a couple YouTube videos to. Try to there's a friend who's a bit of a mechanic, a bit of a gearhead recommended this YouTube channel to walk you through how to go look at a car that's on the side of the road. What are the key things to look at to know if there's if it's worth pursuing further right? And so we constantly have to learn, particularly in those areas that we don't know a lot about like, for me, it's cars and mechanical things. Like, I have to learn about some of that stuff so I can be better prepared to analyze and also create and look at various options to tackle the problem that's in front of me. But the beauty of having options and a plan is just knowing that the options exist. I have experienced calms the nerves a bit, right when we experience pain and we just want to get out of it so quickly, whether it be some type of a car emergency or medical emergency, or something like that, and there's that money pain that we feel. I have experienced that the better organized my finances are, regardless of how much money I have or saved or whatever. When we were first trying to get out of the debt, we still had different emergencies, but since we had a plan, it was like a backstop to my emotions, and I didn't lose control, because I would just take a deep breath and we'd figure it out. We could look at everything. It wasn't that panic frantic, you know, drive to try to ease the pain and solve this problem as quickly as possible. Now we try to solve problems as best as possible, right? And that there's a difference. Sometimes it's quick, and sometimes it's not, depending on how we're set up for it. So there's always another option, and this is important. You know, there can be a significant cost if we limit our thinking, right? Use the example of getting a car loan to buy a car. Well, of course, the cost is you're going to pay more for a car that's still going to depreciate. You're going to lose value on plus you have the interest that you're paying, plus you have that lost opportunity cost of that monthly payment. And again, think I talked about this not too long ago. The average monthly payment, let's say used, it's in the five hundreds, so the cost is that opportunity cost of now, you can't do something else with that 500 you can't save up for something else. You can't invest it. You can't use it to pay for, you know, life's things, right? Rent, lights, kids, college expenses, whatever it might be. So there is a true cost if you limit your thinking. And so the key is to have that mindset, mindset, right? You might have to shift it. But instead of looking down and getting so busy focusing on the problem, if we can lift our eyes a little bit, kind of get a broader picture of what's going on and and start asking better questions, right? And so, so here's some questions, right? We could ask the one I'm starting with here, right? Is there another option? Right? And some of those questions might look like this, what else is possible? Right? Sometimes we can ask ourselves, we can ask our spouse, or we can ask someone else who really cares about us and we might respect their opinion. We might ask, Who do we know that's maybe solved this differently and maybe we don't know? Maybe we think someone else didn't we reach out to them. Or we could ask a friend, say, Hey, do you know anyone else who dealt with a similar problem to this? Could I talk to them? Or what did they do? So who has solved this differently? And then again, that feeling, that pain, you just say, Well, what? Wait a second. What if this pain wasn't here? Let me take a deep breath. What would I do if I wasn't afraid? What would I do if I wasn't in a panic? And sometimes we have to see is we almost have to triage the situation and say, Does timing matter, right? Is this urgent, or is it just important? But it's not urgent. Maybe it's urgent, but it's not very important, and we could almost just skip it for now, right? How do we triage that so does timing matter? And then another one that I love to ask is, if there's a lot of things going on, is there any way I could combine some options on the things I'm facing, right? Is there an opportunity to maybe hit two birds with one stone? Could I shift something to help make something else work as well? And that requires us standing back looking up and taking a view of the big picture. So I talked about, you know, the example of a car, right? And trying to sifting through those options. Questions not long ago, I think a few episodes ago, I spoke about looking at college or life after high school, right? Are we doing a four year college, community college, trade school? We jumping right into the workforce? Is there military scholarships, employee, employer reimbursement, some type of plan, or maybe we're just taking a gap year and go make some money, or just take some time to discern what the Lord might be calling us, right? So those are different options for life after college in housing. I have some friends that are moving. You know, selling a house, buying a house, buying a first house. Maybe they just moved. I was talking to a friend yesterday who they were renting, and now they're having a baby. They had to find a two bedroom, and they were able to find a two bedroom that was cheaper than the one bedroom there. It's not as updated and as nice as the old place, but it's saving money and is bigger. And they love the space, right? They love the the area that they just moved to. So like, housing? Should we buy? Should we rent? Can we do a multifamily? Could we? Could we I know a couple, they're just they moved in with a family, just for a season, just for some time. And I remember talking about that. I said, just put a limit on the time. Like, don't go in there, open ended. But say we're going for