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Life Insurance: How Much Do You Need, and What Kind?

"But if anyone does not take care of his own, and especially of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever." 1 Timothy 5:8

The first question we should ask is why we need life insurance at all. Whenever somebody dies, there are financial consequences left for those behind. Those consequences might be costs associated with death, like burial costs and medical bills; they might be a loss of income that dependents had become accustomed to; or they might be debts that are now someone else's obligation.

In my own case, if I passed away, Lucy would have to go back to work and make enough money, between Social Security benefits and her income, to pay for daycare for four children, cover my final expenses, continue saving for retirement and our other financial goals, the children's education, and many other expenses too long to list here. Life insurance is a clear necessity for us, so that Lucy can continue to stay home with our children, raise them in the faith, and stay on track with all of the goals we created together. Our family does not end with my death.

How Much Coverage Do You Need?

There are many rules of thumb on the internet, and this is ultimately a personal question requiring a conversation with a competent agent or planner. In my practice, however, I have found that most young, growing families need somewhere in the range of 15 to 20 times their annual income in life insurance. Many online calculators use a number closer to 8 to 12 times income, but that figure tends to be overly optimistic about portfolio growth after meeting short-term family needs, and it often overlooks many of the intangible goals that matter most to families.

The most important thing, whatever your situation, is that you have enough coverage that fits within your budget. Working with a professional to determine your specific need is always the best course of action.

What Kind of Coverage Do You Need?

This can be a contentious topic, with strong opinions on all sides. The answer is usually somewhere in the middle. Before discussing type, the most important thing is that each family has enough coverage. If you have enough coverage and can manage the premium, you are doing the most important thing. The three types to understand are term, universal, and whole life insurance.

Term Life Insurance

Term life insurance is often called "pure insurance" because it essentially has just two features: your premium and your death benefit. The insurance company sees every policy as carrying a cost of insurance, reflecting your probability of dying in any given year. As you age, that cost rises. Term insurance charges you roughly that cost each year, making the most basic form an annual renewable term where your death benefit stays level but your premium increases annually.

Most companies also offer level terms, typically 10, 20, or 30 years, that lock in a higher premium for a longer period so your payment stays predictable. Because you pay somewhat more in the early years, the total cost over the level period is usually lower than carrying annual renewable term for the same span. Term is best for covering temporary needs: a child's education, employment income during working years, a mortgage balance, and other obligations with a defined end date.

Universal Life Insurance

Universal life adds a third feature to your policy: a cash or accumulation value. It is the most challenging type of coverage to understand, so make sure you are working with a competent agent or planner if you are considering it. You set an expected premium at the start, higher than the early cost of insurance, and the excess builds in a cash account. You can choose from different accumulation tools: fixed interest, indexed participation, or variable return options.

Over time, the cost of insurance typically exceeds the premium you originally set, and that excess is drawn from the cash value. The risk is that if the cash value is depleted, the policy lapses unless you step up your premium to cover the full cost. If you own a universal life policy, have it reviewed regularly. Universal life has many legitimate uses: cash accumulation for long-term goals, a permanent death benefit for estate planning, or a flexible premium structure that provides coverage now and income later in retirement.

Whole Life Insurance

Whole life is also permanent, but with a critical difference: the insurance company does not charge the rising cost of insurance against your cash value. Instead, they guarantee your premium at the outset. You will generally pay a higher, inflexible premium than the minimum required for universal life, but that premium is guaranteed to stay level for the life of the policy, and the cash value is guaranteed to grow every year according to your contract.

If you are considering a whole life policy, look for a mutual or fraternal insurance company that pays dividends and carries strong financial ratings. These dividends, representing a share of the company's surplus, are typically best used to purchase paid-up additions: additional life insurance that grows both your cash value and your death benefit over time. Dividends are not guaranteed, but many companies have paid them continuously for over a century. Whole life is best suited for permanent needs: final expenses, replacing a permanent income source such as a pension or Social Security, estate planning for a permanent dependent, or simply building a conservative, guaranteed savings component alongside other assets.

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What Is Catholic Financial Planning?

"Quaerite ergo primum regnum Dei, et justitiam ejus: et haec omnia adjicientur vobis."
"Seek ye therefore first the kingdom of God, and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you."
Matthew 6:33

Many people live without form or direction. They make decisions based on how they feel in the moment. They eat what they want when they're hungry. They spend money when they have it. They do what gives them enjoyment in the moment. As Catholics, we are called to something different. We are called to live with virtue, make decisions intentionally, and live for eternity. Sometimes that means sacrificing things in the moment for the greater good. According to the Gospel, it means seeking the kingdom of God first and trusting that all else will flow from that. This perspective should inform every decision that we make, including our financial decisions.

