Financial Status as of 9/2008
The third quarter is now over. The summer was rough. And September was still poor. Now we enter the final quarter and we need to catch up!
![clip_image002[1]](http://neoxenos.net/files/clip-image0021.gif)
You can see that our expenses are in line with our budget, but giving for the year is $8,372 behind for the year through September. In order to make our budget for the year, we have to average $10,722 per month these last three months, something we’ve only done one time this year! We have just under $10,000 in our buffer which is way below the comfort zone. The lack of pledged giving accounts for most of our deficit: only $6,000, which means we’re effectively stuck and unable to get new ministry initiatives supported!
Impact
[callout]October hasn’t started off that strong with only $2000 collected the first two weeks.[/callout]We are not really able to incur huge deficits without making cuts. But we really do not have room for many cuts. Over 90% of our budget is for paying people to do ministry (the McCallums), to administrate, and for our facilities. The other roughly $10K is what supports our entire ministry, equipment/supplies, and leadership/FST retreat needs. There really is no room to make cuts which won’t be very painful to ministries.
![clip_image002[3]](http://neoxenos.net/files/clip-image0023.gif)
We are being used by God to extend His Kingdom into this dark world. He calls on us to use the world’s unrighteous money to pay for it (Luke 16:9-13). We all have this great opportunity to loosen our ties with the world and to prosper eternally.
We have to do better these last three months!
By the way, October hasn’t started off that strong with only $2000 collected the first two weeks.
4 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
Wow.
Is our rate of pledging typical or is it below where it’s been before? Apparently, pledges comprise a bit over 60% of our approved budget.
With the auto withdrawal feature available to folks, it’s certainly never been easier to be consistent.
Something else strikes me:
With a church such as ours, people will never be surer that their money is being spent efficiently for His kingdom. We operate with an extremely/miraculously low overhead. And yet people are getting saved at a preciously high rate – at least as churches in America go.
Rick, that’s a good question re: wether we’ve moved our ” Required Pledges for Budget” from 80% down to %60… there may be something wrong with the graph.
Our total pledged giving for 2008 was just under $95K. Our budget is almost $105K. That means our pledges amount to about 90% of our budget which is very good!
Our pledges are behind $6,000 year to date based on the 9/12 of total pledged amount year to date. In other words we should expect about $71K in pledged giving through September but we have only received about $65K.
The graph above shows total giving which is pledged giving ($65K) plus non pledged giving ($5K) through September. The budget value is almost identical to our actual expenses through September.