Setting “Financial Finish Lines” — A Practical, Biblical Framework to Unlock Radical Generosity and Live with Greater Faithfulness, Impact, and Joy: True Riches Podcast Ep 1

How much is enough?

Without a thoughtful and intentional answer to that question, it’s easy to keep moving the goalposts as life evolves—earning more, saving more, and accumulating more without ever defining what we actually need.

In this first episode of the True Riches Podcast, I introduce the concept of a financial finish line and a practical framework for setting both:

• an annual spending finish line
• a personal wealth finish line

We’ll look at how these two numbers coincide to help Christians confidently balance spending, saving, taxes, family responsibilities, and generosity.

I also walk through two hypothetical case studies—one for a mid 30’s family still accumulating wealth and another for a recently retired 60 year old couple—to show how setting a finish line can create the freedom and confidence to give more generously NOW rather than “someday”.

Finally, I share a few practical best practices for setting, revisiting, and creating accountability around your own finish lines.

In this episode:

• Why “just a little bit more” can become a dangerous default
• Spending vs. wealth finish lines
• Planning for “the big 5” ticket items beyond the spending finish line: home improvements, cars, healthcare, college, and legacy
• Two practical case studies
• How finish lines can unlock radical generosity
• Why accountability deeply matters

The goal isn’t legalism or deprivation. It’s thoughtfully answering “how much do I truly need to keep?” so you can freely give away the rest more confidently and live with greater joy along the way.

• Finish Line Resources
• God and Money book
• Treasure Principle book
• Schedule free consultation with Zack at True Riches Financial Planning

Welcome To The True Riches Podcast [00:00]

Welcome, everybody, to the True Riches Podcast, where modern financial planning meets timeless biblical principles. I'm your host, Zack Gutches, a practicing CPA and CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® professional. I'm also the founder and lead financial planner at True Riches Financial Planning, which is a fiduciary, flat-fee Christian practice that provides a cohesive experience across full-picture financial planning Faith-based investment management and personal tax return preparation, all for one transparent flat fee. As always, I like to remind everybody that this podcast is intended to serve only as general financial education and not personalized tax, legal, or investment advice.

Please be sure to speak with a qualified professional about your specific situation. On today's episode, we're going to be talking about financial finish lines. What is a finish line? Why set a finish line in the first place? The two different types of finish lines? How to estimate your finish lines and some best practices for doing so? And then we'll look at a couple of case studies for folks who find themselves in different seasons of life and then some resources that can help you set a finish line as well.

What Financial Finish Lines Are Not [01:16]

And before we jump into what the two types of finish lines are and then how they coincide, I want to first clarify what finish lines are not. So the first thing is they're not an end to working or ambition or to living out God's calling on your life. It's just an end to financial indefinite accumulation where you turn into John Rockefeller, who was famously quoted by When asked how much is enough by saying just a little bit more. The other thing that a finish line isn't is it's not about legalism or pure asceticism where you just deprive yourself of every good thing and you just live off of, you know, like I said earlier, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches indefinitely.

It's thoughtfully answering how much do I truly need to keep given the season of life that I'm in, given the, you know, county and zip code that I live in. Knowing that God's had the Israelites set aside 10% of their income back in Exodus to be able to celebrate. God, yes, wants us to live frugally, I believe, and be super generous with others, and we're called to deny ourselves, absolutely, but at the same time, that doesn't mean we need to deprive ourselves of all good things. He's a good father that knows everything.

The Two Finish Lines: Spending And Personal Wealth [02:37]

So there's two different finish lines that we need to set as part of this finish line framework. And they're independent, but they're also related at the same time. The first is a spending finish line. So this is basically saying like, how much do we truly need to live based on the season of life that we're in? You know, and be realistic about your expenses. Like I said earlier, this is not just about pure deprivation by any means. Think about like, what is our mortgage cost? What is our childcare expenses? You know, we want to take a family vacation every year.

We've obviously got groceries and restaurants and birthday presents and Utilities and car insurance and all the other expenses that we all know add up so easily. So the first is setting a spending finish line. And then the second is using that spending finish line, projecting it forward into the future, and then also taking care of some one times, which I'll talk about in just a little bit, and extrapolating that spending finish line to create what's your personal wealth finish line. In other words, Based on some reasonable assumptions about market returns and inflation and longevity, you know, how much would I need in assets to be able to support the spending finish line that I set on an annual basis?

And accounting for that, some things will change over time. Like I said, we'll talk about some one things. And then that creates kind of a personal wealth finish line. And so what I love about the finish line concept is when you, when you Go over either of those finish lines. In other words, if your income is higher than what your spending finish line is, and then you also have set the personal wealth finish line, it's kind of like the basic algebra equation where if you have four different variables and you know what three of them are, you can solve for the fourth unknown variable, aka x.

