Living on passive income from large sum of money

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servus_Mariae

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Would it be a sin to live without working by passive income from the interest of your egg-nest? Is it the supporting of usury?
 
servus_Mariae said:
Would it be a sin to live without working by passive income from the interest of your egg-nest? Is it the supporting of usury?
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I think there are a couple of issues involved here:

First, IMO it’s a sin for any able-bodied person to live without doing some work. It doesn’t need to be paying work, or full-time work, but everyone should find some useful work to do.

Second, as to usury – people have different definitions of usury. Some consider any earning of interest on loaned money to be usury, while others (including me) define it more narrowly as earning interest at an excessively high rate.

If one’s passive income comes from stocks, then usury isn’t a factor, since stocks don’t pay interest. (Well, preferred stock sometimes does, but it’s not necessary to be that technical.) If one’s passive income comes from bonds, notes, interest-bearing accounts, or other loans, then usury is possible but not likely, because no reputable business is going to pay usurious rates of interest, at least not to public investors.

My :twocents:

,
 
servus_Mariae said:
Would it be a sin to live without working by passive income from the interest of your egg-nest? Is it the supporting of usury?
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You would have to have quite a nest-egg, then, eh? What if, for every year you lived on passive interest, you gave 10% *of the entire nest egg *to charity?
 
Langdell said:
I think there are a couple of issues involved here:

First, IMO it’s a sin for any able-bodied person to live without doing some work. It doesn’t need to be paying work, or full-time work, but everyone should find some useful work to do.

Second, as to usury – people have different definitions of usury. Some consider any earning of interest on loaned money to be usury, while others (including me) define it more narrowly as earning interest at an excessively high rate.

If one’s passive income comes from stocks, then usury isn’t a factor, since stocks don’t pay interest. (Well, preferred stock sometimes does, but it’s not necessary to be that technical.) If one’s passive income comes from bonds, notes, interest-bearing accounts, or other loans, then usury is possible but not likely, because no reputable business is going to pay usurious rates of interest, at least not to public investors.

My :twocents:

,
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Good analysis. Even in the centuries before it became common for women to do paid work, they were certainly rarely completely idle.

Even the rich women would work at running and organising their households (which usually employed numbers of indoor and outdoor servants and tradespeople, rather like a small business) and so on. Not to mention being expected to take an interest in volunteer work helping the poor and needy of their area.
 
The bible says not to idle and doesn’t speak kindly of “busybodies”, so you should probably find at least a little bit of work to do.
 
servus_Mariae said:
Would it be a sin to live without working by passive income from the interest of your egg-nest? Is it the supporting of usury?
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Isn’t that what we all aspire to be able to do? 😉

I don’t think it would be a sin in and of itself. It just means that you have a greater obligation for charitable giving and volunteer work.
 
I knew an investment advisor whose favorite saying was this:
“There are only two sources of income: people working, and money working.”

Passive income is not in itself a bad thing. You put money in the bank to save. The bank lends it to others, you earn interest, the borrower uses the funds to grow his business, the bank makes money on the spread. It’s a win-win situation.

Many universities, hospitals, and charitable organizations use large endowments to generate income for daily operations.

My own diocese has an endowment to support seminarians in their education. They don’t spend the principal balance of the endowment. In fact, they want to add to it. But the interest income is used to send seminarians to school.

The purpose of accumulating a large savings for family or personal use is the same: to earn money to support the family: money working when people can no longer work.

But work itself is a positive good. Even those who are retired or can no longer work must find some work to do, whether volunteer or otherwise.

I might add that the principle of accumulating wealth in order to live on the interest does not apply to programs such as social security. Workers pay SS taxes, but that money is not saved or invested. Rather, it is immediately paid out to current retirees in benefits. It is, in fact, just the younger generation supporting the older, as in an extended family, but on a much larger scale. When we begin to get fewer youth, though, there is a problem.
 
Some of the people feel that it is necessary to work to live rightly. It is true that people should in some ways serve others. I don’t seen any guilt in not working though. What about cloisered nuns? In some houses, only some of the members do the work. What about St. Elizabeth of Hungry, a queen? As far as I have heard, she didn’t have a job or worked. As far as I have heard, St Monica, St. Augustine’s mother didn’t work, since their family had servants. I didn’t hear that she had a job or worked. You can use money to help you serve others, and I agree that if you use it simply to serve yourself, you are taking a wrong turn in your life.
 
mdgspencer said:
Some of the people feel that it is necessary to work to live rightly. It is true that people should in some ways serve others. I don’t seen any guilt in not working though. What about cloisered nuns? In some houses, only some of the members do the work. What about St. Elizabeth of Hungry, a queen? As far as I have heard, she didn’t have a job or worked. As far as I have heard, St Monica, St. Augustine’s mother didn’t work, since their family had servants. I didn’t hear that she had a job or worked. You can use money to help you serve others, and I agree that if you use it simply to serve yourself, you are taking a wrong turn in your life.
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You are right, of course. But work need not mean just work for money. I don’t think that Elizabeth of Hungary, or St. Monica, or any SAHM, spent all day lounging! For that matter, prayer is work too, and it’s work that many cloistered do on behalf of the rest of us.
 
