For thirty-some years, giving was easy in a specific, boring way. A number hit my account every two weeks, I gave ten percent of it before I could talk myself out of any part of that, and I didn't have to think about it much beyond that first decision, made back when I was in my twenties and didn't have much to give in the first place.
Retirement is going to take that automatic number away. And I've noticed, working through the budget my wife and I are building, that I have to actually decide again what giving looks like, instead of just letting a habit run on autopilot.
That's turned out to be harder than I expected.
The Questions I Didn't Expect to Have
Do you tithe on Social Security? On withdrawals from a retirement account that's really just money you already tithed on once, back when you earned it? On investment growth you didn't work for directly? I've asked a few people at church these questions over the last several months and gotten a few different answers, none of them wrong exactly, all of them requiring an actual decision rather than a formula.
I don't think Scripture hands us a spreadsheet for this. What I think it hands us is a posture, and I've had to go back and relearn it as if for the first time.
“Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.”
2 Corinthians 9:6-7
"Decided in your heart" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It's not "decided by formula." It assumes an actual decision, made prayerfully, not a rule applied automatically forever. For thirty years I let a rule run on autopilot and called it faithfulness. It was faithful, as far as it went. But I'm realizing now it also let me avoid actually deciding anything, year after year.
What Fixed Income Actually Reveals
Here's the uncomfortable part I've had to sit with. When the number was automatic and comfortable, giving ten percent never really tested me. It was baked into a paycheck I never fully controlled anyway. Now, looking at a fixed monthly amount that isn't going to grow the way a salary sometimes did, giving suddenly feels like it's actually competing with something: the emergency fund, the property taxes, the grandkids' birthdays.
Which is, I think, exactly the moment Scripture is interested in. Not the giving that costs nothing. The giving that costs something real, and gets given anyway.
Solomon put it plainly, long before retirement accounts existed:
“Honor the LORD with your wealth, with the firstfruits of all your crops.”
Proverbs 3:9
Firstfruits, not leftovers. The first check I write from a fixed retirement income, not whatever's left over after everything else gets paid. That's a harder discipline on a fixed income than it ever was on a growing one, and I think that's the point rather than a coincidence.
What My Wife and I Decided
We didn't land on a formula either, if I'm honest. We landed on a number that felt like it cost us something: not the maximum we could theoretically justify, not the minimum we could get away with, but a number we prayed over and both felt right about. We wrote it into the retirement budget before we finalized anything else, the same way we used to write the tithe into the top of a paycheck budget instead of the bottom.
It's less than we gave in some peak earning years. It's more, proportionally, than we gave in some lean early ones. It's ours, decided in our hearts the way Paul described, not inherited from a rule we never questioned.
If you're approaching this same season and finding that giving suddenly requires an actual decision instead of a habit, I don't think that's a problem to solve. I think it might be an invitation, the same one it always was, just finally visible again after decades of an automatic paycheck hiding it from view.
God bless,
Paul