The order of the dollar

God created the world with a certain order: day and night, seasons, birth and death. I'm learning that money and morals also have an order to them.

A dear friend shared with me this weekend that he feels overwhelmed with the amount of information he's exposed to every day. It feels chaotic. Who should you listen to? Which argument is correct? Where do you even get good information these days?

It resonated with me because I've been concerned with finding order in other areas of my life. Reading about the virtues have helped me learn about an ordered life, especially in an anxious age.

What I like about money is how the dollar orders—or exposes—the priorities in your life. You have a fixed amount of money to spend every month—what will you spend it on? Of course, this relates to your schedule as well—what will you spend your precious few hours on? One more hour spent working is a few more dollars in the pocket. That's why time is money.

Said another way, a dollar is a point of focus regarding different aspects of our lives. Like a magnifying glass, money highlights our vices and virtues. Your generosity or lack thereof, your need for control, your fear or equanimity regarding the future. It can bring such clarity to the good, the true, and the beautiful. Or, if we're not careful, it can burn a hole right through it all.

We can also take that sentiment too far. Maximizing your money to the penny, or your time to the minute, is unsustainable and leaves little room for the beauties and vicissitudes of life. People, it turns out, are invariably inefficient.

The point of order is important, so let me hang there for a moment.

God created the world with a certain order: day and night, seasons, birth and death. I'm learning that money and morals also have an order to them.

Modern finance is based largely on math. Math is orderly. A principal concept is the time value of money. The present value of a dollar is its future value divided by the interest rate or growth rate or return over time. One dollar today is typically worth more than two dollars later because of risk and uncertainty of the future.

If a dollar, which is valued by orderly concepts like time and math, and if it provides this focal clarity to how to live the good life, perhaps there's some order to our moral ecology. That's where wisdom comes from. All else equal, it's better to wake up early than late: "The early bird gets the worm." It's better to take care of your physical health than to let it decay: "If you ain't got your health, you ain't got much."

As a result, perhaps there is an objective, right, orderly way to live such that not abiding by these rules or norms creates a more difficult, more unloving way of life that harms not only yourself but others around you. Perhaps we can discover what that is by examining the complexities of modern finance.

What if the Modigliani-Miller model for optimal capital structure does in fact optimize for the weighted average cost of capital, but it doesn't optimize a firm's resilience or creativity?

What if the Fama-French capital asset pricing model shows that you can construct your portfolio for above-market returns, but you have a below-market family life?

Should wealthy people draft prenups if in fact they're supposed to be "one flesh" by way of marriage?

Is it better to set up a tax-advantaged foundation or donor-advised fund if you're not giving to your literal neighbor?

What if Stripe allows us to process payments more quickly or recover more receivables or mitigate fraud, but its 3% fee funds organizations I morally disagree with?

Should you seek a risk-adjusted market return for your retirement account—say 10%, or benchmark it to the S&P 500—if you could lower that amount to, say, 8% and be more at peace, or more generous, or use some of your money to invest in a local coffee shop that's a neighborhood fixture?

What then do you do with the "free" money your employer matches in your 401(k) if indeed your conscience indicates you should invest in the coffee shop?

Should Christians even invest in a 401(k) because of its passive placements spread across an index or mutual fund, or should we take a more active role because we are God's stewards on earth?

What if these ideas we have about how best to order our money are actually divorced from how we should order our lives?

Worse, what if these so-called financial rules entirely arbitrary, created purely by mathematical models, especially given a higher moral order, a grander vision for our purpose on earth? Math is just one part of the human experience after all, important though it may be.

Do you see where I'm going with this? Please respond. I need help.

Thanks for reading.