What’s in this Episode?

In this bonus episode of the Church Tips Podcast, Dick is unpacking 3 key strategies to cut the church budget and maximize effectiveness.

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Read the Transcript

Dick Hardy 0:00
Hey friend, Dick hardy here, with Leaders.Church, it’s great to spend a few minutes here with you on a very important subject to all of us in ministry as pastors, and that’s the subject of the church budget. Now, the church budget doesn’t get people all excited all the time, but I will say there are times in the year when you as a leader need to pay attention to really examining your budget and seeing where you can go in and do some trimming here and trimming there and try to strengthen your position with the church budget. And to this end here a little bit over a year ago, we created a PDF. I just printed off a rough copy here of the 13 Budget Cut Ideas for Churches, I’d encourage you to go to leaders.church/budget, and download that PDF, it’s, I think, three pages, it’s got 13 items in there that you can do, and you may not do all of them, but you’ll do some of them. And if you do some of them, you’ll find that your church budget is going to be positioned better. And you’re going to be demonstrating greater stewardship of the resources the Lord has given you. A couple of the ideas that we’ve got here in the budget cuts, is…

Budget Cut Tip #1: Talk To Your Banker About Your Interest Rate

Dick Hardy 1:09
One, for you to talk to your banker, about the interest rate you’re paying. Now, you may say our banker, he’s you know, he’s not gonna do anything with our interest rate, we don’t mean anything to him, well, you do mean something to him or her. You need to be asking your banker. Just tell him, hey, this time of year, we’re examining everything. And we need to have you tell us what’s the best rate you’re going to be able to do improving our interest rate, we want to drop our interest rate, we want to pay a lower interest rate. And maybe we want to restructure our loan. Now you may say, well, our banker won’t do that. Your banker will do that, believe me, they they don’t want to lose you as a customer. And in fact, if they don’t do that, you probably ought to find another bank, because you want a banker working for you all the time and not just being out of sight, out of mind. So you really want to improve that interest rate.

Budget Cut Tip #2: Look At Your Merchant Fees

Dick Hardy 2:01
Second thing, second area I’d be looking at is I’d be looking at your merchant fees. So you’ve got people giving online, you’ve got people doing recurring giving. In fact, I mean, you need to have a lot of people doing recurring giving, particularly during this season we just walked through, you can see the importance of that. But you’re obviously paying a merchant fee, every time somebody uses a credit card, and gives to you. So you say to your merchant company, hey, you just say we’re gonna bid this out. Because we need to get the best rate we can. And when you use those words, bid this out, believe me, you get their attention, because bid this out to them means they may lose you as a customer, and they don’t want to lose you as a customer. So that’s one of the budget cut ideas is to go in and really cause your merchant company to improve their rate.

Budget Cut Tip #3: Jump Into A CO-OP

Dick Hardy 2:49
Another thing I’d be doing is I’d be looking at jumping into a co-op, where you can join together with other churches, and you gain buying power, because you’re buying larger quantities and therefore you’re dropping the prices as you’re going down the line. You know, you want to go into each line item of your budget. And I’m sure most of your line items are lean and mean. But in almost all church budgets, there’s a place where you can do a nickel here, a nickel there, a dime here, a dime there, and nickels, and dimes all add up. And when you do these kinds of things, I mean, I’ve just given you three or four ideas of things you could do to improve your church budget, you’ll find that you’re in a better position to move forward into the new year. Just go to leaders.church/budget and download the free PDF, the 13 Budget Cut Ideas for Pastors or for churches, and you’ll be off and running. So we’ve had a lot of churches, hundreds of churches have taken advantage of this. And their budgets have improved. So go to leaders.church/budget and download the free PDF. Just get after it and make your budget all it needs to be now and for the future. I hope you found this video helpful. We certainly would love to provide it for you. Leaders.church/budget. Get after it and make it a great day be blessed.

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