Hello. I’m Matt Johnson, and I’m the originator of the Good Steward Project. A few years ago, I became interested in personal finance. Learning how to manage, save, and invest money has become a God-given passion of mine, and I want to share this passion with others. I volunteered to host a personal finance small group for my church in Bellevue, Nebraska in the hopes of doing just this.
I quickly discovered, however, that I couldn’t find an “all-in-one” solution for someone who wanted to provide materials for a Christian small group focused on personal finance. An ideal solution would:
- Be comprehensive: covering all area of personal finance — paying off debt, writing a budget, tracking expenses, and investing for retirement — and not just one or two.
- Focus on primarily on personal finance and not only on spiritual issues — covering areas such as “giving,” “tithing,” and “recognizing God as the true owner of everything” ad nauseum and then neglecting to mention how and where to open a retirement account in the chapter on investing.)
- Provide useful, relevant, and accurate information. Many books on personal finance for Christians will suggest contacting a “financial counselor” to start a retirement account instead of laying a simple plan to do it yourself. None that I’ve found have discussed buying index funds, using free online software such as mint.com to track expenses, or the value of online-only banks as a way of building cash savings for a rainy-day fund. In fact, most Christian personal finance books won’t even touch the “how” of personal finance — they all focus almost exclusively on the “why,” which is summed up as “all your money is God’s, so stop being so greedy.”
- Have no hidden agenda. The companies behind some personal finance “systems” receive kickbacks for pushing certain financial products, and are all too eager to endorse a products without offering full disclosure as to what they’re promoting and why. A cornerstone of the Good Steward Project is the integrity in knowing every recommendation behind a product, service, or company on this site is unbought, and unpaid for. That’s a promise.
My primary inspiration for this project has been Clark Howard, a talk radio host in Atlanta, Georgia who provides a wealth of free information every day on his program and on his website. It’s my goal to do the same through this website and the materials I’ve collected for our church’s personal finance small group. I also intend to share as much as I can for free in one place, all organized and written in a concise, easy-to-read format. That’s the goal of this site — to be a one-stop repository of our group’s personal finance materials, to make it easy for anyone to learn to be a Good Steward of the gifts God has given us through sharing knowledge with one another.
Thanks for joining us!