I  can’t keep count of all the phone calls informing me that I won millions of dollars and a brand-new Mercedes-Benz. All I have to do is send them $15,000 to cover the income tax and processing fee, and they will be able to send me millions of dollars.

I grew up in the Pennsylvania Dutch area, and I would be the last person to fall for that kind of scam. If I won money, why do I have to pay money?

Growing up, my father was very frugal with money. If you could get money out of him, you were a magician of the top order.

When we would go to a restaurant, he was very frugal, but he did tip the waitress. The only thing about that tip was it was only $0.25. He thought she earned every penny of that quarter.

He died in 2010, so he won’t hear about this, but many times after lunch, we were going out to the car; one of us would have to go to the bathroom, and so the rest would go out to the car. Actually, the guy going to the bathroom was the one we had assigned to put a tip on the table. All of us, except for my father, contributed to that tip. As far as I know, he never found out about that.

However, I learned a lot about money from my father. He never spent a nickel if he didn’t have to. He loved to get his monthly bank statement so that he could see his money and study it for days.

My father did have money. He was a successful building contractor, but very few people knew he had a dollar bill on him. If you met him, you would not know he had an extra dollar in his pocket.

They would be a genius if they could scam him out of a dollar.

Money meant a lot to my father, especially in his pocket. He was never out to scam anybody or buy a lottery ticket. In fact, he thought lottery tickets were the worst scam in the world. I lean towards that thought myself.

One of the things I learned from my father was that it’s not so much how much money you have as what you do with it.

I was a small-town pastor in Maryland one year, and one of my friends spread a rumor my first year that I was the poster child for the baby Gerber. I’m not sure where he came up with that scam, but he did.

I didn’t know he did it, and all of a sudden pastors came to me and told about some of the ministries they were involved in and they needed to raise money to do them.

At first, I didn’t understand why they were telling me this. Why did I need to know what their ministry was and how much money they needed?

After several months of this, somebody spilled the beans and told me what my so-called friend had done, why these people were telling me about their ministries, and how much money they needed for those ministries.

If I had the money he was talking about, I would probably have given money to their ministries. But all those pastors were talking to someone who was simply broke. I didn’t have the money they thought I had, just enough to get by week by week.

What I do with my money is really important, but I won’t let my money, which I don’t have much of, define who I am.

There’s nothing wrong with being frugal. I’ve been pretty much frugal all my life because I’ve never made much money. I just tried not to spend money that I don’t have.

Money has a way of influencing people. If someone knows that someone has a lot of money, they’re going to approach them to see how much they can get for themselves.

I have no problem giving to charities and to people who really need help. But I’m very careful about that because I want to make sure I help people who actually need help. That’s a hard decision to make. Who really needs my money more than me? That’s the question.

Many years ago, a friend of mine wanted me to invest in some investment program that he was involved with. He had given them well over $65,000. According to the investment, he would be getting interest every month. The one thing that sort of ticked me off was that the $65,000 had to be in cash. If that isn’t a red flag, I don’t know what is.

It turned out to be one of those Ponzi schemes. I’m not sure how they work, but I guarantee they will never work with my money.

The only investment I have made was to good old Uncle Sam. Now, I get a monthly salary from my Uncle, of which I am thankful.

I couldn’t help but think of a verse of scripture that is ao often misquoted.

1 Timothy 6:10, “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”

Money is NOT the root of all evil like so many people think. Rather, it’s the LOVE of money that is the “root of all evil.”

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