And so that's kind of what this is trying to get to where x is, Right. Right. Right. Taking that discernment step to say, how much is a reasonable spending finish line? We'll just use an example of a mid-30s couple whose spending finish line in this current season is $12,000 a month. That includes a mortgage out here in Denver, Colorado, plus childcare. It sounds like a lot. It is. It's a nice lifestyle, but a lot of it does go right away to housing and childcare. Using financial planning software... We can estimate their total wealth finish line at the $12,000 a month spending finish line, but we need to incorporate a few different kind of one times or things that people don't really think about when they set their annual spending finish line each year.

Planning For “The Big 5” Beyond Your Spending Finish Line [05:50]

So there's about five. The first is there are certain expenses that won't last in perpetuity. So childcare is a great one. Like you won't be on the hook You know, for $2,200 a month in child care expenses for the rest of your life. That's a temporary season. And potentially you won't have the full mortgage payment that you're paying to. Hopefully the principal and interest, you know, portion goes away when the mortgage is paid off, say 20 or 30 years down the line. And then there's a couple of items that we need to think about that add in to the spending finish line that maybe don't hit every year.

The first, you know, for anybody that's owned a home for any reasonable amount of time is major home improvements. Now, those won't happen every single year. But if you look at a rolling five or 10 year period, there's going to be those costs that just that come up over time. Right. You need to replace the HVAC or you need to redo the painting or landscaping or your water heater goes out and on and on and on. So that's one is major improvements. Home improvements over time. And you could just factor in a reasonable amount if you look at your historical spending over the last five or 10 years.

Or maybe you say, hey, it's going to be $10,000 every few years depending on the size of your home. Oftentimes people use 1% of the home value per year. So if you live in a $500,000 home, your average maintenance repairs, assuming it's a little bit of an older home, might be $5,000 per year. So you just kind of factor that in on top of the spending finish line. The second one. I'm blanking on it right now is, oh, I'm sorry, cars, right? So new cars. And it doesn't have to be brand new, but just saying you're going to need to replace your car, let's say, every 10 years for $25,000 each 10 year, you get a different car.

So that's another one that I like to factor in. And then another one is healthcare costs. If you have an early retirement, you're going to be retiring before Medicare, which is age 65. And then once you are even on Medicare, those premiums vary based on your income for the most part. And there could be Medicare Advantage. We don't need to get into all of that today. But a reasonable estimate is a few hundred dollars a month in Medicare premiums, obviously knowing there could be with an asterisk, there could be some exceptions to that. Once you're at age 65 or if you're planning to retire before then, the cost of health insurance before you're 65 and you're on Medicare.

The next thing to factor in kind of above and beyond the spending finish line is your kids. And so that's mainly twofold. The first is if you want to provide a college education, whether you believe in traditional college or not, most people want their kids to pursue education. Higher education in the form of vocational training. So whatever that looks like, if you want to earmark an amount to be able to help support that opportunity for your kid's future vocation, that needs to be factored in as well. And then potential wealth transfer. So any inheritance that you want to give to your kids.

And what I love about the finish line concept is you can actually apply this finish line concept to your kids in quantifying, well, how much do I realistically want to Have my kids inherit rather than the default just being, well, they just get everything that I've accumulated. Because quite frankly, a lot of times, especially young kids, we don't know if they have the character and integrity and skills to be able to navigate. Say you pass away, your total net worth is $3 million. Is that kid realistically going to steward that $3 million well? And- Are they, is that going to be worse off for them than it is going to be positive for them?

I mean, you just hear endless stories of people that have been given way too much. And while it's well-intentioned, it can just have really negative effects on their walk with God. It can create, you know, money is one of the most common or it's the easiest to be a false idol rather than God. We can place our trust and security and money in And if we give our kids too much money, especially when they're not ready for it or it's not necessarily opportunistic driven or event driven, you know, I hate to say it, but that can just oftentimes be more of an inhibitor than it can be a positive thing.

How The Two Finish Lines Work Together [10:12]

So by using your annual spending finish line, knowing we could be subtracting certain costs that won't be forever, like the principal and interest on a mortgage or childcare, and then adding in the five things that we talked about that might need to be added in above and beyond the spending line, home improvements, new cars, healthcare and retirement or pre-retirement, college costs, and then legacy transfer, you know, inheritance. After accounting for all of those, you know, you can use some financial planning software. This is obviously, you know, I use financial planning software called RightCapital with clients.

You know, maybe an AI tool could do an okay job at this, or maybe there's some calculators out there. And you use all of that to then back into, well, again, based on some reasonable market returns and inflation assumptions and say living until your early 90s, then you can estimate what your total wealth finish line is. Is based on all those inputs. Again, kind of solving for X there. And then you can run the math backwards to say, okay, well, we have, maybe we make $350,000 a year. Our finish line is $12,000 a month. So that's about $144,000. Well, even after we pay taxes, we have a lot of excess.

