The WOW Factor

Ah, stewardship season. My favorite time of the year. Not most people's because we've been taught that stewardship is about guilt and deprivation. It's not. It's about extravagance and generosity.

In last Sunday's sermon I talked about the fulfillment curve, a concept from the book Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez. I also wanted to talk about the WOW factor, from The Tightwad Gazette by Amy Dacyzcyn, but I didn't have time. So I'll share it with you.

Amy and her husband Jim had six children. They also had a goal of buying an old farm house on Jim's salary while Amy stayed home with the kids. They learned some excellent money-saving strategies, hence Amy's Tightwad Gazette newsletter, which is now a book (actually three of them). One principal they practiced with their kids was the WOW factor.

Amy often bought her kid's clothes at garage sales. One year she asked her daughter Jamie if she needed new boots. She didn't. But later on the in the season she wanted green L.L. Bean style boots like her classmates. Before hitting the stores, they went to their church's thrift shop. Miracle upon miracle, she found the exact boots she wanted, only they were plum colored instead of green. Amy bought them anyway, and then at home talked to her daughter about them.

"These boots are almost exactly what you want. Do you think we should spend $25 to buy new boots for you?"

"Mmmmoooommm! I didn't say 'new,' I said 'green'!"

"Okay, plum-colored boots cost .25 cents and green boots cost $25. Are green boots a hundred times better than plum-colored ones?"

She admitted they weren't and quite contentedly wore the plum-colored boots for the rest of the winter.

That would never work with my child, you say. Perhaps not, but maybe because we haven't learned how to use that principal with ourselves. When we go to buy something, we can ask ourselves will the more expensive version give us that much more satisfaction?

Say you were deciding between a $500 camping trip and a $5000 cruise. The camping trip, on a scale of 1 to 10, would be a five. So that's $100/wow. The cruise would be a 10, which is $500/wow. Would you enjoy the cruise five times more than the camping trip? And what if you spent that $4500 you didn't spend on the cruise on other things that had a higher wow factor? You might end up with 40, 50, or more wows for the same 10 wows you spent on the cruise.

Stewardship is about using the resources that God has given us to the best of our ability. One way I do that is to give each purchase the wow test.