God has blessed us with the financial gifts we have been given, and we are expected to return blessing for blessing. Allowing these provisions to leak out of our budget by spending unintentionally, failing to set money aside, and pursuing wealth without purpose are all examples of financial vice. Every family should be thinking intentionally about their potential impact: for their own sanctity, the education of their children, the good of the Church, and the good of their neighbor. These things don't happen when our budgets are left up to chance or whim. It takes intentional thought and a concrete plan. That is what Catholic financial planning is.

Two Questions in One

Hidden in the question "What is Catholic financial planning?" are really two distinct questions. First, what is financial planning? And second, how can it be done in a Catholic way? Financial planning, at its most basic, is the ordering of your finances in the most optimal way to achieve your goals. For someone approaching this question without faith, those goals might not fall in line with Catholic virtues. Someone might pursue wealth for its own sake, or a false sense of security. A Catholic approaching these questions, however, must rethink some of the common assumptions of financial and wealth planning, because the ends are different, and when the ends are different, the means must be examined too.

The goal of Catholic financial planning is to inform not only what the virtuous ends of a financial plan look like, but also to provide the proper order of the means that can be used to achieve those ends.

St. Ignatius makes it clear that we are called to indifference to all created things before God. We simply use what has been given to us, whether riches or poverty, to glorify God and to sanctify ourselves. Our first priority in any thought or action must be God, and only then can we consider what that means for how we interact with the world. The path to sanctity is not necessarily wealth or poverty. The Church has always required the generosity of benefactors, but it has also required the virtues associated with poverty of spirit. Rather than seeking wealth or poverty, Catholics are called to seek God's Will, which could be either.

Catholic financial planning, then, is not a niche version of secular financial planning with Scripture verses attached. It is a distinct discipline, rooted in a distinct understanding of the human person, ordered toward a distinct end. The practical implications of this, from how we budget to how we invest to how we plan for our deaths, are substantial. This series of articles walks through those implications one domain at a time.

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The Order of Love: How the Ordo Amoris Shapes Your Financial Priorities

In the previous article in this series, we established that Catholic financial planning is not simply secular financial planning with a religious gloss. Because the ends are different, the means must be examined too. But how do we determine the right order of financial priorities for a Catholic family? St. Thomas Aquinas gives us a framework that is more practical than it might first appear.

The Ordo Amoris

In the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas establishes that there is an order to our love, or charity, and this order also helps define the just order of our money. The first principle of all charity is God. Aquinas says that "the love of charity tends to God as to the principle of happiness" (II IIae Q26 A1). Not only is the love of God supposed to be first in our lives, but this is also essential to our happiness. We cannot be truly happy without putting our love of God first.

Aquinas goes on to establish an order to our loves: God, self, neighbors, our own body. He also clarifies who our neighbor is: first, our own family, then our countrymen, then any other neighbor, with a preference for neighbors in a state of grace over others due to their closer affinity to God. This order of love should inform every decision that we make, including how we order our money.

Ultimately, money is a means to an end. If we use it in the wrong way, we may be working against our first end, the love of God. There is a certain justice that is achieved when we properly order our finances around our love. This is not an abstraction. It becomes concrete in the order of the budget: the tithe comes before the vacation fund, the family's insurance needs come before discretionary spending, and the education of our children takes priority over accumulating wealth without a goal.

Grace Presupposes Nature

It can be tempting, after contemplating the pitfalls of accumulating wealth, to favor poverty as the remedy. But this is not necessarily the answer. One of the great principles of St. Thomas Aquinas is gratia praesupponit naturam: grace presupposes nature. God won't work with us against our will and our nature. He uses our nature and our free will to further sanctify us. Rather than ignoring the proper preparations we can make using our prudence, it is imperative that we use our nature and the gifts given to us to prepare for the expected and the unexpected.

Preferring poverty to riches may not only work against a holy indifference, but it may even be a form of foolhardiness. There is a difference between trusting in God's grace and presuming it. God desires for us to participate in our salvation and sanctification, not to save us without us.

