GIVMOAR – Episode 2: The 5 Things You Can Do With Money (And Why GIVE Matters Most)

There’s all kinds of great advice for building wealth out there. Live on less than you make. Invest. Dollar cost average. Force it. Save and give first and live on the rest. Avoid debt. Use the debt snowball to pay down debt. Use tax-advantaged savings options like your 401k, IRAs, Roth IRAs, HSAs.

But you’re done. You’re retiring or maybe you’ve retired. You’ve saved. You’ve hopefully paid off your debts unless you’re arbitraging a really spectacular mortgage rate in retirement. You know what you want to spend on your lifestyle. How do you know how much is left over to give in retirement? If you’ve got a money question or worry, the answer is probably GivMoar. I’m Jason Demland. Welcome to GivMoar.

I want to talk about the 5 uses of money in retirement and specifically how Giving should guide the other uses of money. The Ron Blue and Kingdom Advisors message is that there’s only 5 things you can do with money, and they’re all happening simultaneously and competing: Live, Give, Grow, Owe (taxes), & Owe (debt). The bible teaches firstfruits giving and joyful giving. The New Testament implies a percent giving “in proportion to your means” which means the more you have the more you give. The Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 16 says:

“Now concerning the collection for the saints: as I directed the churches of Galatia, so you also are to do. On the first day of every week, each of you is to put something aside and store it up, as he may prosper, so that there will be no collecting when I come.” — 1 Corinthians 16:1–2 (ESV)

Our culture is different. Usually you prioritize your lifestyle expenses and use debt to finance them, then you pay taxes because there’s no escaping it, then whatever is left (if there even is anything) goes to giving.

While you’re working and trying to get ahead in your younger years you probably struggled some, you probably didn’t give that much and you almost certainly didn’t save very much. Most of my clients have a similar story — being young, married, and broke and faithfully working and grinding and saving a little until later in life they could save a lot more. Maybe you were actually able to prioritize giving in your younger working years. Kudos to you if you did, because the younger you are the harder it is! You had competing priorities like…I don’t know…food diapers electricity rent furnaces and that sort of thing that were also kind of important. The common high saving years are those last 15-20 years before retiring — when you’ve finally figured out what kind of lifestyle is enough and that you can actually prioritize saving in some big chunks. That’s usually when people that think giving is important start to give a regular chunk of their income away — hopefully first to their local church. If you didn’t cultivate a habit of percentage giving off of your income when you were younger though, this can be a tough transition. Giving breaks the power of money and sets our priorities up well. Prioritizing giving forces you to plan well and results in better financial stewardship while you’re earning and working. It’s why I recommend giving a set percentage of your gross income as a starting point for giving — when you don’t have much income, five or ten percent of not very much isn’t very much — then as your income increases at least your giving increases at the same rate. I’ve watched this play out with clients again and again. And the research backs up something related: having more money doesn’t automatically make anyone give a bigger share of it. The national giving curve is bent almost entirely by a small group of committed households who set a percentage and stick to it.¹

I know from experience that most retirees are primarily concerned about running out of money in this new phase. You worked hard all your life and built good habits of living on less than you make and saving up and investing through bear markets and bull markets. While you were working you weren’t as worried about running out of money, because you were earning and could handle fluctuations as they arose.

But retirement is weird. You worked your whole life and maybe just finally spent the last 10 or 15 years feeling pretty comfortable about where you are financially, but all of a sudden you aren’t a saver anymore. You feel like you aren’t earning so you may be tempted to get really conservative. And when that happens the last priority on your 5 uses of money usually gets dropped first. And if you haven’t developed the habit of giving first and generously, you may have adopted a method of thinking like the world about your money and you’ve prioritized it like this: “LIVE, OWE, OWE, GROW, GIVE”. Then out of fear of running out of money you reduce the risk in your investment portfolio and have less to give.

Maybe you’re thinking, “Jason, I’d love to give a lot, but I don’t think it’s very wise to end up having no way to take care of myself in retirement because I gave too much away. Shouldn’t I make sure I prioritize my living expenses first?”