Now, how much needs to go towards giving and saving? You can then kind of work backwards to say, well, our total wealth finish line is X. Our current total wealth is Y and our savings rate is this. Again, based on you can use financial planning software to then make more informed decisions around the actual ratio of, well, I'm 35. I make good money. I have more than I need. How much do I give versus spend? And so that's how the two finish lines coincide. I'd say the spending, this is something that I update personally for myself once a year. And again, the goal is not to be legalistic or judgmental.

You know, my spending line this year was the highest that it's ever been. You know, I've got three young kids, got healthcare costs that are kind of coming in, being self-employed, right? You know, and then just having, you know, medical costs with having a third kid this year. And then just, yeah, some other things that, you know, we did some trips earlier this year before we had a third kid, knowing we wouldn't be traveling for a while. So It's not about just depriving yourselves of everything. It's taking a realistic look at what you actually need in this season and then knowing that it won't be like that forever and then kind of doing all of that future planning forward.

And I'd say the spending finish line, start with that because that's what you can control most. And then that kind of feeds into what the wealth finish line is. And it's not a static process. This is definitely an iterative process. But as you'll see, hopefully with this case study that we do in just a minute, how this can actually Lend itself to making more practical decisions in the here and now and unlocking generosity in the here and now.

Case Study #1: A Mid-30s Family Still Building Wealth [13:08]

So I've been kind of talking about this mid-30s couple. So I have a case study here where we've got a 35, 36-year-old. They've got two children. Their annual gross income as a household is $350,000. They have just shy of a million dollars in their investment portfolio today. Their annual spending needs or their spending finish line is the $144,000 or $12,000 per month. And so if you look at that spending as a percentage of their gross income, it comes out at around 41%. So they're living off of 41% of their gross income. If you run just using financial planning software...

Their tax liability based on their income is 22 percent. So that's Social Security tax, Medicare tax, federal income taxes and state income taxes, assuming Colorado. That's 22 percent. And they're currently tithing off of gross income, which, you know, that is rare in of itself, I think. There's a whole different discussion we could have on that. But this couple really wants to use this finish line concept to see how much they could actually be giving here and now and helping people today rather than quote unquote someday. Because right now all of the excess that they have after they give 10%, live off of 41% and pay taxes of 22% is they're able to save and invest 27% of their income.

But by doing all this work up front, Their total wealth finish line, when you factor in paying for college for their two kids at $30,000 a year in today's dollars, we've got healthcare costs in retirement, new cars every 10 years, and then healthcare, like I mentioned, they could effectively, based on the financial planning work that we did, they only, only, Need to be saving and investing 19% of their gross income instead of the 27%. So really they could take that extra 8%, plus they would be saving more on taxes because they'd be giving more. So that actually, if they change to where they're giving and investing 19% instead of 27%, That would actually reduce what they owe in taxes from 22% down to 20%.

So they shaved two percentage points off their taxes that now they can actually double their giving. So they went from 10% giving, which that's a faithful step, I think. But at the same time, knowing they could give 20%, they're still on track to being able to retire by their late 50s. Like if you look at the projection based on what they were currently doing, saving 27%, they were going to be able to fully retire and hit their wealth number at like 46 years old. Whereas if we just kick that out an additional about 12 years or so to age 58, which is a very, that's still an early retirement in today's, given how long we're projected to live, that They can double their giving effectively for the next 23 years.

And that gets them really excited and gets me really excited and is what kind of this concept can do for you. I think if you're willing to take that step of having this intentional stewardship approach to your finances.

Case Study #2: A Recently Retired Couple In Their 60s [16:39]

So I want to look at a second case study here. It's someone that is in their early 60s and they had not been doing this. They'd been entrusted a lot. They'd done really well. But at the same time, they hadn't been doing this. They'd just been tithing off of their gross income, but not necessarily doing this when they were in their 30s. And now they're in their early 60s and they're wanting to approach this concept. So this hypothetical, excuse me, couple has, you know, a total net worth of seven million dollars and we've quantified, you know, what they want their retirement to look like over the next 30 years.

And that's effectively come up with a personal finish line, a financial finish, a lifestyle finish line, excuse me, of about three million dollars. And then based on the different their retirement income plan, right, their projected taxes over their lifetime is is about five hundred thousand dollars. And then we've got a flexibility bucket. That's about 10% of their lifestyle finish line for some potential things they might want to do, some bucket list items or some unknowns, you know, and that's $300,000. So really, you know, their total, that takes up about $3.8 million of the total net worth.