In practice, maintaining this indifference to our material goods is not easy, because many of them are required for our health and maintenance. One key is the reminder from Deuteronomy 8:18: "It is the Lord, your God, who gives you the power to acquire wealth." Our wealth does not ultimately belong to us. It belongs to God who gave us the gifts we have received. We must not only use our gifts wisely and in honor of God, but we must also return to God his just share. The tithe is not an afterthought in a Catholic financial plan. It is the first line item.

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Money, Virtue, and the Vice of Greed

In the first two articles in this series, we established the framework: Catholic financial planning is ordered toward a distinct end, governed by the Ordo Amoris, and grounded in the conviction that grace works through nature rather than against it. In this final piece, we turn to the practical question of virtue and vice as they apply to our financial lives, and what it means to order our money to the good.

What Greed Actually Is

Most people have a basic understanding of the vices associated with money, but typically they don't know what this means in practice or how to address it. Take the most prominent: greed. Most people understand greed as a desire to hoard wealth, but this doesn't fully capture its meaning. Greed is more accurately described as any inordinate attachment to money, which could be true of anyone, poor or wealthy alike.

If we recall the thought of St. Ignatius, we should not prefer wealth nor poverty, simply the will of God. So the accumulation of our wealth simply has to have a purpose. The accumulation of wealth for its own sake, or for some general feeling of security without a defined goal, could be a form of greed. There are legitimate reasons to accumulate money: for the protection of your family, for the preservation of your standard of living and dignity, for the continued education of your children and grandchildren. But I have found many families reach retirement with significant wealth accumulated without any specific purpose or goals. This is precisely why financial planning is essential to a Catholic family. It puts purpose behind their dollars and makes sure that the family does not fall into the common temptation of greed.

Ordering Your Money to the Good

Catholic financial planning helps us order our money so that it conforms to the glory of God, our sanctity, the good of our family, and other worthy goals. This process starts by taking stock of our current resources and understanding what blessings we have to work with. Once we understand this, we can start to think about what practical goals are possible within our state in life. Then, the more intentionally we plan and practice virtue, the more impact we can make.

Many families find it difficult to achieve their goals simply because they didn't lay out a plan to make them happen and make them non-negotiable. A concrete plan changes that. It is the difference between hoping your finances serve your deepest commitments and ensuring that they do.

Our Lord could not have been clearer. The choice before us cannot be compartmentalized. We cannot amass our wealth apart from God and then live our life for God as a separate matter. If in this area of our life we do not submit to God's Will, we will ultimately stand by the world and despise God. For what is greed if not the love of self and the hatred of all the good that can be done by and through God's Holy Will?

This is why Catholic financial planning is not a bolt-on addition to ordinary financial planning. It is a fundamentally different posture toward money, one that begins with the recognition that nothing we have actually belongs to us, and that every financial decision is a moral act. The good news is that a plan built on this foundation tends to produce better outcomes practically as well. Families with a clear sense of purpose and priority are more consistent savers, more resilient in hardship, and more deliberate in their generosity.

I pray that as you think about your Catholic financial planning goals, you can find purpose and direction, and live with virtue to achieve them.

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Roth Conversions: Locking In a Win on the Tax Game

One strategy that is becoming increasingly popular for retirees is the Roth conversion. For a long time, the conventional wisdom held that during your working years, while your income was high, you should defer as much in taxes as possible, because in retirement you would be in a lower tax bracket. For some families, this worked out very well. But many reached retirement with a different problem: they had accumulated far more in pre-tax accounts than they could ever withdraw at an efficient tax rate. The deferred tax liability had grown into something they could not manage.

The whole point of deferring taxes was to someday get the money out at a lower rate: to win what I sometimes call the "tax game." So if you find yourself in a position to withdraw funds at a lower rate than when you deferred them, executing that withdrawal and paying the tax now means locking in that win. It can be one of the most effective tools for doing exactly that.

Roth conversions are particularly well-suited for the window between retirement and the start of required minimum distributions (RMDs) at age 73. During this period, many retirees have low taxable income and room within their current tax brackets that would otherwise go unused. Simply withdrawing money and spending it may not be the best use of that room; if you don't have an immediate spending need, a Roth conversion lets you fill the remaining bracket with converted funds, pay tax at that favorable rate today, and move the money into an account where it will never be taxed again.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

This can be a complicated strategy, and working with a competent tax professional before executing any conversion is important. There are a few common pitfalls people fall into, and getting any of them wrong can erase the very savings the strategy was intended to produce.

Is a Roth Conversion Right for You?

The answer depends on your current tax bracket, expected future rates, the size of your pre-tax balances, and a number of other factors specific to your situation. A conversion that makes excellent sense for one family could create an unnecessarily large tax bill for another. The last thing you want is to incur a penalty that wipes out every dollar you were trying to save.