Great point. Making sure you don’t run out of money is an extremely important part of retirement planning. But if it’s the whole paradigm or hermeneutic you’re using to look at your retirement then you’re going to get all out of whack. Proverbs 3:9 says “Honor the LORD with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce” (ESV). That snippet of eternal wisdom applies in retirement.

GivMoar exists as a philosophy because when you start with GIVE everything else changes and comes into focus. Starting retirement with giving as a priority is every bit as important as starting your working years with it.

If you spent your working years prioritizing giving it makes the transition a lot easier, but it’s still not easy to do. If you’re nervous about running out of money and it leads to less giving, it’s a mistake. You’re not obligated to give. It’s not a law. It’s not true that you are guaranteed financial success and vast amounts of wealth because you give a bunch away. What is true is that giving produces joy. 2 Corinthians 9 sums this all up and you’ve probably heard that “God loves a cheerful giver” but have you paid attention to the context around that one verse? Have you read the next part? At verse 10:

“He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness. You will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God. For the ministry of this service is not only supplying the needs of the saints but is also overflowing in many thanksgivings to God. By their approval of this service, they will glorify God because of your submission that comes from your confession of the gospel of Christ, and the generosity of your contribution for them and for all others, while they long for you and pray for you, because of the surpassing grace of God upon you. Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift!” — 2 Corinthians 9:10–15 (ESV)

If you heard that and thought “Cool. I give my money away and God promises to give me back more money than I gave. This is a good deal.” Then you missed the point. God may reward generous giving with financial prosperity, but that’s not the promise here. Eager giving deepens the believer’s experience of God’s grace — breaking the power of money over us. Our giving is a small way we mirror God’s generosity to us and it leads to great joy. Don’t rob yourself of joy by worrying. Don’t rob yourself of joy by restricting your giving because of your worrying.

So we start with Giving first when we start doing retirement income planning because it reveals capacity (how much is enough, living expenses, and guardrails for income), it calibrates Grow (asset location, asset allocation), defuses Owing taxes (designing income and tax planning around maximizing the net-of-tax amount of charitable giving), and demonizes Owing debt.

When I sit down with a couple that’s retiring, the first thing we do is talk about values. I’m trying to get better at asking questions here, because the answers can be really rich and telling. What’s your first memory about money? Why is money important to you? If you really believed this was someone else’s money and you were managing it for them, what would you have done differently and what would you do differently now?

I ultimately want to know how much is enough for them. How much is enough to live off of. Enough is an incredibly deep question and the answer is different for everyone depending on the day. If we know we’re stewarding God’s money, then we know the primary use of the money is to use it for the advancement of the kingdom, and yes — that primarily means making sure we are clothed, fed, and sheltered so we can continue to work and rest in retirement — but it also means that we give. We especially give to the ministry of the Gospel and we give to those in need. This framework helps us keep Enough in focus — and helps us put some boundaries on how much money we use to Live so it doesn’t continue to creep up and up.

Give calibrates Grow. How much you need to live and how much you want to give help calibrate how we invest and grow your money for the long-term. Especially in retirement when taking distributions from your portfolio, this is important. The asset allocation matters a lot — how much in stocks and how much in bonds and how much is “safe” depends mostly on your spending and giving and a whole lot on when you plan to die. We can’t predict when death is, but we’re pretty sure it’s certainly coming (memento mori). Asset location matters even more — because it impacts the type of growth and efficiency in giving and living off of the money. Which is the last account type we’re planning to take money out of? Whichever it is should probably have the most risk. Which is the first place we’re drawing money from? We ought to make sure we have some fairly stable investments there so we can last through market volatility. How big that stable piece should be — bond ladders, CDs, cash, all of that — is a whole episode on its own. It’s coming.

The most fun part of the GivMoar philosophy is how Give defuses Owing taxes. A few low-hanging strategies can save thousands — sometimes hundreds of thousands — of dollars on taxes over your retirement lifetime. Qualified charitable distributions from IRAs, gifts of appreciated securities, batching years of tithes into one big gift to a Donor Advised Fund, gifting appreciated securities to your Donor Advised Fund, converting Traditional IRAs to Roth IRAs in down markets or combined with large charitable contributions, and more! Generosity is the single best tax lever a retiree has. I never recommend giving just to save on taxes, but if you’d rather a charity have your money than the IRS there are worse things you can do. Being really generous usually means having less money than you otherwise would have, but that’s a feature not a bug. If you give from a heart overflowing with joy then let’s make sure we can maximize that giving by reducing taxes.

