Faith & Finance Blog: Setting Your Money Intention for the Year

I like to start my season of Elul- the season of doing return- on the Fast day of Tisha B’av every year. That’s where it’s easiest to recognize what’s gone wrong- the first step in redirecting. That’s worked for me for years. That didn’t happen this time. This year on the Fast day, I walked around the South Hills of Eugene, Oregon, thinking about how the world really feels unwhole right now. It’s not just Covid 19 or social injustice. The way we treat each other is not getting better, and it needs to. We need to do better. I need to do better.

Rather than let the fact that I moped around on Tisha B’av in a daze of hunger and heat overwhelm entirely derail my practice of doing return, I decided to get in gear last week with the beginning of Elul. Some may not enjoy reading other people’s intentions for the coming year so I won’t share too many details about where I’ve started.

What I will say is that Elul has become my favorite time of year. The last two Eluls, I spent a huge amount of time setting my intentions for the year on top of doing the making of amends I needed to do. Two years ago, I decided to really restructure how I did my business to a great extent and the results have been great for both clients of the firm and for myself. Last year, my wife and I had the same intention for once: we’d try to start a family. On Shavuot this year (June 31st), we had our first daughter. However you do the math on that, we were blessed with our daughter Amirah almost as soon as the New Year began. Our intentions have been blessed along the way in recent years, it’s become an exciting time in our lives.

With all of that said, this year I’m doing my best to manage my high expectations of the season and the coming year. The more concrete and less abstract I’ve made my intentions, the better I’ve done to fulfill them.

Financial Planners are always talking about goals. I’m the same as any advisor in this regard. If you come into my office and start talking about “intentions,” my notepad is going to read “goals” as I take notes. That’s the best I can really do as a professional. Intentions are something a bit broader, however, and while your Financial Planner can help you talk them through, there are other sources of inspiration you can consult with (yourself, your rabbi, your teacher, your family, etc.).

Here’s an example of a money intention for the coming year: Talia wants to do more with her money to support her local community. She gives to national and international causes most years, budgeting money for monthly or annual charities she supports such as Children International, the Anti Defamation League, etc. This year, her community is on her mind as the economy’s stumble has marked the landscape of her city. Homeless camps have grown. Stores are closed or empty. It’s hard to know what to do to help in light of the amount of need that exists.

The smaller goals needed to make that greater intention a reality flow from the top. In Jewish tradition, we ask G-d to recognize our good intentions as we declare and define them and to help us achieve them. This is the real synergy of return, the purpose of the season- to align our intentions with the service of healing our world. I have secular clients who speak of “Law of Attraction” or other concepts to facilitate their intentions.

Step one is to create the intention, to define what it is you want to do, and to commit to doing something. As resources come your way (perhaps you get a stimulus check you don’t “need” or get a promotion at work large enough to matter but not large enough to make you, say, buy a bigger house), you attune them to whatever intention you’ve set. People meditate, they pray, and generally make themselves as receptive as possible to achieve this. That’s why it’s great to start on Tisha B’av, as the state of fasting facilitates that open and focused state.

Step two is to start making tangible goals. Find charities you like. For Talia, perhaps “Mutual Aid” networks and Free Loan Societies are just what she’s looking for. Portland abounds with such opportunities. Perhaps it’s the face of a homeless person on the street that sparks her inspiration to find local homeless services. Maybe it’s simply her spiritual home, her house of worship.

Step three is to transform those inspirations and investigations into concrete action items. Creating a schedule to fulfill the goals, ear-marking funds for them, understanding potential tax benefits and financial impacts on the household budget. Step three is something we at Chaim Investment Advisors can help with. Money Coaches such as Emily Gowen  in Portland can also help with that, or an accountant or bookkeeper depending on what your income sources look like.

Step four is to monitor the goals over the year. Has the charity you’ve chosen got itself in hot water with the community by falling short of its promises? Has a better opportunity for your funds arisen? Have you made the contributions you meant to, and if not, do you have a need to restructure your plan? Perhaps your partner has lost some income this year and you need to cut back a bit. Following through with your commitments matters, but so does keeping your commitments aligned with your capabilities! After all, we have a whole liturgical high point of the year to address our unfulfilled commitments right around the corner!

I’ve talked about using money for tzedakah or charity here. That isn’t the extent of making financial T’shuvah! Looking at what role money is playing in your life in every regard is fair game. How is the trade between time for money you’re making in your job serving you? Is the money enough? Do you need more to do what you really need to do with your life? Is paying your mortgage bumming you out every single month? Do you want to spend less on superfluous things for yourself and more on, say, a niece or cousin’s path to education or owning a new home? There are many ways to make transformative financial return. This is the season to start looking for ways to do so.

