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Includes airfare, two-night hotel, tickets to the show, plus $1,000 in spending cash. For official rules and entry information, visit IHeartRadio.com/SmallBusiness. As a listener of Radical Personal Finance, I know a few things about you. I know that you have a desire to build wealth in all of its forms, to live a rich life now and build a plan for financial freedom, as the tagline of the show talks about.

I know that you desire to avoid poverty. I know that you have a desire for wisdom. After all, you're making time in your busy day to listen to this. Well, today I'm going to try to share with you some ideas and some wisdom that will help you to avoid poverty.

Because here is the proverb that we will talk about today. "Be not among drunkards or among gluttonous eaters of meat, for the drunkard and the glutton will come to poverty, and slumber will clothe them with rags." Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, insight, encouragement, and wisdom to live a rich life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. Today we tackle the subject of drunkenness and talk about how it can have an incredibly deleterious effect on your bank balance. Back in episode 279 of Radical Personal Finance, towards the end of the show, I was talking a little bit about my frustration with modern society.

And I was using the example of modern business conferences, specifically the conference that I just returned from, FinCon, which was fresh in my mind. Now, my comments at that time were not specifically associated just with FinCon. They were inclusive of all modern business conferences. But I had just returned from FinCon, and so I was freshly aware of what had happened there.

Well, later on, I had a listener to the show who connected with me on Facebook and said, "Joshua, hey, what did you mean by those comments on drunkenness? What were you referring to? Were you talking about people running up and down the hall wildly or just people hanging out, having a few drinks with their friends?

What were you talking about?" And my answer to him was, actually, he gave me this rather great list of all of the negative effects of drunkenness, the behavior that often occurs in conjunction with drunkenness. And my answer to him, however, was none of the above, because what I was talking about was not anything specific that I oversaw or that I heard or anything that I had observed personally in terms of the behavior of people.

I didn't see any drunk people. My comments were specifically focused on how we have a tendency in modern society to treat drunkenness as something that ranges from neutral to positive. And we have a tendency to embrace it and to raise it up as something that can be enjoyed. But I believe exactly the opposite.

I believe that drunkenness is not something to be enjoyed. It's something that will have incredibly damaging financial and moral effects in your life. And thus, we should face it square and head on. Now, here was what I had noticed. As I said, I wasn't referring to any one person.

I didn't observe anybody. And besides, what other people do with their lives and their time is none of my business. I don't go out looking for trouble. I don't go out looking to mess with other people. I focus on living my life. And so, as such, when most people are out enjoying the clubs and the bars and the parties and whatnot, I'm usually in my bed.

I have found that over the time, my circadian rhythms and my sleep cycles work better for me to get to bed early and get up early. So thus, I live by Ben Franklin's maxim, "Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." So I don't generally – I'm the first to leave an evening party, and I don't generally participate in a lot of those events.

So I didn't observe anything personally. But what I did observe, and I observe often, is that especially in the United States of America – and for those of you who are international listeners, I apologize. I know many of you have a much healthier relationship. Some of you have a much less healthy relationship, but some of your cultures have a much healthier relationship with alcohol than the U.S.

American culture does. Because in the U.S. American culture, drunkenness is celebrated and is promoted. And here is what had bothered me at the conference. It was specifically the way that speakers were introducing themselves, and they were using the topic of drunkenness, referring, "Hey, what a great party. Wow." And it goes like this, "What a great party we had last night.

Man, I saw a few of you tying a few ones on." Or, "Wow, you rolled out of bed this morning. I can't believe it." Or, "I'm here, and obviously the attendance here this morning is not as good as it can be." Now, in and of themselves, most of these statements are innocuous, and all of us have made statements like that.

I'm no fool. It's obvious that these are just simply rhetorical devices that the speaker is using to try to build rapport with their audience. Anytime you're engaging with a new audience, especially in a public speaking capacity, you have to build rapport. You have to do this in personal, interpersonal interaction.

