What can a Christian do when he wishes to honor the Lord with his investments?  Can he use a personal financial advisor who is a Christian?  I have written in the past, and highly commended, the Eventide family of mutual funds.

Their fund family includes the Eventide Gilead Fund (ETILX), Eventide Healthcare and Life Sciences Fund (ETIHX), Eventide Exponential Technologies Fund (ETIEX), Eventide Large Cap Focus Fund (ETLIX), Eventide Dividend Opportunities Fund (ETIDX), Eventide Multi-Asset Income Fund (ETIMX), Eventide Limited Term Bond Fund (ETIBX), and Eventide Core Bond Fund (ETIRX).  (They also have class N, A, and C shares as well as class I shares, but I utilized the ticker symbols for the class I shares here.) When one invests with Eventide, he avoids companies that support wickedness like abortion, tobacco, cannabis, pornography, violent media, and so on.  In addition, their investment philosophy  goes one step further to ask important questions about integrity, business practice, and value-creation.  I was very excited to find out about Eventide years ago, and still believe they are the best option for practicing Bible-based values in investing, for the reasons explained in my review of the Eventide family of funds and their second-best competitor, the Timothy Plan family of funds.

 

Are your investments clean, or at least as clean as the Timothy Plan–which is in many ways good, although at a lower standard of Biblical conformity than Eventide–would view it?  You can get a complementary moral audit from them of what you own at a link on the page here.  Why not find out?  Are you afraid of what you will discover?  Would you rather find out now, or at the judgment seat of Christ?

 

One might suppose that he could have a personal financial advisor assist him in investing in a clean, God-honoring way.  Is having an actively (or passively) managed account with a personal financial advisor an option?  Fidelity, Schwab, Merrill Edge, and many other investment firms provide the option of a personal financial advisor who will seek to follow your investment directions for a fee.  On multiple occasions, when I have discussed Biblical, Christian values with such people, they have said that they could follow our virtuous, godly directives and set up something that was acceptable.  Does this work?  I recently tried it.  How did it go?

 

As is common knowledge, in the San Francisco Bay Area homes and condominiums are very expensive.  I would like to be able to buy a residence close to Bethel Baptist Church that fits our ministry goals and family needs.  I have prayerfully formulated a plan to get there that also dealt with other financial goals.  Because Scripture affirms the value of a “multitude of counsellors” for safety and being established in one’s purposes (Proverbs 11:14; 15:22; 24:6), I wanted to run my plan by more than one financial advisor.  I got a complementary meeting with one from Schwab, while with an organization called Personal Capital, part of Empower, I scheduled a meeting because they had promised one would get $100 for meeting with a financial advisor and getting a proposal.  I was willing to hear what the Personal Capital person had to say about my investment plan, and that they would give me $100 for meeting with him made it better.

 

Over the course of three meetings, I explained my Christian, Bible-based values and what I viewed as acceptable for investments. The financial advisor with Personal Capital said something like that he was a devout Christian himself.  He said he managed the assets for numbers of Christians and others who, for example, did not want to invest in abortion.  Now that sounded good, no?  Surely if one can get one’s investments personally under the care of a financial advisor who is himself a Christian, and who manages the assets of numbers of Christians, one can invest cleanly, like one can with Eventide.  The financial advisor provided a variety of reasons why he thought what he would offer would outperform an investment strategy that held strictly to a number of Eventide funds.  (This post is not about the performance side of the question, but I am actually skeptical of his claim that his mix of investments would outperform what I was doing with Eventide.  For example, since inception on 7/8/2008, the Eventide Gilead Fund has grown at an annualized 12.99%, and class I shares since inception on 2/2/2010 have grown at 13.60%.  That is a long time for them to outperform by several percentage points what the Personal Capital gentleman said I could expect what he was offering me would probably earn on average.)  His company has a section on its website promoting the option of socially responsible investing, which they advertise as a way “to align [one’s] investments with [his] personal values and beliefs.”  In any case, for investing in a righteous way, he is certainly a better option. Right?

 

Unfortunately, no–wrong.  First, he said that he did not have the ability to actually determine whether individual companies were actually engaging in evil behaviors, or actively seeking to do good, the way that Eventide would do.  Trying to make investments clean would just be, with him, taking a base strategy that did NOT evaluate things from the perspective of the kingdom of God, and simply attempting to improve it a bit.  What he could do was take out some notorious companies such as a casino here and there.  Would the personalization he offered be clean, according to the complementary moral audit mentioned earlier in this post?  Highly unlikely.

 

Furthermore, he also wanted to diversify into foreign companies (a reasonable idea; nothing wrong with that).  But for the foreign investments, he would simply have me get ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds) that had no moral or Christian component whatsoever.  So domestically, I could be part-owner (through ETFs or other investments) of companies that were engaged in evil, although not as notoriously.  Outside of the USA, I could own companies that were chopping up little babies in the womb, selling abortion drugs, or marketing cigarettes and booze to twelve-year-olds.  No filters whatsoever.  Problem.

 

After the third meeting, when I got his actual proposal, I looked over the companies that he wanted me to invest in.  I cannot share on this blog post what they were, because it is proprietary information with them.  However, without even doing a complementary moral audit, I knew that many of them would fail, and that a Christian had no business owning them.  It would be a tremendous step backward were I to join the Christian clients of this professedly devout Christian financial advisor.  My investments would not be clean, much less focused on companies that are positively doing good.  It would be a bad choice.

 

If blog readers assume that their investments are clean because they have a financial advisor who goes to church, reads the Bible, and even possibly is a truly born-again Christian, they should make very, very sure about it.  At least with my situation, the fact that this advisor told me that he was committed to Christian doctrine and managed the money of a good number of Christians, and could personalize investments to avoid what is bad turned out not to mean a whole lot.  It meant we could take a framework focused solely on gaining filthy lucre and could clean up bits and pieces of it.  With Eventide, everything is built around a Biblical framework of investing.  What a difference–and what a blessing!  Eventide won hands-down over the professedly devout Christian financial advisor who said he could personalize investments to be suitable for Bible-believers.

 

Naturally, I did not sell my Eventide investments and move over to Personal Capital with Empower.  Personal Capital would not have allowed me to invest in a way that glorifies and pleases the Lord.

 

Other reasons why I did not move over to them–such as that Empower had poor customer service when they were the 401K company for one of my jobs in Wisconsin (I was able to invest in Eventide through them, and that’s all I did), that what the financial advisor said would be their likely performance is lower than how Eventide has performed since their Gilead Fund and other funds started, that Empower / Personal Capital never even gave me the $100 for spending a lot of time with them and having several meetings, that they did not have a phone number for me to call to get help with this, but only an email, and that their customer service here in California seemed to have even more room for improvement than they did in Wisconsin, were less important, although they were not very promising.  These all could have been reasons for me not to go with them.  That I could not invest cleanly was necessarily a reason not to go with them, but stick with Eventide.

 

What about you?  Do you have confidence that what you invest in pleases the Lord, and will be something you can be happy about when you stand before Christ on judgment day?  Don’t assume that you do, just because you have a financial advisor who claims to be a Christian and who says he can personalize your investments.

 

–TDR