To the Boys and to the Men

by President Gordon B. Hinkley
Oct. 1998 Priesthood Session
(click on title to read entire talk)

We need to get our houses in order. I was at Education Week this past week at Brigham Young University and took a class by Sherry Dew. She mentioned this talk and how greatly it helped her in her life during the economic crash in the fall of 1998.

Are we listening to our Prophet's voice?

"Now, brethren, I want to make it very clear that I am not prophesying, that I am not predicting years of famine in the future. But I am suggesting that the time has come to get our houses in order.

So many of our people are living on the very edge of their incomes. In fact, some are living on borrowings.

We have witnessed in recent weeks wide and fearsome swings in the markets of the world. The economy is a fragile thing. A stumble in the economy in Jakarta or Moscow can immediately affect the entire world. It can eventually reach down to each of us as individuals. There is a portent of stormy weather ahead to which we had better give heed.

.....

I repeat, I hope we will never again see such a depression. But I am troubled by the huge consumer installment debt which hangs over the people of the nation, including our own people. In March 1997 that debt totaled $1.2 trillion, which represented a 7 percent increase over the previous year. "

I really need to get my house in order. We have been working on it for some time but then it seems like we always hit set-back after set-back. I remember this talk and wish I would have followed this advice more closely.

I loved this part :)
"President Faust would not tell you this himself. Perhaps I can tell it, and he can take it out on me afterward. He had a mortgage on his home drawing 4 percent interest. Many people would have told him he was foolish to pay off that mortgage when it carried so low a rate of interest. But the first opportunity he had to acquire some means, he and his wife determined they would pay off their mortgage. He has been free of debt since that day. That's why he wears a smile on his face, and that's why he whistles while he works. "