Before pursuing a Roth conversion strategy, consult with a competent tax professional who can model the impact across multiple years, not just the year of the conversion. Done correctly, it can be a very powerful tool available for improving the long-term tax efficiency of your retirement income plan.

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Pre-Tax or Roth? The Question Most People Get Wrong

One of the questions I get asked most frequently is: how much does a Roth IRA return? The question I wish I got more often is: should I do a pre-tax retirement account, or should I do a Roth?

On its face, it may seem like there isn't a whole lot to consider. Most people break down the question simply to: what tax bracket am I in right now, and what tax bracket will I be in during retirement? In some respects, this is the most important part of the question, because the direct effect of this decision is which option will save the most in taxes. In theory, if you are in a high bracket now and expect to pay at a lower rate in the future, it makes sense to defer. If you are in a low bracket now and expect to be in a higher one later, a Roth makes more sense.

The conventional wisdom says that while you are working you have income, and while you are retired you do not, so you should always defer taxes until retirement. But it isn't quite that simple. Plenty of people have a large number of deductions and tax credits during their working years, or they have irregular income years that put them in a lower position where a Roth would be ideal. And people tend to forget that in retirement they will likely still have income: from Social Security, a pension, an employer match sitting in a 401(k), or part-time work.

The Math Is the Same: Until It Isn't

One common misconception is that deferring taxes helps with the compounding growth in an account. This isn't really true. Deferring taxes on growth in a Roth has the same mathematical effect as deferring taxes on growth in a pre-tax account. Consider: if you are in a 20% tax bracket at both contribution and distribution, and you put $10,000 into a pre-tax account that doubles before you withdraw it, you receive $20,000 and pay 20% in taxes, netting $16,000. If instead you contributed $8,000 to a Roth (having paid the 20% upfront), and it also doubles, you withdraw $16,000 tax-free. The math is identical.

What the math cannot tell you is what tax rates will look like in the future. Whenever you defer taxes, you are taking on the risk that rates will change. The only thing we know with certainty is what rates are today. With the current level of national debt, the risk that rates will rise at some point in the future is not trivial. Sometimes accepting the rate that is available now, rather than gambling on a better rate later, is the more prudent choice.

The Problem of Too Much Deferred Income

I have met many people who deferred a large amount of money into a pre-tax retirement account, so much that they will never spend it all. This creates a compounding tax problem. The account will likely never be drained during their lifetime, leading to very large required minimum distributions (RMDs) later in retirement, when reinvestment options are limited and tax brackets may be less favorable.

The SECURE Act made this problem worse for heirs. It now forces most non-spouse beneficiaries to inherit pre-tax retirement funds within ten years, rather than stretching distributions across their own lifetimes. This compresses those distributions into your children's highest earning years, often resulting in a much higher effective tax rate than you ever paid.

There is also a liquidity concern. I once worked with a client who had already decided, before we ever met, to purchase a home in retirement using their IRA as the source. Their only significant asset was a pre-tax account, and they did not want to take on a mortgage. Taking a few hundred thousand dollars out in a single year to buy the house in cash produced an enormous tax bill. If a portion of that money had been in a Roth or in cash, they could have taken exactly what they needed without triggering a higher bracket.

The Hidden Costs of High Retirement Income

There are real advantages to having lower taxable income in retirement. Many government benefits are tied to income. Social Security is a potentially tax-free source of income, but with sufficient other income, up to 85% of it can become taxable. Medicare premiums are also income-dependent through a surcharge called IRMAA. These two factors can create a telescoping effect where even small additional distributions carry a much higher effective marginal cost than the nominal tax bracket would suggest. Roth distributions do not count as income for either of these calculations.

For those considering early retirement, the same logic applies to marketplace health insurance premiums before Medicare eligibility. Subsidies are income-based. Using Roth funds to live on in the early years of retirement can help keep income low enough to qualify for meaningful premium assistance, a real and substantial benefit that is easy to overlook when the focus is only on the raw tax rate comparison.

As always, make sure you are working with a competent tax professional to help guide you with these decisions so that costly mistakes aren't made.

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Is Social Security Fair?

