After bartering for a while it occurred to me that my trade profit was significant and that I really should be tithing at church on the profit that I’m earning on trade.  For a couple months I started tracking my trade profit and tithing cash for it.  It didn’t take long for me to realize that I hadn’t come up with a good solution.  I simply couldn’t afford to keep paying out cash tithes on barter profits.  I’ve spoken with a couple people and have come up with two potential solutions:

The easy solution is simply to set your church up with a barter exchange account and tithe in barter credits on the barter portion of your profit.  The problem I have with that solution though is that it puts the burden of managing the account and figuring out what to use it for on your church.  I don’t know about other churches, but the staff at my church already have plenty on their plate and really didn’t need another job added.

My solution is more work for me, but I think it’s the best way to go.  I contacted my Pastor, and let him know the situation.  I explained to him that I wanted to tithe on my barter profit, but I simply couldn’t do it in cash.  We agreed that we would both watch for things that the church needed that could be purchased on barter and that I would then take care of those needs based on records I was keeping with regard to what I needed to tithe in barter.  This way it doesn’t put any new work on church staff and at the same time, I don’t need to tithe cash on barter profits.