In this episode, Joy interviews financial coach Katie Jones about the spiritual dangers of making a financial goal an idol in our lives. Katie shares her personal journey of paying off $40,000 in student loan debt and how she initially followed conventional financial wisdom that led her to inadvertently worship money rather than God.

Katie Jones is a certified financial coach and real estate investor based in Colorado who helps Christians move from feeling disempowered by their lack of financial education to becoming confident and competent stewards of their resources. Her focus isn’t on the numbers, but on helping each person grow closer to Christ as they partner with him in becoming better stewards of what they’ve been entrusted. Katie is also a wife, mom, and foster mom who brings her real-world experience to her work.

Joy Hunt: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Pastors & Money Podcast. I’m Joy Suzanne Hunt, pastor and financial coach, bringing you conversations about personal finance, church finance and how we disciple our churches in the areas of finance and stewardship. You can find the episode show notes, and more at pastorsandmoney.com. And here’s the show.

Katie Jones is passionate about equipping believers with excellent money management skills that are rooted in the gospel. As a certified financial coach and real estate investor based in Colorado, she helps Christians move from feeling disempowered by their lack of financial education to becoming confident and competent stewards of their resources.

Joy Hunt: Her focus isn’t on the numbers, but on helping each person grow closer to Christ as [00:01:00] they partner with him and becoming better stewards of what they’ve been entrusted. Katie is also a wife, a mom, and a foster mom who brings her real world experience to her work, helping others find true financial freedom the way that God intended.

Welcome to the podcast.

Katie Fiola Jones: Hey, Joy. Thanks so much for having me today.

Joy Hunt: Can you share a bit about your journey with money, starting with that $40, 000 in student loan debt after college?

Katie Fiola Jones: Yeah, yeah. So, that’s a great place to start because honestly, my journey to where I am today, obviously, there’s lots that went on before that moment of graduation. But I would say my real, true financial testimony kind of began around that time. I was getting ready to graduate from college, and I had this student loan debt. I had no clue.

Honestly, I didn’t know about student loans at this point except that I knew that I had them, but I didn’t know anything about going about paying them off or trying to get it paid off quickly. [00:02:00] But at the time I was working as a property manager for a real estate company. So I was helping other people rent out their rental properties.

You know, if Joe had a house that he wanted to move out of and then rent out to some tenants to earn some money, he would come to our company to help rent it out. So what I was doing was as a leasing agent, just getting his property rented out and taking care of it. And I thought this was a really cool way to earn like a side income.

I started learning about how to then go about doing that. Making money through real estate investing myself. This was before I had really graduated. I was just becoming curious in this world. After graduating and realizing I had this very large amount of student loan debt, the gears started shifting in my head. Oh, maybe I could potentially use real estate investing to help [00:03:00] me pay off debt.

What would that look like? And I began to explore this new avenue to me. At that time, I really followed a lot of the conventional wisdom out there. I wanted to do it all as quickly as possible because that’s kind of what the world at that point was telling me to do: get rid of your debt, become debt-free, and then you can become financially free. So my everyday life revolved around getting this debt paid off, and I wanted to invest in real estate. I was trying to figure out how the two of those balance together, So I graduated from college in 2016. My husband and I got married in 2018, and then we ended up paying off our student loans. I was the only one who had student loans. I say ours because we’ve always considered everything as a joint thing.

We paid off the student loans that I came to the marriage with in [00:04:00] I think 2020. Yeah, and we actually bought a rental property right before we actually paid off all of our student loans. It was a little unconventional the way that we did things, but we had the money saved. We had been focusing on trying to get that all figured out. That’s the path that we took and we were able to pay it all off.

It felt really good. For like maybe half a second, then it was okay we’re debt free and we’ve been focusing on this financial goal for so long and like with such intensity, and now what? Honestly, I felt very lost at that moment.

Joy Hunt: Yeah, so you mentioned following that conventional wisdom initially. So you shared a little bit about what that looked like, but how did that affect your relationship with God during that time?

Katie Fiola Jones: Yeah, I mean it severely impacted my relationship with Christ. I wouldn’t have admitted that In the moment, because I felt like I was doing what God really wanted me to do was to have this [00:05:00] really intense focus on paying off our debt and becoming financially independent. I believed that was what God was telling me to do.