Social Security has been one of the more contentious financial topics for years now. Some debate the merits of the program at all; others focus on its solvency and the potential fixes for its long-term funding gap. But what many people really want to know is simpler: is the program actually fair? Most assume it isn't, because they feel like they aren't getting their money's worth. Ironically, one easy indicator that the program may be more than fair is its insolvency. If it really were unfair to workers, we would expect it to be flush with cash, since more money would be collected than paid out. That isn't the best litmus test, for a few reasons, but it is worth working through the math. We will start by being as harsh as possible to the program, then walk through the extra benefits families can qualify for.

Testing the Program Against Its Hardest Case

Because Social Security is fundamentally a welfare program, it benefits lower-income families more than any other group. That means the group that gets the worst bang for their buck is single, high-income earners, so that is the best place to start. In the chart below, we assume a single person earned at or above the Social Security wage base every year of their career, from age 22 until retiring at the end of 2025 at age 66. We have included both the employee and employer contribution, since both represent a cost of the program even though only one comes directly out of the worker's paycheck. This individual then begins drawing a full retirement age benefit of $4,152/month at age 67 in 2026, with a 2% annual cost-of-living adjustment applied each year after, matching the Fed's long-run inflation target.

After 9 years of receiving benefits, just before turning 76, this individual has received back every tax dollar paid in. From there, the "expected" return settles somewhere between 3-4% for someone who lives into their late 80s or early 90s. Whether that counts as "fair" is a judgment call, but for my part, it isn't much worse than the historical yield on the 10-year Treasury bond, probably the best benchmark for Social Security given the relative safety of the government's promise. A single, high-income earner could certainly "do better" investing on their own, but for what the program is, and for the guarantee behind it, this looks like a fair trade.

A Program Built to Favor Lower Earners

Because the program disproportionately benefits lower-income families, it's worth walking through the other benefits available to a covered worker. The retirement benefit itself is proportionally higher for lower earners than for higher earners, which alone provides a better return. A worker earning $50,000/year, indexed for inflation through their final working year at 66, would receive an estimated $1,640/month at full retirement age, about 39% of their ending income. Compare that to the $4,152/month benefit above, which represents only about 28% of the high earner's ending income. The lower-income worker receives almost 40% more in retirement benefits per tax dollar paid.

The Hidden Value of Spousal and Survivor Benefits

Social Security also provides a spousal retirement benefit: if a spouse's own benefit would be smaller than 50% of the worker's full retirement benefit, that spouse is eligible for the larger spousal amount instead. If our $50,000 worker were married to a homemaker with no earnings history of their own, that homemaker would still be eligible for an estimated $820/month at age 67. Together, this family could bring in $29,520/year in Social Security benefits alone, about 59% of their ending household income. And because Social Security only counts 35 years of earnings history, this worker could have started their career 10 years later, at 32, and still qualified for the same benefit, despite paying 10 fewer years of tax.

One more factor worth accounting for here: the cost-of-living adjustment used throughout this analysis is 2%, the Fed's stated inflation target. But inflation hasn't always cooperated with that target, and since the COLA moves with actual inflation, it hasn't always stayed at 2% either. That gap represents an added protection for retirees that we haven't quantified yet. If the COLA averaged closer to 4%, in line with periods of higher inflation, it would push the expected household return higher still, on top of providing valuable inflation protection against one of the biggest risks retirees face. The chart below shows both scenarios side by side.

Looked at as a household return, the numbers are striking. For a couple who lives into their late 80s or early 90s, this combined benefit works out to roughly an 8-9% annualized return on the taxes paid, a figure that would be difficult to match with the same safety and guarantees in a private investment.

There are also retirement survivor benefits available to the surviving spouse of a worker, equal to the worker's full retirement age benefit. If the worker passed away before their spouse, the survivor would continue receiving the full $1,640/month for the rest of their life.

Protecting Young Families

Beyond retirement survivor benefits, Social Security also provides survivor benefits for young families. If a 30-year-old earning $50,000/year passed away today, their survivors would receive an estimated $1,450/month per eligible survivor, up to a family maximum of $3,254.30/month. If they left behind a spouse and two dependent children, the family would receive this maximum benefit until it began to phase out as each child turned 16 or 18, depending on the type of benefit. If the 30-year-old had a newborn and a two-year-old at the time of passing, their survivors could receive the maximum benefit for 16 years, then $1,450/month for two more years, a total of $659,644.80 in benefits before any cost-of-living adjustment. After that, the surviving spouse would remain eligible for a survivor benefit of $1,933/month at normal retirement age.