The first thing, the skill of a good conversationalist is to find common ground, find rapport, and then build from there through excellent listening. And as a public speaker, you have to do it even more so. And so public speakers will have a tool bag that they go to to try to find areas of common ground that they can use to build on to engage with their audience.

And this is just simply one of those pieces of common ground. I get that. I recognize that. But these statements are reflective of a view that we hold on the subject of drunkenness. We expect it. We expect it at business conferences. And this is not, again, not specific to FinCon.

Many business conferences for many people serve as a time away from home where they can fill their lives with debauchery, including drunkenness and other aspects of immorality. But in our culture, we've grown to treat this lightly. We've grown to treat this as though it's something to be tolerated and/or celebrated.

But it's not. It has very damaging effects in your life, very financially damaging effects in your life. It has very damaging effects on your family, and it has very damaging effects on society. Now, some of these things will be self-evident, and some of them won't be. And yes, obviously, with a show like this, I will come across in this show as preaching, and I am.

But the subject of a show like this is moral in nature, and it has a tremendous influence on your wealth. Let me read to you again the proverb that I began with. It says this, "Be not among drunkards or among gluttonous eaters of meat, for the drunkard and the glutton will come to poverty, and slumber will clothe them with rags." There are a number of proverbs that follow this theme.

Here's another one. "Whoever loves pleasure will be a poor man. He who loves wine and oil will not be rich." Now, I'm reading these proverbs to you out of the Book of Proverbs from the Christian Bible. The Book of Proverbs, if you're unfamiliar with the background of the Bible, is a collection of wise sayings that was primarily assembled by King Solomon.

Proverbs basically just mean things that are generally true, wise sayings. The Book of Proverbs is not a prophetic book. It's not a direct communication from God with a prophetic voice saying, "Thus saith the Lord." Proverbs are not promises, so I don't think it's appropriate in biblical interpretation to say, "Well, it says this in the Book of Proverbs, so thus this is a promise of God that will always be true." Proverbs are things that are generally true.

There can be exceptions, but often not. King Solomon, if you're unfamiliar with your history, King Solomon lived during the Bronze Age. He was the son of King David, the famous king of the Jews, that the Jews exalt and honor appropriately so. And King Solomon was the wisest man who ever lived.

He received his wisdom as a supernatural gift from God when he asked for it. When he was ascending to the throne of his father David, he asked for wisdom. When God gave him an opportunity to ask him for anything, he asked for wisdom. God gave him wisdom and he blessed him with everything else.

The scripture records and history records that people came from all around the world to seek Solomon for his wisdom. So over the years, he wrote the Book of Proverbs and collected these sayings. Many of them are Hebrew proverbs. Some of them are perhaps original with him. Not all of them come from Hebrew culture.

Some of them are Arab proverbs. There's an entire chapter that comes from the Egyptian culture. Solomon, one of his wives was the daughter of a pharaoh. It's a saying of proverbs that are generally true. There's a lot of wisdom. But there's a consistent focus, and there's many proverbs, I'll read a couple of them, about drunkenness.

Solomon was a man who was incredibly rich and incredibly wise. When you read proverbs, we're reading what he had to say on the subject. He says this, "Whoever loves pleasure will be a poor man. He who loves wine and oil will not be rich." Now, I would imagine that if you think of your own experience, you might be able to relate to a saying like that.

You might be able to relate to the idea that somebody who is a lover of pleasure and wine, and I won't go into oil. I'm more sophisticated with wine, that they very well might find that their love of the good life supersedes their ability to accumulate wealth. Now, especially when you get to the extreme, think of the person in your life that you know who is most dedicated to a lifestyle of drunkenness.

Ask yourself if they're rich. There have been a couple of people who very much enjoyed drunkenness who were rich, but the vast majority of the people who are most engaged in drunkenness have come to poverty. I'm going to talk about this on an individual level, a family level, and a social level.