The issue was that I had made those financial goals more important than God himself, even though I believed that these big goals were coming from Him. Paying off your debt is not an unbiblical thing, right? We know that for sure. There are so many times in the Old Testament and even in the New Testament where we’re warned against debt.

And so the issue was that I had taken this goal that I believe was from God, and then I looked at how to attack it from a kind of conventional worldly wisdom perspective with this really intense focus on only my financial goal. I had this idea or this concept, again from the world, of putting myself first, filling up my bucket before I can go and overflow to [00:06:00] others.

I focused on things like achieving financial independence. What I realized was that in this process of attacking my financial goal so intensely, I was trying to become independent from God. And so this financial independence was taking over my life. So when I say that after we paid off that debt, it was really exciting for a day, I felt so empty because I realized that God was not in this at that point.

Like I was not inviting Him into this process. Again, I would not have admitted that to anyone because I was convinced that I was doing this for God. But the truth is that He doesn’t need us to do any of this for Him, right? He wants to do all of this with us. That was the mistake I made, and what I mean by following this conventional path was all about me.

It was all about myself, even though [00:07:00] I thought I was honoring God in it. I really wasn’t because I had kicked Him out of the process.

Joy Hunt: And as you were saying that, it makes me think we can do that with any of the things that God calls us to do.

Katie Fiola Jones: Definitely.

Joy Hunt: So it doesn’t even necessarily mean that the direction or the call didn’t come from God, but we can still push Him out of the conversation in the process. Or we can, as pastors, we can prioritize our ministry over our relationship with God.

It’s so easy to do that without even realizing it.

Katie Fiola Jones: Yeah. And it even can be focusing on that one specific goal over everything else. So I think, one challenge that pastors have that I would say every pastor struggles with at some point is ministry even over family. My husband is a youth pastor and this is something that we as a family unit have worked through as well.

And so when you think about your financial ministry too, like as an [00:08:00] individual, pastor, or family, when we focus on just our financial ministry over everything else, we need to have balance. So I think one of the other mistakes that I made with my debt journey specifically was, again, having that intense focus on just my debt and clouding out any other things that God might have put before me. If He had been calling me to give one month instead of paying extra toward my debt, I didn’t know because I wasn’t in relationship with Him. I wasn’t communing with Him.

When we focus on one thing and don’t have that balance with everything else in our lives, we can also run into a bunch of challenges and problems. By doing that, it’s not just kicking God out, but tuning everything else out as well.

Joy Hunt: Good God-intended things can become idols if they’re in the wrong position.

Katie Fiola Jones: [00:09:00] Yeah.

Joy Hunt: So what was that moment of realization like when you realized that you had been really idolizing money and worshiping money more than God? What was that like?

Katie Fiola Jones: That’s a good question. I don’t think that I recognized that truth, that I was worshiping my money more than God, until a few years after I had paid off my debt. I had that moment of emptiness right after we paid off our debt. But I didn’t correspond that with the fact that I was worshipping money. Like I was making money my idol.

It wasn’t until maybe a couple of years later that I recognized it. I read a book called Getting Over Yourself, and it’s all about idols. It is one of those smack-you-in-the-face kind of books because it woke me up to the fact that the prosperity gospel is [00:10:00] something that pretty much all of us in America specifically, but just like Western cultures, like that we all fall prey to.

And I would have never recognized that or admitted that about myself if I had not read this book. Because the way that it was explained to me and expressed in this book was something that I was like, “oh my gosh, I do this.”

Joy Hunt: Okay.

Katie Fiola Jones: We associate the prosperity gospel with flying on a private jet, or you know just being like driving around in like really fancy cars.

That’s what a lot of us tend to view the prosperity gospel as. And so I’d say most of us as Christians would not say that’s something that we are trying to achieve, right? But what we are trying to achieve a lot of times, most of us in the Western, especially American culture is this sense of like comfort and, security and just like having status amongst your friends. Not a lot, but like being in a really comfortable spot.

Joy Hunt: Okay.

Katie Fiola Jones: And what I realized was that Oh, by doing this, I’m worshiping my money. And that’s because that’s all I wanted.