six months. We're going for nine months until we we've paid off this, until we've saved up this, right? That's a that's an option, as opposed to just jumping in to buying a house that they're not ready to pay for, or just signing up a lease on something that's very expensive that they know they don't want to be there long term, right? You How do you find these different options? Another one might be and I deal with this sometimes with married couples, especially when they're having a baby, or maybe their first baby is childcare. Is there work part time? Can we get a remote job? Is working going to balance the loss of time with the child and the expense of daycare, right? Is there a way for one of the parents to stay home to care for the baby and maybe have some side hustle, some remote work, some part time stuff going on that they can close the gap on the finances? Right? Flex flexible work. Maybe swap care. Maybe you change with another family who you know, they're working three days a week. We're working two days a week, and we alternate with watching the kids, or maybe there's some family help that's available. You know, one of the other things, and this wasn't part of my plan to talk about today, but I do want to mention it. You know, for many of us, when we find ourselves in different and difficult situations, maybe there's, there's some pride that creeps in, and we don't want to ask for help. We don't want to ask other people. We don't want to go to them and say, I'm not sure what to do. Can you help me figure this out? Most of us, I think we like to give, truly. We like to give, right? We're made in the image and likeness of God. He is the biggest giver. He gave us his only son. So there's the most real part of us loves to give, and sometimes the evil one, he distorts things, but that desire to give sometimes stops us from allowing to receive right and accepting other people's help or input and and here's the the beauty of God's economy. We love to give, right? We love to give, and everyone loves to give. What? But? But sometimes we don't know those areas, or we don't see the opportunities to give because people aren't asking. There is such grace in asking for help or support when we find ourselves in a bit of a pickle, in a tough situation, there is so much grace to say, You know what? Could you help me? You know what? I'm looking for options, and I could use someone to help me figure out some options, or I just feel very challenged and I'm not sure what to do. Can you help me? Or maybe it's very Can you watch my kid for for two hours so I can go to a job interview? Right? Maybe it's a very practical ask for help. But I hear too many times people not asking for help because they don't want to be the one asking for help. They want to be the one giving. Well, I hear some pride in there, and I also know that there's so many people around you that would love to help and to give and to support, but we need to speak up. We need to raise our hand and say, Please help me. Over my life, I've learned to do that more and more, and I've also, as I've done that I've I've learned to also see the cues in other people when they might be stifling that cry for help. And I try to give them permission to ask and to speak up. And I do it very simply by just looking at them and in all honesty and. Right, and just 100% care and honest humility. I'll ask them, How are you doing? Is there anything I could help you with? What's the biggest challenge in front of you right now? Could I help you with that? And you'll see how people open up. So we need to do that. We need to support each other. We need to love each other. We need to give to those around us that need help. We need to accept help and ask for help when we need it. Because when we don't, we limit ourselves. We limit the options. There's always another option. There's always another option, no matter what situation you're facing right now, if I gave it to a classroom of 42 kids and I said, let's come up with as a group, let's come up with 20 different options, they would do it. And then you could pick one, right? And you might not like any of them, and you could come up with your own. But most of the time is because we haven't planned well. We're not allowing ourselves time to stop, take a deep breath, say a prayer, look up, look around and see what other options might exist, right? So when we face ourselves in a tough situation, we think there's only one option. Forward. What are we going to do? We're going to pause, gonna say prayer. We're not going to rush. We can brain dump. I do that. Sometimes I'll just brain dump a million different ideas. No idea is a bad idea. Let's just get it on paper and then ask others seek counsel. If you're married, you're doing this with your spouse, pray you invite the Holy Spirit into it. I say this in my prayers a lot. God has an awesome plan for you. He does. It's great. It's fantastic. But we've got to stop and be quiet and listen and seek, seek His truth about it. So that's what I that's what I have today. I'm hopefully. I'm encouraging you, you know you're not stuck. Options exist, other options exist, even if you don't see them yet. So let's do this as a takeaway. Let's take one decision you might be facing right now. Right if you think there's maybe very limited options, just take one situation you're facing right now. Say a prayer. Say Lord, reveal the truth of this situation to me. Show me what other options might exist, and write down at least five other options. And if you need help, I'm here in the podcast episode description, there is a link. Get in touch with Paul. I would be happy to serve you. Hopefully this has been helpful today. Thank you for joining me. 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.