I'm going to talk about this with regard to short-term, medium-term, and long-term impacts. Let's talk about some of the costs of excessive drinking. Number one, alcohol is expensive. Have you ever sat down and run the tab to see how much alcohol costs? It is incredibly expensive. It's expensive whether you do it yourself in your home.

It's expensive if you buy it out. A simple glass of wine at most of the restaurants where I live is going to be about 10 bucks, if not more. Most people are not going to have one glass. They're going to have more than one. You wind up spending a lot of money on a substance that is expensive.

It's expensive because of the cost of making it, especially fine alcohol. It takes many years to produce 20-year scotch or a well-aged wine. These things take many years to perfect. It's also expensive because of the taxation, one of the most heavily taxed products. If you drink to excess and devote yourself to drunkenness, you will find yourself spending a lot of money buying drinks.

It's also expensive because of the things that go along with alcohol. Most of the time, alcohol is an accompaniment to other things that are generally costly. A fine meal, many drinks. Alcohol leads, at least in many of the drunk friends that I've known over the years, alcohol leads to liberal spending.

It leads to liberal spending of, "Let's go do shots." "Eight bucks a pop. Great. Now all of a sudden we're coming out $100 for the night instead of $40." Alcohol leads to excess. It leads to buying the round of drinks for the entire table. It leads to buying many rounds of drinks.

It leads to, "Put it on my tab." If I think back to my days of my drunken friends back in college and I just think about the bar tabs that broke college students would run up, it's absolutely incredible. The price. It's expensive. It's an expensive hobby. Even those who get into the good stuff, who are very dedicated to the finest wines, the finest whiskeys, the price tag on that stuff is tremendous.

That's one way that's relatively obvious that excessive dedication to alcohol can quickly drain your pocketbook. Those are the short-term impacts. What about the medium-term impacts on a personal level? A different proverb says this, "Wine is a mocker. Strong drink a brawler. And whoever is led astray by it is not wise." Again, "Wine is a mocker.

Strong drink a brawler. And whoever is led astray by it is not wise." When you think about some of the medium-term effects of drunkenness, I think about some of the things that drunkenness can lead to. It leads to fights. It leads to being thrown out of places. It leads to hurting relationships.

It can easily lead to something like a DUI. If you want to mess up your financial life, consume an excess amount of alcohol such that it impedes your judgment, get in a car, get pulled over, and have a breathalyzer run on you, you will destroy your financial life for the next few years.

Minimum a DUI first time is $10,000. Minimum. Second time it just goes up. I've watched a few friends go through this process, and the damage is extensive. There's all the initial costs, yes. There's all the initial costs of the court fees and all of that stuff. There's the initial cost of getting the stuff put on your car so you can blow in the blower.

There's all the cost to your social life of having the blower on your car so that you can deal with that and so you can actually be able to drive. There's the cost. I had one friend who wasn't able to drive for a year on his second DUI, couldn't drive for a year.

Well, he had to Uber every day to work. The money adds up quickly. And then there's even the long-term effects of such a decision where it impacts your job prospects. It impacts the types of things that you can do in the future. It can lead to felony DUI, or God forbid, some of the things that come with DUI manslaughter.

Things like that. You have an accident. You hurt somebody else's family. The results are extensive. So what would prudence do in a situation like that? I think prudence would be pull back from the edge and don't ever drink to the point where your judgment is impaired. A mistake made can be made in a moment, but good judgment will keep you from many of those mistakes.

Judgment is impaired by alcohol. The long-term personal effects of alcohol, especially with regard to health, can be tremendous. I have a friend of mine who is in his early 50s, 51 years old. He is the perfect picture of sickness. He can barely function. And it's just incredibly sad because all of his life choices are damaged.

He has to stay working in a job that he doesn't particularly like because he needs the health insurance. Because he's had to have a kidney transplant. Because his liver is not functioning very well. In case he has to go on dialysis. He can't do much because of his physical condition.

So thus he continues in a cycle of depression, cycle of inactivity, grossly overweight. And though he has money to spend, his enjoyment of that money is substantially diminished. And his lifespan, I would be surprised if he makes it another decade. Why? Well, in talking to him, a lot of it is traced back to his heavy drinking in his early years.

