Gerard Spinks UndagroundMilli

Tithing is a HOT topic in the black community in terms of church because we are taught as kids to give 10% of your check at church every pay period. But I challenge this because if you give 10% of your pay check before you give 10% to yourself in savings, you may just be a fool. Self tithing and saving should precede tithing at church and here’s why. If you give to the church first, although it’s a beautiful and wonderful thing, you are sacrificing saving yourself in an emergency in order to save another.

Although this is the greatest thing to do, it is also the foolish thing to do. You should ALWAYS beyond the shadow of a doubt, save 10% of your check on your pay cycle and put it away for an emergency or sudden job loss. Let me put it this way: if someone suddenly dies in your family and you are not in the same city or state as they are and you need to immediately fly there to help the family, do you have the money in savings to go? If you don’t, can you realistically go back to your church and ask them to help you? Yes and no. Remember, the church has the whole entire congregation to look out for with prayer requests and money.

Nothing against church but YOU need to protect and look out for YOU. If you make $3,000 per month, you should be saving $300 per month no question prior to you saving and giving to the church. This is your personal seeds and they are just as important in planting as planting the seeds to help another. What good is helping someone else if you can’t help YOU?!

Math homework with my 9 year old daughter is fun because we make it fun. Many times, kids see math as scary, tough, hard to learn, and just downright hard to understand. Last night, we were doing division homework and I turned it into a fun exercise and also a visual exercise where she can learn how to visualize what she is doing rather than just trying to do it in her mind. For us African Americans, math is very important to our child’s growth and competitiveness in America.

Many foreign countries focus their kids on math because they know that math will get them into schools such as Georgia Tech, Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, The University of California Berkeley and other power house schools that focus on engineering disciplines. Math itself, is the key separator at colleges and universities as far as African Americans go. I have cousins and family that have tried to get into these good schools but their SAT math scores are low and these greatest schools in America require a high Math IQ.

We parents, have got to get to the point where we know how to more effectively help our children conquer any fears of math and raise the collective math IQ of our community. Math does not have to be hard and difficult to teach and learn. You can Understand the Fun and Beauty in Mathematical Concepts! Order "Joy of Mathematics", on DVD!

It seems as though this recession and crazy economy has pulled a trick on a number of people and not just lack of jobs and income. It seems to have also taken a toll on personal friendships and family as well. Since people are really hurting financially and need money for everything, the person with a job becomes a real target for anger and hostility by those who may not have it.

These economic times have put an increasing pressure on family and friends because when someone needs money, they really need money and they don’t know where to get it to help themselves immediately. I think this is a shame and the thing that is overlooked by politicians when it comes to helping America. I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know if it’s a political thing or a personal thing but it is becoming extremely difficult to keep up with one’s life when 5-7 people around you need an immediate cell phone bill paid, need to move into their apartment, need help with the moving truck, need help with an emergency surgery, or need help getting to and from work so they need help with the car down payment.

For the person that has the job, it dang near makes you go into hiding because so many people need your help. It kind of reminds me of a movie where everyone else has some sort of plague and there’s one or two people that did not get it and nothing’s wrong with them. Everyone with the plague is looking at them like they’re crazy and they need to hide out in a basement somewhere so they don’t get killed.

I pray for the sake of America, friendships, and better family relationships that this recession concludes this year but I don’t think it will. I think people are going to get worse off in 2011 and real change will not come until 2012 or 2013. What does this mean for anyone with a job? Save your money now or end up being on the side where you are calling everyone for money and can’t get help because the people with the money barely have enough for themselves and need to save their own households.

I walked into my daughters room tonight to check on her as it was her birthday and we had a super fun birthday party at the rollerskating rink. She also got two new dolls to add to her collection from one of her BFF’s and one of her uncles from California. I noticed that when she plays with these dolls SHE is the voice of the dolls which is really a form of self talk.

I decided to stand in the doorway to listen to what these imaginary girls are chatting about. It was awesome hearing what is in my daughters mind as a little growing 9 year old human being. This exercise made me think about what we adults tell ourselves in our self talk? Do we even self talk anymore or is this a thing of youth only? If it is, we need to bring self chatter back immediately. You should look in the mirror and just talk to yourself and see what you say to yourself. Do you berate yourself? Do you tear yourself down and not accept yourself? Do you over praise yourself on your looks, your beauty, your brains. Are you honest with yourself as you gaze in the mirror?

This is one of the toughest exercises I have ever done and I’ve been doing it for quite some time. Me and my friend Adisa Banjoko used to call it “Raw Real” which to us is the deepest form of reality. The examination of self in a raw manner is the toughest and realest thing you could ever do. Most times, it is WAY easier to examine someone else in either our family or friends circle. I recommend for 2011, that people examine self and start by truly listening to the self talk and chatter that dominates your thoughts.

This post is only for the mature audience. Please turn away if you don’t like this title or identify too much with it. Keeping broke friends and family around you may cost you more than you know or think. I used to have a broke friend around me years ago who was constantly in need of money. When I say constantly, I mean she needed money all the time for 3 years solid. Being a loyal friend, I would listen to her and help her out now and then. I started tracking how much money I was giving to her back in the day just to help me continue my budgeting.

She never liked me tracking the money and would say that I was throwing it up in her face when I told her that I had “donated” over $5,000 to her over a 3 year period from 2000-2002. She accused me of not being a good friend since I was counting how much I helped her and we both went our separate ways after I brought it up to her.

This made me think about measuring how much you “give” to people. Everyone talks about seasons of giving and giving back to people in need and yada yada yada but I’m here to tell you to be very careful because having too many broke friends and family will literally in turn break you and empty your bank account.

Let’s examine YOUR numbers since it’s your money that is being spent. Let’s say you bring home $3,000 per month or $1,500 every two weeks. You’ve got to pay your own overhead of mortgage/rent, car payment, car insurance, health insurance, kids stuff and whatever else. First check is gone. The second check of $1,500 has a little room left in it for you. If you give away and donate $100 per week to your friend, you now have a $400 per month friend bill and that’s just one friend.

Let’s add it your cousins and the sporadic needs that having 7 cousins who need money, 3 aunts, and 4 uncles. You have 14 people who desperately need financial help consistently every single week because they have bills and need to eat and live themselves. If you give only $25 to 14 people each month you now have an additional financial bill of $350 per month consistently on top of the other $400 per month. You are now spending $750 per month of money that you supposedly don’t really see or think you have.

This money does not include the occasional emergency that one of the family or friends have to cover the rent because they are late and are about to get evicted. The money that you were trying to save for yourself is now being spent to help the family and friends who are broke. In turn, you are broke and have no financial cushion to help yourself if something happens in your world. And on top of that, the money that you give out will NEVER come back to you.

If you want to survive and thrive in 2011, you must remove all of these people from your life financially. Personally, they can stay but they will drift off because they are blaming you for not helping them anyway. Good luck!