I am 30 years old and I started saving for retirement when I was 20. Before you think I’m a savant of my time, with endless pools of wisdom, let me back you up a scootch.
When I was at Taylor University for college, there was a class offered in the spring semester of my senior year. It wasn’t a get-a-credit class. It was a few weeks, a few hours of non-credit learning. And by the end of it, they promised us money if we finished.
What was this?! I was going to get paid to go to class instead of paying to go to class? What were they asking for, my blood plasma?
On top of that, there was pizza. Free pizza. And it gave me another excuse to hang out with my newly minted boyfriend in the lull between open dorm hours that wasn’t a lounge, a car, or a gas station. It could’ve been a comprehensive overview of the history of salt. Whatever it was, I was sold.
The class was called “Multiplying your Minas”. It was a non-credit class teaching the bones of financial literacy to everyone from writing majors (me) to business majors (my hunky then-boyfriend). The name referred to the passage in Matthew of the widow’s mite, of the woman who gave her mite, or minas in the offering box.
So, we traipsed to class every Monday for a few weeks, learning about investments and the magic of compound interest, taught in part by some students’ dads who came down from Wheaton, a suburb of Chicago. By the end, we opened up a Roth IRA and set up automatic contributions (and those were quite meager, I might add).
So life went on. My hunky boyfriend and I got married, moved away, we both got jobs. Every month, a little money got sucked out of my checking account and thwooped into the market, to sit and grow with that magic fairy dust of compound interest. We would shovel more money into our little Roths as our careers progressed, even when mine was a piddly writer’s salary living in very expensive Seattle as a single girl. Ah, the writer's life.
It’s a decade later, and those Roths that we inadvertently opened up have grown from dweeby seedlings to sturdy saplings in the boom of the post-recession economy. Retirement calculators tell me that if we stop now and don’t contribute a single dollar more, our sturdy saplings will grow into oak trees, where we can sit in their shade when we’re gray and wrinkled, and read books while fending off curious ants.
Oh, you want real numbers instead of my poetic tree language? I started mine with $200 in college and at last check it was worth $60,000, with minimal work from me. I figure I’ve contributed less than $30,000 of my own money, sent through in feasible monthly chunks over the years. It could be worth a half a million dollars by the time I retire without contributing a single dollar more since I started it so young.
Wow.
What a gift.
What a tremendous gift.
I found out it had only run for a few years, perhaps while the leaders of it had students attending Taylor. I was just one of the lucky few.
When the topic comes up with friends nowadays in passing—these retirement accounts we opened when we were 20 and 21—they say, “wow, I wish I had something like that when I was in college.”
And I say, “Yeah!”
Wait. YEAH! Every student should have this. Every student should be able to accidentally stumble upon this incredible financial tailwind, ushered in by the wisdom of someone who came before. Financial literacy—financial confidence for the years to come—all laced up with that sweet generosity from the widow’s mite.
So, like the intentional Taylor alumni I am, I made one that built off that same practical exercise, and then wrapped it in the living, giving, biblical words of stewardship and generosity. Six weeks. Non-credit. A small group course to give students a biblical foundation for their financial lives. It’s called Open Hands.
It has brought students together to talk about money: what to do, mistakes to avoid. This gives the time and space for soon-to-be-career adults to ask all the questions they might have wondered before about money—maybe for the first time, and maybe for the last time.
By the end, they’re a little more confident about how to do money as a Christian once they start their careers. To give them a picture, a framework, of what it means to live wisely and generously.
To date, hundreds of students have gone through, from Taylor students and beyond. They’ve talked about their student debt, they’ve talked about living below their means, and they’ve opened Roth IRAs of their own—their own little seedlings to grow in the decades to come. They can plow into the world with newfound money confidence. Armed with a college degree, the beginnings of a stable financial footing, and a heart for healing a broken world: just think of what they’ll do.
And to those folks who ran the original program—the ones who got it off the ground to students who were perhaps more excited about pizza than the wisdom you had to share, you probably didn’t even know all this was happening—that your actions had an impact so many years later. Throw a stone and sometimes the ripples go farther than you can see.