Are the church's investments sufficient to pay for BYU without dipping into the annual inflows? I know the church is ultra conservative, and I suspect that similar to BYU requirements (e.g., buildings are fully funded and operating costs are also funded so that it is in perpetuity), I have always wondered to what degree the church does that, in particular to the funding in perpetuity.

For example - a temple is built. Is a fund created that generates income to fund those operations in perpetuity? I know a few years back, President Hinckley talked about setting aside 10% of annual income each year into a reserve. Doing simple math, after about 15-20 years or so of that (and it has been that long since he said it) you would have a investment that would effectively fund all of the operations of the church, depending on the operating cost growth rate and the annual cash flow.

My question was never about whether it is "tithing" or something else as others have commented, but more about the wherewithal of the investments of the church (I called it endowment and that caused more confusion). I am sure there are very few people on earth that know the answer to that.

We'll never know, but I enjoy speculating about this stuff more than whether we will be 6-6 or 8-4 next year in football...