So it wasn’t with the debt that I recognized that I was worshiping my money. It came a few years later, unfortunately. It would have been great if God had woken me up in that moment to be like, hello, something’s wrong here. I started to recognize it then, but it wasn’t until it was really explained to me that I understood, “this is why I’ve been feeling so empty after I’ve achieved financial goals.” Like now that I’ve achieved it, now what do I do? I don’t know where to go. So yeah, it’s been an interesting journey.

Joy Hunt: Yeah, for sure. So you talk about how the prosperity gospel is not just about health and wealth, but [00:12:00] asking money to do what only God can do. So can you unpack that for us a little bit more? You touched on it a moment ago, but can you unpack that?

Katie Fiola Jones: Definitely, and fair warning, this concept does ruffle feathers amongst us because, and I say that knowingly, because that’s what it did for me when I read those words in this book I was falling for a version of the prosperity gospel.

Like I was not happy about it. That made me very uncomfortable because I was in this position where I was like, no, I don’t want to be some wealthy millionaire with a mansion on a private jet with fancy cars and going on lavish vacations. I just want security, comfort, and status quo. And, I want to, for lack of a better phrase, I want to keep up with the Joneses. My last name is Jones now.

I married into the last name Jones. So people using that phrase, it just cracks me up. But that’s what it is. We just want to keep up [00:13:00] with what everybody else is doing. And that is it.

When we ask money to do for us what only God can do, like giving us that security, giving us comfort, giving us a status, a purpose, giving us identity, then that’s when we’re really worshiping our money more than God. That’s when we’re falling for this version of the prosperity gospel.

My friend, Bob Loddick, who is also in the faith and finance space, has said oftentimes that “money is the perfect idol because money really is like a form of power,” right?

When we have money, we can do things with it. We can go places, we can influence people, and it’s just the reality of money. And when we have this power, when we have lots of money, why would we ever have a need for a god to come and rescue us, right? Like, why would we [00:14:00] need god? Money can be so tricky, and that’s why we’re warned about it so often in the Bible because it is a form of power.

It does cloud our judgment. You can do almost anything when you have money. Obviously, money doesn’t buy everything. It doesn’t buy you happiness. Many of us have recognized that by trying to buy things that we think will make us happy.

But when we try to do that, when we use money that way, we’re asking money to do for us what only God can do for us, right?

Joy Hunt: Yeah, so let’s shift a little bit. So you had this shift in your understanding and that changed your approach to how you do financial coaching. So can you tell us a little bit about that?

Katie Fiola Jones: Yeah. So 2018 was when my husband and I got married, we bought our first rental property. We were going on this journey of paying off all our debt and all these things. I started blogging around this time. I started [00:15:00] teaching people the things that I was learning about money, and about real estate investing.

Again, I was doing it from this perspective of God wants us to do this so intensely and we want to achieve financial independence. And I was reading the Bible to find my own truths in it. Unfortunately, I was teaching from that perspective because I didn’t know better.

And I think there is still a lot of wisdom that came from it because it wasn’t like I was teaching something that was opposite of the Bible, right? It was like paying off your debt. Let’s do this investment for our future. It’s great to save for your future These are all biblical principles that we can find in the Bible. So it wasn’t like I was like go take out tons of debt and spend all of your money. At least there was some truth. I just pray for the people’s lives that I did connect with at that time.

I pray that they were able to chew the meat and spit out the bones of the stuff that I was teaching because then it was years later that I [00:16:00] realized that I was teaching this version of a prosperity gospel thing once I read Paul Tripp’s book, Redeeming Money, and then I read Getting Over Yourself. I’m failing to remember who the author is, but once I read these books, it started to shift my perspective of money. It’s not meant to just achieve our own goals.

Like, we have a bigger purpose than becoming debt-free. We have a bigger purpose than saving for retirement. We have a bigger purpose than living comfortably and saving. And so it really started to change the way that I helped other Christians with their money.

Yes, let’s work on these things together because they’re still very important, but let’s not make it the end all be all. And we’re not just trying to achieve financial health for the sake of financial health.

We’re trying to achieve financial health for the kingdom of God. What does that look like?

So it just really changed the mission that I was on. And I hope, I [00:17:00] and pray, that it’s been more closely aligned with the way that God would want us to be using our money.

Joy Hunt: So what are some of the biggest challenges that your clients are facing with their money?