No, it’s not a sin and no it’s not usury. The Church does not prohibit us from earning interest or living on a passive income. Usury is ruinous levels of interst-- for example pay day loan companies.

Certainly work is important in our sanctification. I would love if I did not work outside the home, so I could “work” full time in parish ministry, in my home, volunteering, etc. Not all work is paid work, nor should anyone feel bad about having a large sum of money off of which they might live. The bible warns us against being idle, it does not require a payin job.

Also, it is important to be a good steward of what God has given us. So, we must be generous and charitable when we find ourselves in such fortunate circumstances. (However, the suggestion that you give away 10% of the nest egg *every year *is NOT any sort of requirement of the Church.)
 
Also consider that society has changed over time. Here in the USA, the young no longer support the elderly. They need to have a means of support when they can no longer work. And that is usually what ‘nest egg’ is referring to. The gains of work not used until later in life.

There may come a day when I will retire. Then I will continue to work for the community. But beyond that there may come a day when I can no longer rise from my bed. When I am the homebound person needing the eucharist brought to me. Then I will grow in grace because I will be allowing others to serve me.

As Christ told Peter, unless you allow this you are not one of mine.
 
Evan said:
Also consider that society has changed over time. Here in the USA, the young no longer support the elderly.
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Actually, they do, in the form of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Those are funds paid in by the young, and paid out largely to the elderly. So we still need a base of young and working taxpayers to support the retired and the elderly.

Of course, those programs are never sufficient, so a nest egg is needed as well.

Plus, the cohort of the young is shrinking, while the cohort of the elderly is growing.
 
servus_Mariae said:
Would it be a sin to live without working by passive income from the interest of your egg-nest? Is it the supporting of usury?
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how is it usury? if you are 65 you will probably get 5% or less from an annuity, hardly usurious interest
 
Not a sin at all.

It’s a GIFT!

You have the rare opportunity to study, to learn, to pursue some pursuit other than being a wage slave.

We get stuff in the mail all the time for seminars and for various study courses and you have the gift of being able to go to them.

Or, suppose you watch television and learn that only 1% of the ocean floor has been studied. Well, you could decide, just one of a million examples, that it is so interesting to you that you want to either learn more or do more.

So, you could contact the existing groups that explore the ocean floor and hook up with them OR you could decide to start your own marine institute.

You could read that fish landings in the Hudson River are declining but your friends say that there are plenty of fish migrations. So you could get a boat and sonar and count the fish yourself. Do original research on some subject of interest to you.

Or you could move to San Diego and volunteer at Catholic Answers.

Or build a larger library for your town (or start a committee to build a new library).

Read Federalist Paper #45. Read all the Federalist Papers.

Go back to school and study medicine.

Thanks be to God you now have the opportunity to do stuff.

[Usury might be if you give out payday loans and charge 100% per week interest.]
 
JimG said:
You are right, of course. But work need not mean just work for money. I don’t think that Elizabeth of Hungary, or St. Monica, or any SAHM, spent all day lounging! For that matter, prayer is work too, and it’s work that many cloistered do on behalf of the rest of us.
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St Augustine and St. Monica had enough money to travel to and live in Italy. Their home was in Tunisia in North Africa. St. Augustine used his money to fund his activity for the Church … hung out with St. Ambrose and St. Jerome and the others to collect the books of the New Testament.
 
No it is not a sin to live on a large sum of money that allows you not to have to work for a living. the sin would be not using it for the betterment of the church or world. that does not mean you have to give money to the church but if you do not have to work then you should be giving your time to the building of the church. you have time so volunteer.
 
Consider also that having a large sum of money does not particularly guarantee never having to work. It is not risk free, even if it is all in CD’s and T-bills. The government could wipe out the value of your nest egg slowly through inflation or rapidly through hyperinflation. And if it’s invested in stocks or bonds, as we have discovered, it’s value can decline quite rapidly.
 
This thread reminds me of Tevye’s (from Fiddler on the Roof) view of prosperity:

“If money is a curse, may the Lord strike me with it! And may I never recover!”

😃

DaveBj
 
mdgspencer said:
Some of the people feel that it is necessary to work to live rightly. It is true that people should in some ways serve others. I don’t seen any guilt in not working though. What about cloisered nuns? In some houses, only some of the members do the work. What about St. Elizabeth of Hungry, a queen? As far as I have heard, she didn’t have a job or worked. As far as I have heard, St Monica, St. Augustine’s mother didn’t work, since their family had servants. I didn’t hear that she had a job or worked. You can use money to help you serve others, and I agree that if you use it simply to serve yourself, you are taking a wrong turn in your life.
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St Elizabeth of Hungry spent the majority of her time in charitable work, as did St Monica. As another poster stated, the ‘stay-at-home-moms’ in prosperous households in the past were really doing the equivalent of running small businesses. Read the description of the ‘stay-at-home-mom’ in Proverbs–she’s certainly not laying around eating bon-bons!

The Church also has never said that every wealthy person has to use all their money for charity. Indeed, we have many examples of people that did. But there are also examples of great Christians (even Saints) who continued to live on their wealth while also performing works of charity and living very pious lives.
 
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