Perhaps no counsel has been repeated more often than how to manage wisely our income. Personal debt in some nations of the world is at staggering levels. Too many in the Church have failed to avoid unnecessary debt. They have little, if any, financial savings. The solution is to budget, to live within our means, and to save some for the future. Nowhere is the oppressive burden of debt more clearly taught than in the graphic counsel of President J. Reuben Clark, Jr.:

"It is the rule of our financial and economic life in all the world that interest is to be paid on borrowed money. May I say something about interest?

"Interest never sleeps nor sickens nor dies; it never goes to the hospital; it works on Sundays and holidays; it never takes a vacation; it never visits nor travels; it takes no pleasure; it is never laid off work nor discharged from employment; it never works on reduced hours. Once in debt, interest is your companion every minute of the day and night; you cannot shun it or slip away from it; you cannot dismiss it; it yields neither to entreaties, demands, or orders; and whenever you get in its way or cross its course or fail to meet its demands, it crushes you." (In General Conference, Apr. 1938.)

There is another aspect of sound financial management, and it concerns our budgeting and offering to the Lord a fast offering to bless those in need. We must cheerfully and gratefully apply this principle if we want to perfect ourselves.

I remember as a young bishop getting a call from the hospital late one night to inform me that a widow in my ward had died. I went to the hospital, then obtained the key to her apartment. A note had been left that this was to be the procedure I was to follow. As I entered her humble basement apartment, I turned on the light and went to the little table that was in the small living room. There on the table were two small bottles with a note beneath them. The bottles were filled with coins. This sweet little widow, Kathleen McKee, with no relatives surviving her, had written this note. "Bishop, here is my fast offering. I have been just with the Lord." I think we simply need ask one another, have we been just with the Lord? Remember the principle of the true fast. Is it not to deal our bread to the hungry, to bring to our own house the poor who are outcast, to clothe the naked, to hide not ourself from our own flesh? An honest fast offering, a generous fast offering, will certainly be an indication to our Heavenly Father that we know and abide this particular law.

(Thomas S. Monson, "Guiding Principles of Personal and Family Welfare," Tambuli, Feb. 1987, 2)

Activities Committee