Katie Fiola Jones: Most of the challenges that my clients come to me with are different than I’d actually say are the challenges that they’re really dealing with. Many of them come to me thinking that their problem is that they need more money, or that they need to make more money or save more money.

They think they just need more, but after beginning to work together they start to realize that they have a lot of the resources they need to cover all of their responsibilities, right? Just day-to-day things, groceries, your bills, insurance, whatever.

Joy Hunt: Mmmhmmm.

Katie Fiola Jones: So they can then go and accomplish their financial goals, but they’re [00:18:00] not managing their money well. They’re not managing their money in accordance with gospel principles, or just simply spending less than you earn.

Many people think that the problem is that they need to bring in more money. But the challenge really is this heart issue of where are my priorities? Where am I spending money that maybe is not good for my finances?Good for the kingdom?

So it’s a matter of recognizing and reprioritizing where our money is going. And so the actual challenge that they are needing to overcome is to learn to manage their money with excellence for the glory of God. And to get that strategy into place versus just bringing in more money.

But the reality is when they come to me, they’re like, I need more money. Help me to figure this out

Joy Hunt: It doesn’t matter how much money I have if I don’t know where it’s going.

Katie Fiola Jones: Exactly. And so we need to find [00:19:00] those leaks in the boat so we can patch them to then be able to figure out how can we redeploy? If you think about deploying your dollars, like putting them to use, like, where can we put them to strategically achieve the goals that God has given us? And also to build the kingdom to, further the mission of Christ here on earth.

Joy Hunt: So what are some practical ways that you help your students identify where they might be falling into that prosperity gospel thinking?

Katie Fiola Jones: Practical ways. I think just starting from a heart perspective, starting with the gospel. Like sin infiltrates all of us, right? It’s just the unfortunate reality of this world.

Like leprosy doesn’t show up on your skin for about five and up to 15 years after someone has actually contracted it. But that person who’s been infected with leprosy oftentimes [00:20:00] knows after just a few years of having it that they have leprosy. There are inward signs and illness things that are going on.

And so they really know that there is a problem. But the reality is that for many years, nobody else knows that the leprosy is being hidden. And I share this because it’s very similar to our financial health. Inwardly, we can be very sick and everyone around us would have no idea of the financial pain that we are experiencing.

We can keep pretending that everything is okay until one day those signs start showing up on our skin and people are like, what is happening? Why can’t you pay for this? You’re filing for bankruptcy? Like I had no idea you had so much debt. People come to me sharing these external wounds that they have as a result of their unhealthy financial habits.

They have debt and they can’t save money. Or they feel stressed. And they can’t do the things that they want to do because they don’t have money to [00:21:00] do them. These are all outward signs of an inward illness. So practically, we need to start looking at what is going on underneath the hood. What is happening that’s making these outward issues happen?

It’s a matter of doing some really deep spiritual work. Where might your pride be getting in the way? Is envy one of the issues? is it just like wanting all this stuff, right? It’s, we make these self centered decisions and the reality is that sin is the problem. practically speaking, what that might look like is actually sitting down to then look at, like, where is all of your money going?

One of the most impactful exercises that I have my clients do before we even ever set up an actual budget is to do what I call money tracking. We go through the last few months worth of expenses to see, [00:22:00] On average, how much are you spending on groceries? On average, how much are you spending on gas?

On average, how much are you spending on, Amazon purchases? Or DoorDash? Believe it or not, there’s a lot of people who overshop at Costco! Or in-app purchases. If you’re, like, addicted to the games.

Joy Hunt: I had somebody who put corner store on their budget because they wanted to see how much money was going just these little onesie twosies trips over to get a drink or something.

Katie Fiola Jones: Exactly. So for me, like that looked like coffee. When I was working as the leasing agent for that property management firm, I was driving around most of the day. And so I stopped to get coffee at least two times a day. Then sometimes if I was having like a really hard day, I’d be like, I need a third, I was spending like 500 or something outrageous on just coffee and it was like, honestly, it was appalling because I would have never even been in a ballpark range of guessing that just off the top of my head, [00:23:00] but when we go through this very practical exercise of looking at where your money is going, We can start to see those leaks in the boat.

