God's Word gives us practical wisdom for all areas of life including our finances. There are many Bible verses about not wasting money that can help us be better stewards. Read or listen to this material from Your Finances God's Way to learn how to avoid wasting money.

Table of Contents1. Bible Verses About not Wasting Money Teach Us Small Purchases Add Up2. Bible Verses About not Wasting Money Teach Us to Avoid Worthless Purchases3. Bible Verses About not Wasting Money Teach Us to Resist Self-EntitlementEve’s EntitlementAmnon’s EntitlementKing Ahab’s EntitlementBeware of Self-Entitlement from Any Source4. Bible Verses About not Wasting Money Teach Us to Be Patient5. Bible Verses About not Wasting Money Teach Us to Understand “Good Deals”Jesus’s ExampleJesus’s Self-DenialJesus’s Patience

Most people throughout history have wanted necessities, but the more common problem today is having too much stuff. In the past, people wanted food and clothing, but we have too many clothes and overeat food. Mark Twain once defined civilization as “a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.”1 We spend too much money and accumulate too much stuff. Unsurprisingly, storage space facilities are one of the fastest-growing industries. An article titled “Self-storage: How Warehouses for Personal Junk Became a $38 Billion Industry” reads:

Despite recessions and demographic shifts, few building types have boomed like self-storage lockers. The self-storage industry made $32.7 billion in 2016, nearly three times Hollywood’s box office gross. Self-storage has seen 7.7 percent annual growth since 2012, and now employs 144,000 nationwide. One in eleven Americans pays an average of $91.14 per month to use self-storage. The United States has more than fifty thousand facilities and roughly 2.31 billion square feet of rentable space. To give that perspective, the volume of self-storage units in the country could “fill the Hoover Dam twenty-six times with old clothing, skis, and keepsakes.

When I drive down the road and pass storage units, I wonder what’s in them that people don’t need and can’t easily access but still feel the need to keep. How many owners are still paying off the credit cards they used to buy that stuff in the first place?

Typically, when we have too much stuff, we should recognize two things: First, we are spending too much money. Second, we don’t have an income problem; we have a spending problem.

If we have spending problems but blame our income, this creates another problem. We don’t make appropriate changes because we blame the wrong place: We blame our income when we should blame ourselves. We complain about our paychecks when we should handle our finances differently.

Even people with low incomes can still enjoy commodities that years ago would’ve been considered luxuries—cell phones, cars, computers, televisions. Most of us can comfortably live off much less if we avoid the spending problems that plague us. I use the word most because some people work hard and are financially wise yet still struggle to make ends meet. For the rest of us, let’s figure out how to make our money go further by examining the most common spending problems.

1. Bible Verses About not Wasting Money Teach Us Small Purchases Add Up

Sometimes, we struggle financially because of large purchases costing thousands of dollars. More often, though, we struggle because of our small purchases over several years. These frequent expenditures take place without a second thought for three reasons:

Small purchases are easier to justify—we can tell ourselves, “It is only five dollars...or ten dollars...or twenty dollars,” without considering that, over time, this adds up to thousands of dollars.

Small purchases don’t seem detrimental—we recognize how tragic it is to waste thousands of dollars, but it’s much more challenging to recognize the damage caused by wasting a few dollars.