Built-In Disability Protection

On top of these benefits, the lower-income worker would also be eligible for disability income benefits of an estimated $1,883/month if they became permanently disabled. A comparable private disability plan could cost around $500/year, though that assumes the insured is in at least average health and works in an average occupation class. Someone in poor health or a dangerous occupation might not qualify for private coverage at all, or might pay a steep premium for it. Beyond adult disability benefits, there are also benefits available to children of the lower-income worker who become disabled before adulthood, another potential benefit for the family.

There is also a one-time $255 death benefit paid upon the passing of a covered individual, along with other family benefits that may apply depending on circumstances.

In Conclusion

Ultimately, it seems like Social Security can pay a more than fair benefit out compared to the tax dollars paid in for some families. Obviously there are still scenarios where someone could pay into the program for their whole lives and never receive enough benefits to compensate for the cost, but it seems like, on average, families will get their money's worth. Now, you might be asking yourself, isn't it unfair that a high-income worker isn't benefited as much as a low-income worker? You might be right, but this is ultimately what welfare programs do.

It is also worth noting that this article isn't meant to provide an exhaustive list of all of the benefits and rules behind Social Security, so make sure to consult with the proper professionals to determine how these benefits might work for you. A great place to start is opening your online Social Security account so that you can review your statements each year.

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Laxabo Rete: Labor, Delayed Gratification, and Leaving All Things

"Existimo enim quod non sunt condignae passiones hujus temporis ad futuram gloriam, quae revelabitur in nobis."

"For I reckon that the sufferings of this time are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come, that shall be revealed in us." Romans 8:18

"Praeceptor, per totam noctem laborantes nihil cepimus: in verbo autem tuo laxabo rete... Et cum hoc fecissent, concluserunt piscium multitudinem copiosam: rumpebatur autem rete eorum... Et subductis ad terram navibus, relictis omnibus, secuti sunt eum."

"Master, we have labored all the night, and have taken nothing: but at thy word I will let down the net... And when they had done this, they enclosed a very great multitude of fishes, and their net broke... And having brought their ships to land, leaving all things, they followed him." Luke 5:5–6, 11

I think it is important to mention that it is one of the great theological errors of our days to try to turn Scripture, and the Gospels in particular, into a series of worldly lessons and ignore the great spiritual truths that they contain. Today's epistle is a great example of a passage that should be primarily understood in the anagogical, or heavenly, sense of Scripture, meaning we should primarily interpret this as a message about our anticipation of heaven. However, every passage can be understood in multiple senses, and the goal of these articles is gleaning Catholic financial planning principles from Scripture, so that is what we will treat.

Delayed Gratification

Perhaps the clearest lesson we can draw from the epistle today is delayed gratification. Whether it is sacrificing the pleasures of this world for eternal glory in heaven, or reducing our spending now so that we can save for the future, delayed gratification is an essential virtue in Catholic family life. These "sufferings" today, undertaken to prepare for the future, are nothing compared to the benefits that we can reap from these actions.

Compounding interest is very strong and can make even a small contribution now a very large sum after years of growth. Feel free to experiment with the compounding growth calculator at the bottom of the page to see how years of growth can impact your contributions.

Laboring Without Purpose

However, as the Gospel shows us, if we labor our whole lives but never for Christ, we labor in vain. If we spend our whole lives living and saving without purpose, we may never truly find enjoyment and fulfillment from our resources. I have encountered many families that spent their whole lives saving diligently because that is what they were supposed to do, but they never saved with purpose.

When they arrived at retirement, they were so used to saving and avoiding spending at all costs that they could not get themselves to spend when the time came. They sit on their balances, either worried that they might spend too much, or that some disaster will take it all away, or they simply do not want to watch their balance decline after working so hard to accumulate what they have.

This is why it is so important to save with purpose, because it can give us permission to spend now. If, to achieve all of your long-term financial goals, it is only necessary to save fifteen percent of your income, then why would we save any more? Any extra income at this point could be allocated toward other short-term goals or given to charity. When we start ordering our lives toward virtue and purpose early, by the time we reach retirement this should come naturally to us.

Leaving All Things

The end of the Gospel today reaffirms that this all must be done for the sake of Christ. Peter left all things and followed Him. For us to do the same does not necessarily mean that we are called to give all of our worldly possessions to the poor or the Church. In fact, for a Catholic family, this is almost certainly incredibly imprudent and not virtuous.

However, it does mean that we must dedicate all of our possessions to Christ and use them for His glory. We should be indifferent to our possessions so that we could do this if it were asked of us. It also means that we should take our estate planning seriously, considering what we ought to gift charitably at the end of our lives.