And they've gone through this finish line process for, you know, their, their two children. And they want to fund meaningful opportunities for their kids, you know, things like college and maybe get them started on early retirement and help them purchase a first car and maybe help them, you know, with a down payment on their first home. And so that number was $600,000 per kid. So for two kids, that is a finish line for their heirs, that legacy planning or wealth transfer of 1.2. So when you add all of that up, it's like, well, we've kind of earmarked and started with this finish line for both them and their heirs, and that's $5 million.

And that's a lot of money. Like I said, this is not necessarily about deprivation. That's a very nice lifestyle. I think you could even take this further where the number probably doesn't need to be that high if you're really pushing me on it. But that still leaves $2 million of their $7 million for generosity. Yeah. And you could apply this. You don't need to have $7 million. Someone with $1.5 million that has strong work history and has a lot of Social Security income coming in and their expenses, they don't have a mortgage anymore. The ratios could be very similar.

I think you'd be really surprised. Yeah. That their giving wouldn't be that high if you just went off a basic tithe. So that's what I love about kind of doing this finish line framework is it allows you to unlock so much more generosity for the kingdom, for people that really need the help and things that could be easily alleviated with extra dollars. And like I said, it's for our own hearts and just our own joy to be able to give money away. That is the most fruitful use of money that we will ever have. And that's what gets me so excited and passionate about this concept as a whole.

Finish Lines Aren’t Only For The Wealthy [20:03]

And I know that I used maybe people that are doing quite well financially in those two case studies, but it doesn't have to be. This is applicable to Everybody's going to have a different finish line. They're going to have a different spending number based on what season of life they're in, where they live, like all the different things. And so this isn't only for ultra wealthy people. I genuinely like I'm using this concept and this is for people, whether you're in your 30s or whether you're in your 70s, it can be applied either way. Um, but it really, I just love that.

It really helps answer the question. How much do I really need to keep? And then knowing that everything beyond there, I can just freely and confidently and joyfully give away towards kingdom impact, sending it on ahead, investing in treasure in heaven that will last forever and not leaving it here sitting idle where moth and rust will destroy it over time. Um,

Resources To Help You Set Your Finish Lines [21:00]

So I do want to transition here as we wrap up to just some practical best practices and then also some resources. So starting with resources, I mentioned the God and Money book, which I'll link to in the show notes. And that's a really great resource. If that one feels a little bit too intimidating, I would encourage you to read The Treasure Principle by Randy Alcorn. Very approachable, very short book that kind of introduces this giving concept, especially above and beyond the tithe. And then there's actually a website called finishlinepledge.com that has some really great data-driven Resources to help you build a finish line if you don't have one already.

It mainly focuses on the spending finish line. And they've got, you know, U.S. BLS, so Bureau of Labor Statistics data based on your county that you live in. So you can kind of see, you know, what percentage percentile your spending is. I think a lot of times we just get so carried away with the bubble that we live in. It's really important to take a step back and just remember, you know, what most people do. Encounter and experience. And so that is, I'll link to that. It's finishlinepledge.com. They've got some great resources. They've got a great podcast as well.

And then the last, or I guess those are the resources that I would suggest. And then financial planning software, if you're not working with a financial planner, that could be potentially a good reason if this concept resonates with you, especially if you're a Christian who really values generosity and And biblical stewardship, you know, working with a Christian financial planner that understands finish lines and how to realistically apply them.

Best Practices And Why Accountability Matters [22:46]

And then just some best practices. So I'd say the biggest thing is just accountability. Like it's not really complex. It's just not many people end up doing it. I think that's a lot of things in life. But at the same time, excuse me, uh, Just sharing it with someone that you trust. If you don't have an advisor, maybe that's one or two other people that are outside and completely removed from your financial picture so that they give a more objective view, but share it with somebody. Go through and create the spending finish line and the wealth finish line using some, even if you don't have anything, AI tools, but then share it with someone once a year and do a mid-year update.

For me, I share it with three Different people who are in different seasons of life live in different geography parts of the country. And I share that each January with them, kind of update my, you know, for the year ahead, the spending finish line, and then what that means for the wealth finish line, and then sending a mid-year update in July. You know, for me this year, I had hit, you know, say 80%. Of the goals I was doing really well on the spending portion, but maybe I wasn't doing as well on a different portion, my giving portion. I hadn't gotten up to date on my giving yet, uh, as much as I'd like to, to be midway through the year.

And so just having that so that you can actually then make those changes in the second half of the year, rather than just having it be a retroactive. Oh, I didn't do that for this year. It's kind of like setting new year's resolutions and then not actually doing anything about it. Um, So I think that would be my biggest best practice. And then if you are looking for an advisor to work through this with, there's a lot of really great, there's advisors even on that Finish Line Builder website. Everybody on there kind of practices what they preach and goes first and lives by the finish line.

So that's a good place to look. But I hope you enjoyed today's podcast and I'll see you next time.