We like, for me, yes, I loved doing my little coffee runs, but I could easily make the switch to making coffee at home, or, even though I was driving around, we had an actual office, so I could stop at the office and they had coffee going the whole day. I could just get free coffee there. and so we have to find out like, what’s going on? Where’s that heart issue? And a lot of times doing that practical work will help us expose some of these areas where, again, like we have to get over ourselves. Like where are you making it more about you versus making it about the kingdom?

And it can look very practically like where are you spending your money on a day to day basis?

Joy Hunt: You want to see what your priorities are. Look at your bank statement and your calendar, right?

Katie Fiola Jones: Yes.

Joy Hunt: Yeah. I can imagine too, just in a practical sense, I heard somebody say once that sharing takes away the shame. And there’s just something incredibly powerful about [00:24:00] somebody knowing your junk and sitting down across the table or across the zoom call or whatever it is with somebody that in this category of your life, you don’t have secrets from. and that, I think that’s like kind of the first Axe that hits the pride and starts because I’ve had this, you’ve probably had this too. I’ve had clients who tell me all their stuff and they say, you probably don’t want to work with me now. I’m like, Nope, let’s go. Let’s do this. this is exactly where you should be.

But there’s this, that the enemy likes to keep our, Ugliness in the dark on the inside and it’s when it comes out into the open doesn’t mean it has to come out to the Open on the internet like I did with mine, That’s not for everybody That’s what God was calling me to do but bringing it out into the open with somebody that you can trust Is one of those first steps to saying?

This I’m gonna get healing here

Katie Fiola Jones: Yeah, absolutely. I would say, for those who do have a lot of debt, one thing that I have experienced with [00:25:00] some clients is that, tons of the clients that I have worked with come to me with, Various levels of debt, some with just a little bit others with tons in a recent conversation that I had with a client of mine She admitted to having close to a hundred thousand dollars in debt ranging from you know Her car loan to student loans a few credit cards and then even some medical debt on top of that and she expressed to me that she knows in her mind that she shouldn’t keep taking out debt.

And she knows that she should work on paying it off quickly. She knows these things, but the issue has been that the enemy has been whispering to her these lies that have kept her stuck in shame. apparently I am pretty much the first person she’s ever told about her debt.

No one in her family, none of her friends, would ever know that she has all of this debt because she’s really good at continuing to hide it. Remember, it’s like that leprosy, [00:26:00] right? It’s like we can keep all these junk things hidden down, but

Joy Hunt: how are you going to take the actions to actually get out of that? How are you going to change those behaviors if you can’t let anybody see that you’re working through this?

Katie Fiola Jones: Exactly. And shame is the only thing that has really kept her hidden for so many years. It’s kept her from actually reaching out for help, even from a professional, because she just didn’t want anyone to know. And it is. I think that there is a healthy balance, though, of having some shame about it, because that, I think there’s a righteous and I use this word lightly hesitantly, because I don’t want to say oh, shame is also good.

But I think shame is also the reality of we know something’s wrong. It, I think the, exactly the Holy Spirit can use this little bit of shame to convict us that what we’re doing is not actually right. Of course, the enemy wants to use it as a way to keep us hidden [00:27:00] and keep us in the weeds of it.

But I think that The Holy Spirit can actually use it as like a way to be like, no, this isn’t quite right. And so like my encouragement to anyone who might be dealing and battling with the shame of having debt or even just, misprioritizing their finances, if you’re feeling that right now, listen to it, because I think that it can very easily be God telling you something has to change.

this is not about me anymore. something is wrong here. We need to get help. to honor God in that situation would be to bring it to the light. To get help if you need professional help.

Joy Hunt: Sometimes the shame is about, I feel like I should understand this, but I don’t.

I should know how to do this because I’m a grownup. And I should know how to do this by now, or I should have figured this out by now, but I don’t. And sometimes it’s not even like this big sometimes it’s the big pile of debt like it was for me.

But sometimes it’s just this feeling of being out of control. [00:28:00] Like you should have and feeling like I’m supposed to know how to do this. But. Nobody ever taught me or they taught me and I just never got it. And now I can’t tell anybody that I don’t know what they’re talking about when they say to do a budget.

Katie Fiola Jones: Yes. I have worked with some individuals. I primarily work with young individuals, young families, young professionals because I myself am in my 30s and in my young professional years. And so that’s just who I tend to connect with. The individuals that I have worked with who are in their 40s, 50s, and a few that have even been in their 60s, they do, feel really embarrassed about, no one’s ever really sat me down to figure this out, and now I feel like it’s too late for me.