It's had a tremendous impact on his life. Heavy drinking in his early years caused significant physical problems for him now. Now this person is compared to many alcoholics highly functioning, called a functioning alcoholic, right? He's not an alcoholic in terms of the way that we use that term in our culture in the sense of an addiction.

He's not addicted to alcohol. He was a drunk when he was younger. But if you think about so many people who are drunks and how that follows them through their lives, it destroys things. The long-term effects personally are tremendous. What about other financial and specifically to keep focused on these financial threads, the cost of the financial cost of dealing with sickness throughout your life is huge.

Huge. It's so sad to have to deal with financial costs of sicknesses that are completely preventable. There was no reason for the sickness to occur. But now you've got decades of medical bills. And then the opportunity cost of sickness is also huge. The cost of not being able to take advantage of opportunities, the cost of not having the energy to start a business, to get a good job, to work because you drained because of the physical condition.

And all of it traces back to drunkenness while a youth. It's very sad. Moving on from personal to family costs. Think about the short-term family costs. Another proverb says this, "Like a thorn that goes up into the hand of a drunkard." You ever know a friend who when there are three sheets to the wind has not the ability to feel pain and does something foolish and stupid?

Something that results in them hurting themselves and they're bleeding and they don't feel it. That's the picture. "Like a thorn that goes up into the hand of a drunkard is a proverb in the mouth of fools. Like an archer who wounds everyone is one who hires a passing fool or drunkard.

Like a dog that returns to his vomit is a fool who repeats his folly." Bit of a connection here between fools and drunkards, eh? And yet most drunks, what do they do? Talk about how great the drunkenness was and want to go back and repeat it. What's the impact on family?

Well, it destroys relationships. Talk about the financial cost. A good relationship, a good marriage relationship, will save you a tremendous amount of money because you're content to be together. Destroy a good relationship with drunkenness or any kind of destructive behavior, and now all of a sudden we've got to go out and medicate constantly to try to fix social emotional problems with financial expenditures.

Take this on from the long term to the medium term and you wind up families have tremendous costs. When you study drunks and alcoholics and you see the amount of money that they spend and destroy their family's livelihood. I think of a very good friend of mine whose dad was just a complete drunk.

And for many years of his life, the first thing that they had to do was try to wrest the paycheck from him on Friday before he drank it all away. And there were many occasions when his dad would get paid on Friday and would stop at the bar on the way home and the whole paycheck would be gone and would disappear before he had the opportunity to even make it home to meet the needs of the family.

And my friend went hungry because of it. That leads over time to divorce. When you study the impact on the marriages of many people who are dealing with one member of the marriage who's a drunk, divorce is incredibly prominent. Talk about one of the biggest financial mistakes you can make.

Divorce is certainly at the top of that list. It'll destroy at least half your wealth. So the cost is huge. Now, that's not even to talk about the things that the drunkenness leads to. Drunkenness destroys good judgment. In the short term, it destroys the ability to function. Some people say, "Well, I function better after I've had a drink or two." Really?

Do you really? So you're going in for surgery tomorrow, going to be going under the knife on the operating table. Your surgeon walks in with a cup of coffee in the morning to greet you pre-op and you say, "Oh, what are you drinking?" "I'm having a little bit of Irish coffee." Do you really feel good about that?

Getting on an airplane and you see the pilot there and as they're sitting in the front seat, you peek over their shoulder into their shirt pocket and there's a little flask and you see them take a little tipple out of the flask. Do you really feel so good about flying on that airplane?

Going into court, are you going to sit down and have a couple of martinis with your attorney at lunch? Before he goes in and makes his closing argument before the jury? I don't buy this nonsense of, "I function better after I've had a drink or two." But think about the other things that it leads to.

