Tentmaking Tips

I’ve got good news.

The gifting that many people in ministry have is exactly what’s needed to be successful in a side business. You need to love people & serve them well. And you need to help them solve a problem they have. Most of you are already great at that!

Christian counselors help people overcome fear by strengthening faith in God and taking small steps of increasing exposure to that fear over time.

The solution to fear is not to suppress it, avoid it, or deny it. It’s to trust God & gradually be exposed to the fear over time until your fear is diminished.

The same is true with tentmaking.

The best way to overcome the fear of tentmaking is faith & exposure. Trust God & start doing a little bit of tentmaking. We’re not talking about quitting...

That’s when I usually start brainstorming with them about ways it could happen.

My wife and I decided before we got married that, regardless of how much money I made, we wanted to figure out a way for her to stay home with our kids. While we haven’t always had everything that a two-income family would have, we would say in hindsight that it’s been totally worth it!

And, little did we know, she was still able to make some extra spending money over the years using her real estate license. But we never relied on that income and she never devoted much time to it.

Here are 5 ideas I give pastors & Christian leaders for becoming a one-income family.

1. You can likely reduce your spending by close to 50% by focusing on optimizing the top 3 spending categories

   Housing....

The first way is the most obvious and most frequently pursued. But it’s not the best option if you don’t want your real estate business to take you even more time.

The second and third ways are less often pursued, but very powerful if you can pursue them together. Neither of them add to your time commitment, but both can add significantly to the bottom line.

Ok, let’s get started.

1. Increase Your Volume

   This is what most people think of when they’re wanting to increase their commissions. Just increase the number of transactions and you’ll increase your commissions. While this is certainly true, it requires more effort. Each transactions represents hours of additional work. That’s fine if you’re wanting to do this full-time, but if you’re wanting to do this on the side to supplement or replace your ministry income, this is...

1. It reduces the property tax portion of your mortgage payment, or if you don’t have a mortgage, it reduces your yearly property tax expense.

2. It allows your “house hack” to go further because you have less housing expense to cover.

3. It speeds up your journey to financial independence because you’ve reduced your total monthly expenses.

Ok, so how should you go about it?

Most people are not actively thinking about their property taxes and believe it’s just a necessary expense of owning a home that they have no control over. But that’s not true. You have a lot more influence over your property taxes than you may think.

I want to share 4 ways to reduce your property taxes.

1. Make sure you have applied for a homestead exemption

   This is an easy step, but very important. Some people don’t know about this & pay way too much in property taxes...

I shared the first Student Deal Highlight a few months ago & it was quite large & unusual — a $140,874 profit. You can read more about it here.

Today I want to share with you another Student Deal Highlight in a typical profit range for deals done by our students.

After doing his first deal, this student said, “I learned in December about what Chris was doing to help pastors and missionaries create income streams for support. Having, myself, been in ministry for 45 years and being of kindred heart to do the same for ministers, I decided to take the course and give it a go. In a little more than 90 days since being introduced to the process, my first deal yielded $13,000 profit.”

Here are the details on his first deal.

Profit

He contracted the...

It’s a good question.

I certainly didn’t “have” to. I was paid full-time by our church and the elders were glad to continue paying me. There was no financial struggle involved.

So, why do it?

I’ll give you 4 reasons.

1. It’s a joy to do ministry for free.

   When we moved back to Lubbock after graduating from seminary to start our church, we had no income. Our sponsor church was unable to help us financially, so we had to raise our personal support and also a budget for the church.

   We had many generous people give to help fund a salary for me and my family and a start-up budget for our church.

   Once our church started, all of the tithes and offerings went directly to church ministries because my salary had been covered for the first 2 years. I loved this!

   After 2 years, the church had the funds to bring me on the payroll, and while I was grateful, I really enjoyed not being on the payroll. Soon after coming on the...

But, after using many different banks over the years, my favorite bank by far has been Chase.

Now, I know there’s not a “one size fits all” bank. For your purposes, your bank might be far better than Chase. But for my purposes, and I think the purposes of most people, Chase Bank is one of the best banks out there.

I know a lot of people will argue for a local bank, and I can understand the reasons, but I think national banks with local branches can accomplish most of the same things, and even more. And, if you think about it, a lot of the local banks end up getting bought out by national brands eventually anyways.

Here are 10 reasons why Chase is my favorite bank:

1. The Online Interface

   Most people these days do a lot of their banking online. They expect their bank to have a decent website. This is often NOT the case with local banks &...

My family and I have been traveling “nearly” free for years now. We’ve earned tens of thousands of dollars in free travel just by following a simple process.

I’ve written many blogs on the various details of this process, but today I’ll keep it big picture and show you how to get started.

Step 1: Watch and improve your credit score.

• Start by finding your credit score and working to improve it. I’ve written extensively about that here. Even if you have a very low credit score, you can still play the travel rewards game.

• Your credit score will determine what credit cards you can qualify for, and the higher the score, the better the cards you can get.

Step 2: Apply for a Chase credit card with a large welcome bonus.

• The welcome bonuses are the key to accumulating a lot of travel rewards quickly. A welcome bonus is essentially a big chunk of points they give you to incentivize you to apply for...

1. You don’t like the process of buying and selling houses.

   It probably goes without saying that if you don’t like real estate, you shouldn’t get into it. To get your license, you will have to take quite a few real estate courses and to keep your license, there will be continuing education every few years.

2. You have a close family member who is an agent.

   Because many of you would get your license mainly to represent close family members and friends on the side, there could be some family conflict if you take business away from the other family member. Of course it doesn’t have to be this way, but if the other close family member derives most of their income this way, they may feel threatened if you get your license. And they may worry that they’ll lose some of the business they would’ve otherwise received from the...