Just like you were saying, Joy, No, if you are recognizing this now, there’s a reason, there’s a purpose, and now is the right time to get help. So don’t let, your number of years, stop you from, ever learning anything new, right? It’s just a matter of seeking that help, and unfortunately, it’s not a normal thing we’re taught in school, I wish, like I think that there’s a little bit [00:29:00] more of a trend recently that people are starting to learn more of this, and I think that is one of the beauties of the internet age that we are in, this information age there’s so much out there that if you want to learn, People can find that information and now schools are realizing oh yeah, maybe we should include a personal finance class or something.

That’s just good wisdom right

Joy Hunt: How to be a grown up.

Katie Fiola Jones: yeah, oh my gosh, Joy. The other day, this is so frustrating. I got like a letter in the mail about taxes that I didn’t pay in 2014. I was like a sophomore in college. They’re like, you owed 500. Now, it’s been years, so you now owe 1,100.

And I was like, I didn’t even know I was supposed to be filing taxes then, right? I’m like, nobody taught me these things. And It’s just the sad reality of our education system sometimes. I have plenty of things to say about that, but that is not for this. That’s not a conversation for today. But all that to say, [00:30:00] if you are a parent out there, teach your kids about money, right?

Sit them down. It doesn’t even have to be like a very strict here’s how to budget and here’s how to do this. I think there’s a time and a place for those things, but you can really teach a lot. To your children, just through the way that you are handling your money, the things you say about money, how you handle payday, just the way where you spend your money and.

Like, all these things are, on a subconscious level, teaching your children about money. So you have to be careful, right? And not celebrate money like, Oh, we’re gonna go buy everything today, and woohoo!

Because that can be really detrimental and lead kids to thinking, like, When I get a paycheck, I have to spend it all immediately.

And I’m sure you’ve, worked with clients too who, live in this paycheck to paycheck cycle because they believe they have to just go spend it all immediately. And it’s just what they were

Joy Hunt: We better do our appointment on the 25th because they will have spent it all by the 26th.

Katie Fiola Jones: Yeah, and it’s just this mentality. But it’s often how they were taught, I’m using air quotes here. People can’t see that, but I’m using air quotes that this is what they were taught, but it wasn’t like their mom or dad said, when you get a paycheck, you must spend it immediately.

It’s just, that’s what they saw growing up. And so

Joy Hunt: Go to the grocery store on payday, I grew up in a military town and if you go to the grocery store when all those families get paid, the lines are like out the door, right? Because everybody’s waiting for that check to come in and then now we got to go take care of all of our business.

Katie Fiola Jones: My hope working with Christians to become excellent managers of their money is to get out of those cycles and to just be more intentional about, yeah, where we’re deploying our dollars, where we’re like literally putting our dollars to work, in our own lives, and for the kingdom of God.

Joy Hunt: As we get ready to wrap up here, what encouragement would you give someone who’s just they’re feeling overwhelmed by debt, but they want to be able to honor God with their finances?

Katie Fiola Jones: Yeah, I think this is a really beautiful question, because again, as we were just touching [00:33:00] on, so many people, and even Christians, do struggle with debt, and I think the first encouragement Again, speaking to the shame that often comes with having a lot of debt is that the enemy wants you to think that you are the only one in your church, especially like they want you to think that you are the only quote unquote bad Christian in your church who has all this debt.

But the reality is the person that you’re probably sitting next to In your Sunday service either currently has debt has had debt in the past or might have debt in the future. It’s just the nature of our sinfulness is just that we focus on ourselves a lot and debt is the result of that. And so the first encouragement would be that like this.

The enemy is wrong. Like you are not alone in this. You are not the only one who has experienced this, but that doesn’t excuse the issue at hand.

And so my encouragement would be that Jesus needs to be [00:34:00] invited into this conversation. and. And he really is the only way out. and we know this because sin is something that’s infected all of us.

It’s going to cause us to make bad decisions. and we know that we can’t just tough our way out of these temptations, like sin cannot be removed by a number of good deeds, like your financial challenges cannot just be removed by like toughing through it and never spending a dollar on anything good anymore.