Bad decisions, bad judgment. Would you try to trade stocks while you're drinking? People make a joke out of, "Oh, I drunk dialed," or, "I drunk texted," or, "These days, I drunk tweeted." It's not a laughing matter because it has a tremendous cost associated with it. It leads to bad decisions.

Bad decisions will destroy your life. The worst thing about alcohol is that it leads many times to a cycle of addiction. Proverbs 23 says this, "Who has woe? Who has sorrow? Who has strife? Who has complaining? Who has wounds without cause? Who has redness of eyes?" Those who tarry long over wine, those who go to try mixed wine, do not look at wine when it is red, when it sparkles in the cup and goes down smoothly.

In the end, it bites like a serpent and stings like an adder. Your eyes will see strange things and your heart utter perverse things. You will be like one who lies down in the midst of the sea, like one who lies on the top of a mast. "They struck me," you will say, "but I was not hurt.

They beat me, but I did not feel it. When shall I awake? I must have another drink." Is that not the picture of the drunks you know? Who has woe? Who has sorrow? Who has strife? Who has complaining? Their lives not destroyed systematically. Who has wounds without cause? I always picture the person inflicting injury on themselves over some stupid thing, some stupid stumble.

Who has redness of eyes? Those who tarry long over wine. I'm making the point that on a family level, these things are destructive over the short-term, medium-term, and long-term. Many of you have family members who are alcoholics. The cost on your family because of alcoholism is huge. When you look at dementia and problems functioning in older age because of excess alcohol, the cost is huge.

Don't be a fool and devote yourself to drunkenness. It's very hard to out-earn your foolishness. My final comments are with regard to the cost on society. I want to show you how individual actions compound society-wide. I'm going to lead off here with this proverb from Proverbs 31. It's a proverb from a mother to her son.

She says this, "It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine or for rulers to take strong drink, lest they drink and forget what has been decreed and pervert the rights of all the afflicted." This passage here has a tremendous application because in the short-term, people can make foolish decisions that affect others.

If you're in a place of leadership, whether you're a king or whether you're some kind of civil leader, you must make wise decisions, and you cannot have your decisions clouded. Over time, the decisions that you make and the decisions that individuals make compound and have tremendous cost. When a society is dedicated to drunkenness, it leads to lost productivity that affects everybody.

When a society is dedicated to drunkenness, that leads to health problems. I read a report a couple years ago about the Russians and the amount of alcoholism in the Russian society and the amount of physical problems because of it. When a society devotes itself to drunkenness, it leads to shortening lifespans.

A couple years ago, there were a bunch of news articles because for the first time--I can't remember if it was white men and women or just white men, but I think it was just white men, but check me out on that--white men in the United States for the first time had a shorter expected lifespan.

The cause? Alcohol and drugs. Alcohol and drug abuse leading to shortened lifespans for the first time in recorded history where we expect rather living longer to live shorter has a tremendous impact on society. Now, I'm using these examples here because I think that they illustrate. First, I want you to hear me very clearly that when you have something that is so clear in terms of its impact, when you have a moral behavior that is so clear that it has such damaging effects, it's not something to be played around with.

It's not something to be joked about. Go and study some of the Indian populations or Aboriginal populations and look at how alcohol and alcohol addiction utterly destroys their entire communities. So we think that it's fun to talk about drunkenness. Go and study teenage drinking and the men and women that it destroys.

Go and study the rates of absolute alcohol poisoning that occurs on college campuses and go and look at how that destroys lives. There's a friend of mine online that was reading a testimony, and she is very active in standing out in front of the abortion mills and working with people to try to help save some of the babies that their mothers are going in and murdering.

And she interacts with them. She sends emails to them. She's in contact with them. And one of the person's accounts, one of the mothers that had an appointment to murder her baby, she said, "I can't keep it because I don't know who the father was." She said, "I was completely drunk.

I went to a party. It was an orgy with a bunch of men. I don't know who the father is. I can't keep this baby." Lives are destroyed and bodies are pulled apart because of drunkenness. It's not something to be laughed at. Now, there's a moral dimension and a financial dimension.