Sometimes it takes a long time to return when we’ve gone far off the map. Creating good intentions for the coming year is crucial, but when it comes to financial return, one should look at the wrong turns made over the past year. Where are you now versus where you wanted to be? Where did you miss the mark? What was the worst use of money you made over the past year? What was the impact? What was the missed opportunity that arose as a result?

Missing the mark (Khet in Hebrew) is what is expected from us as humans. We’re going to miss the mark. We’re going to miss opportunities, be greedy with money, be stingy with money, you name it. In the modern world where everything is financialized, the opportunities to do the wrong thing with our money is nearly infinite. The process of intention setting is founded on finding where we’ve missed the mark.

Here’s an example: David spends a lot of time waiting around for coffee every morning. How many times have you seen an ad asking for money where they don’t mention “for the price of a cup of coffee?” Perhaps where David has really missed the mark is not his coffee itself. It’s that he had an apple store gift card. Instead of doing what he really wanted to do- learn Chinese so he could understand what his hosts are talking about when he visits China for work- he spends that time waiting around for coffee by playing an iPhone game that requires real world money to “win.” Paying to win- the freemium model. Now his card is depleted, and he doesn’t feel he has the money to buy the app he wanted to learn Chinese with. In the process of return, hopefully David might recognize this for what it is. The opportunity to become a more gracious guest was missed.

This aspect of t’shuvah isn’t all about investing or a big picture per se. It could be if you need it to be. If you feel deeply financially unwell, it’s a great time to start reflecting on that. But having a long term plan and following it will involve plenty of years not going according to plan. It’s really about finding those places in life that were a really bad use of money and changing them. Returning to the path you want to be on from the one you don’t. That is the heart of return.

I’m actually someone who kind of tunes out when someone says “intentions.” I live in a world of consequences. The Markets are famous for their instant consequences, and that’s where my head’s at most of the time. I also grew up in a very groovy, hippy-trippy, out-there world in Lane County, Oregon (home of the Oregon Country Fair). “Intentions” can sound very New Age or imprecise to me, and this is something I’ve heard from other people as well.

In fact, setting an intention around money for the New Year is about as not New Age as it gets. It’s incredibly old school. Early on in the history of the season of Elul’s celebration, spirituality and the physical materiality of life were not at all different from each other. The physical and spiritual are not split in our tradition. People were sacrificing tangible items at the temple- animals, incense, and grain- right up until Jerusalem lost its temple. This link between money, the material world and its considerations, and the spiritual dimension has always been there since the beginning.

In fact, the New Year gives us two extremely old traditions where we put our spiritual intentions into the physical world in very tangible ways: Tashlikh and Kappores.

With Tashlikh (undoubtedly one of my favorite rituals of the entire year), we throw crumbs of bread, flowers, lint from our pockets, etc. into the river. These cast off detritus represent things we want to leave our lives: things we’ve done in the past year, feelings of excessive pride or jealousy, guilts over failed intentions, etc. We do this around the New Year so that we start the new year with a fresh mind and renewed ability to meet our goals for the coming year. This also works for the missed marks we had with our money!

Kappores is one of the most literal rituals linking our intentions and money. It happens right before Yom Kippur (shortly after Rosh Hashanah). Kappores is a ritual that has one version I won’t mention to spare our vegan friends. The version of Kappores that we practice in our household is to wave a handful of money over the head after saying a couple of relevant biblical excerpts. Back in the day, it was usually a bag of coins. The money is then given to the poor.

This is a controversial ritual for many reasons in both the modern and medieval worlds. We have a lot of those somehow. Things find a way of surviving. My own most admired teacher, Moses Isserles (the ReMa), spoke highly of the ritual and I’m happy with that. 1 

Personally, I love Kappores. The idea is not necessarily to give the money (or chicken) to a big charity that will distribute it. Some have the idea to give it directly to someone who needs it. When we lived in Brooklyn, I did this one year with goods from the confectioner I worked for at the time. I’ll never forget trekking around Brooklyn with bags of tasty treats, looking for someone who could use them better than we could. We didn’t have chickens or even know where to get them in our South Brooklyn area, so we were creative that year. Kappores, if done with a flair for the random and coincidental, can combine the intention of charity and the adventure of finding its best use at the same time in my experience. I can’t say this is true for everyone. I use Kappores as an instance of combining intention and money in a defined, ancient ritual.