The only way that you are going to find freedom, like true gospel centered, biblically based financial freedom is through the life transforming grace. of Jesus Christ. And this is a rescuing type of grace that Jesus offers us. And what grace does for us is that it works on our hearts. Like it works on that root problem and it helps to free us from [00:34:00] envy.

It frees us from our pride or our greed or just that self serving nature that we have. And so when we invite this kind of grace, when we invite Jesus into our money decisions, That is when we can actually. Start to experience this real freedom. It’s a freedom from needing more needing bigger or needing better.

And that’s really what at the root of what financial freedom means when I talk about financial freedom, it’s not like this idea of financial independence, like having enough money to never need to work again or something like that, but it’s just having this freedom from needing money to do for you.

What only God can do. So that’s my encouragement to anyone who is experiencing lots of debt or just a really tough financial spot in general is to bring it back to God.

And I know that the person listening to this right now, they know that at the core, because We’re followers of Jesus and we know that [00:35:00] he offers this grace, this transformative grace.

And that’s the beauty of the gospel, right? We can’t do it alone; we need a savior. We need Jesus. Jesus is so good. And that’s my encouragement is that God really does have the answers and it might not be the answer of more money, but it’s more of him.

Joy Hunt: Yeah, you know what’s crazy too is when you start to invite him into those conversations, the other things that you need in that equation, the resources, or the person, or the, stream of income or whatever else that he will open those doors. I’ve had multiple people tell me when they reach out for coaching, right when I needed it.

And I was talking to God about this. I saw something on Facebook and they’ve been following me for a year, right? But it was just this one time, or, again, somebody who’s known about this stuff. And then I said, I was, I’ve just, we’ve been struggling with this and we’ve been praying about it.

And all of a sudden I felt like I was just supposed to call so and or, even for me when I started [00:36:00] being obedient with what God was calling me to do, when I was paying off my debt that things dropped in my lap. multiple businesses that I did not intend to start. I think I had website clients coming to me before I had a business,

Katie Fiola Jones: my gosh.

Joy Hunt: and it was just like, it was when I said like me and Jesus are in charge of my life, not any of these other things. And I’m going to be obedient with a little piece that I know how to do. And that verse from Luke about whoever can be trusted with a little can also be trusted with much. I literally watched that happen in my life. and so we, when we invite him into those conversations and when we surrender it back to him in those conversations that he will, he’ll provide, whether it’s the job, whether it’s the stuff, whether it’s the person to walk us through the process, whatever that looks like, he will open those things up.

Katie Fiola Jones: Yeah, I just love the way that God works.

Joy Hunt: Yeah, so fun. So thank you so much for hanging out with me [00:37:00] today. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. And before we wrap up, can you just tell our listeners a little bit about where we can find out about what you’re doing online?

Katie Fiola Jones: Yeah, absolutely. I have a handful of things going on. I think right now, one of the best places to connect is the Facebook group that we recently started. it’s called Christian Money Management. Just very basic and we do, different trainings in there.

But I have a YouTube channel too where, we’re doing some content over there. That’s Katie Fiola Jones. I know that many people out there might be looking for resources on getting extra help. Obviously, you are an amazing resource, Joy. I do also have kind of an online financial school, Redeeming Your Finances, that if that connects with some people, cool, great.

Come check us out over there. but my encouragement would just be that if you’re in a place needing help, it’s like, Just find that person that you do connect with and check them out. Ask them how they can help you.

Joy Hunt: I have a really a network [00:38:00] of financial coaches that would love to work with pastors and churches. And so if I’m not the right fit or if I’m, or if we’re not in the right location and you want to be with somebody in person, I know somebody who can be

Katie Fiola Jones: I love it.

Joy Hunt: Thank you again, Katie, so much for spending time with us today and for everything that you’re doing and look forward to seeing you again sometime soon.

Katie Fiola Jones: Thanks for having me, Joy.

Joy Suzanne Hunt: Thank you for listening to today’s show. I’d love to know what you think about it. You can leave a comment on the show notes at pastorsandmoney.com/podcast, or email me at [email protected]. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe, share, and leave a review. This helps us to get the word out and invite more people into these conversations.

If you’d like to connect, you can find me on Instagram or Facebook @PastorsandMoney. I can’t wait to talk again [00:39:00] soon.