Heart & Treasure
Where your treasure is,
there your heart will be also.
Most money advice starts with your numbers. It assumes the problem is information, and that the right spreadsheet will fix it. But almost nobody handles money badly because they never saw a budget. They handle money the way they do because of something underneath it, and the numbers are downstream of that.
Heart and Treasure is an eight week financial discipleship program for the local church. It starts where the trouble actually starts, which is the heart, and it works outward from there to the practical things. The destination is not a better budget and it is not even generosity. It is knowing God more nearly. Generosity turns out to be what grows on the way.
The two tools below are free, they take about twelve minutes each, and you do not have to be in the program or attend any particular church to use them. They are the honest starting place the program is built on.
On your own
The Money Mirror
Six Money Hearts and four Financial Tracks. The Heart is the posture underneath your behavior, which is to say not what you do with money but why. The Track is where you actually stand today, named plainly, with the specific next thing standing between you and the one after it.
A mirror does not judge. It shows you what is there.
If you are married
The Couples Mirror
Two people can share a bank account and live in different financial worlds. You each take the Money Mirror separately, under one shared code, and the two readings become one. Not a budget and not a scorecard. A way of seeing what it is like to be married to the heart across the table from you.
Your two hearts are not a problem to fix. They are a place to grow.
What these will and will not do
Who made this
Chip and Karen Measells wrote Heart and Treasure out of two decades of watching people in church try to fix their finances from the outside in, and out of doing it the hard way themselves. It is built for the local church, and it assumes the person reading it is carrying more than they usually say out loud.
If money worry sits on your chest most days, that is worth telling a doctor, a counsellor or a pastor about, and it is not a separate problem from this one.