I focus on the financial dimension because that's most specific to the show. But the moral dimension is every bit as important, if not more so. Jesus said in Luke, he said, "What does it profit a man if he gained the whole world and loses his own soul?" So not only are there impacts for behavior that we see today in terms of the expense of it all, not only are you destined to poverty because of excess drunkenness, but there's an impact on a moral dimension.

Let's read from the Book of Romans. The author writes this, says, "The night is far gone. The day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires." The warnings are incredibly stern in terms of the impact of drunkenness.

Scripture from Galatians says this, says, "I warn you as I warned you before that those who do such things will not inherit." Sorry, let's get past it. Now, the works of the flesh are evident, sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these.

I warn you as I warned you before that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. Now, the beautiful thing about this, I'm going to close with one more scripture passage and a poem, is that the past is not the future. If you find yourself, as so many people have, suffering from the effects of drunkenness earlier in life, recognize that those effects will stay with you, but you can change and you can move forward and you can adjust your behavior.

Now, perhaps you, like me, have never dealt seriously with drunkenness, never been a problem for me, but at least help by not promulgating something that destroys lives, destroys families, and destroys finances. Don't joke about it. Take it seriously. Scripture says this, it says, "Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?

Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God." That's the hope, is that these types of behaviors, and drunkenness is just the one that I chose to focus on today, but these types of behaviors will destroy your finances and they will destroy your life, but they don't have to persist.

They don't have to continue. They can be turned from. Drunkenness and the damaging effects of drunkenness is something that almost all of us would agree on. It's hard for me to imagine anybody from any worldview, any perspective, that would disagree with most of the comments that I've made in this show.

It's relatively self-evident. You don't have to be a disciple of Jesus Christ to recognize these things. There are plenty of complete atheist psychologists who can affirm the damaging effect of this. I know plenty of people who care not a whit for religion, but who don't drink a drop because of these things that I've talked about.

And that's entirely normal. You don't have to believe the authority of the Bible. But drunkenness does have an effect, and part of its sanctions, part of the negative results are because it's a breaking of the law of God. It's the same in many areas of life. There are blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience, and wealth is one of those things.

I don't want to go into a long dissertation on that at the moment, but if you're experiencing difficulty, if you're experiencing financial difficulty, look seriously at the moral behavior in your life and ask if this is connected to that. The connection with drunkenness, with all of the examples that I've seen here, are very obvious.

But ask yourself that question and search to see what your behavior is and recognize that the past is not the future and things can be changed. I close with one of my famous poems. Excuse me, not famous. I close with a famous poem that's one of my favorite poems.

It's called "The Touch of the Master's Hand," and it says this. "'Twas battered and scarred, and the auctioneer thought it hardly worth his while to waste his time on the old violin, but he held it up with a smile. "'What am I bid, good people?' he cried. 'Who starts the bidding for me?' 'One dollar, one dollar.' 'Do I hear two?' 'Two dollars.

Who makes it three?' 'Three dollars once, three dollars twice, going for three. But no, from the room far back a gray-bearded man came forward and picked up the bow. Then, wiping the dust from the old violin and tightening up the strings, he played a melody, pure and sweet, as sweet as the angel sings.

The music ceased, and the auctioneer, with a voice that was quiet and low, said, 'What now am I bid for this old violin?' As he held it aloft with its bow. 'One thousand, one thousand. Do I hear two? Two thousand. Who makes it three? Three thousand once, three thousand twice, going, and gone,' said he.

The audience cheered, but some of them cried, 'We just don't understand. What changed its worth?' Swift came the reply, the touch of the master's hand. And many a man with life out of tune, all battered and bruised with hardship, is auctioned cheap to a thoughtless crowd, much like that old violin.

A mess of pottage, a glass of wine, a game, and he travels on. He is going once, he is going twice, he is going and almost gone. But the master comes, and the foolish crowd never can quite understand the worth of a soul and the change that is wrought by the touch of the master's hand.