Finally, Give demonizes debt. It De-money-izes debt. Hah. Good one Jason. I’ll keep workshopping that one.

Having a Give-first retirement philosophy puts debt in proper perspective. No more borrowing against your future earnings in retirement — it’s palpable how much more real that is once you stop working full-time.

Whatever happened to mortgage burning parties? Back in the 50s and 60s, paying off the house and retiring went together. You made the last payment, you invited the neighbors over, and you literally set the mortgage papers on fire. So cool. There was even a Mayberry episode about one. Nobody’s burning mortgages anymore.

Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that over the last thirty years, the share of homeowners aged 65 to 79 carrying a mortgage went from about 1 in 4 to about 4 in 10 — and the median amount they owe is up 400%.² For folks 80 and over — a generation ago only 3% of them had a mortgage. Now it’s 31%. Why is that? Well, part of the answer is probably the historically low interest rate environment we’ve had for the last 20 years.

I think it’s wise to retire without a mortgage. I’ve never-ever had a client call me to excitedly tell me “Jason! Guess what? We have our portfolio set up on the efficient frontier!” or “Can you believe our TTM dividend yield this past year!?!?” But I can tell you I have had clients bursting at the seams to tell me they’ve paid off their mortgage. I’ve never been invited to an asset allocation party. Having no debt means more flexibility — and yes, I know that the financial answer to paying off a 2.5% mortgage when you can get a government-backed T-Bill that pays more than your mortgage rate is that you definitely shouldn’t pay that off. You’re being basically paid to stay in debt and you’d theoretically be many dollars ahead if you arbitrage the mortgage. But the joy and peace of being debt free is something I can’t quantify, and I have experienced it second-hand from dozens of other people as they retire, and that’s why my advice is always — pay it off. Do it sensibly: if the money’s coming out of an IRA, that might mean spreading the payoff over two or three tax years so the payoff itself doesn’t create a monster tax bill. That’s a planning conversation. But get there.

Over this past year — which of Live, Give, Grow, Owe (taxes), and Owe (debt) has been your priority? You can put a number in each of those five categories if you check your last year of spending. If you gave me your bank statements and your tax return, I could tell you which one you prioritize. Break them into percentages and get a look. The first thing to do in financial planning is finding out where you currently stand. You don’t have to change anything right this moment, but we need to know where we’re starting. The percentages tell you where you’ve been; your heart is what we’re really after. Whether you’re giving 10%, 30%, or 2%, the number by itself doesn’t mean you’re prioritizing it. Where your treasure is, that’s where your heart is too.

Next time we’ll answer the question “how much should I give?” [Subscribe on YouTube — link] so you don’t miss it.

Soli Deo Gloria!

Sources

James, R.N. & Sharpe, D.L., “The Nature and Causes of the U-Shaped Charitable Giving Profile,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 36(2), 2007 — https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0899764006295993. Experimentally corroborated by Hargaden, E.P. & Duquette, N.J., “The U-Shaped Charitable-Giving Curve,” NVSQ — https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08997640231189451
Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, Housing America’s Older Adults 2023 — https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/us-unprepared-provide-housing-and-care-millions-older-adults; as reported by Marketplace, “More older Americans continue to pay mortgages,” June 9, 2025 — https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/06/09/more-older-americans-continue-to-pay-mortgages

The five uses of money framework is adapted from Ron Blue’s “Master Your Money” (Thomas Nelson).

This content is for educational purposes only and is not intended as legal, tax, or investment advice. Please consult with a qualified professional for guidance specific to your situation. Investment advisory services offered through Demland Wealth LLC, a state-registered investment advisor in Ohio & Indiana.

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GIVMOAR – Episode 2: The 5 Things You Can Do With Money (And Why GIVE Matters Most)

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