Should Christians Invest in Facebook?

Facebook claims nearly 3 billion monthly users and reaches 60% of people using social media, worldwide. That's a lot of influence. Hi, I'm Rob West.

There's no question that Facebook has a huge impact on public perception, too often negative. Morally speaking, should Christians invest there? Well, our guest, Robert Netsley, is the CEO of Inspire Investing, an underwriter of MoneyWise Live. Robert and his team are really in the vanguard of the exploding faith-based investing movement. And Robert, great to have you with us today. It is always a pleasure.

Thanks for having me, Rob. Yeah, well, if you're following the Wall Street Journal, they've dropped a series of bombshell articles really exposing unethical, immoral, I mean really inexcusable business practices and decisions, how they're running their platform. You know, for instance, human trafficking, they've been for years profiting, knowingly profiting from ad revenues, from human trafficking. There's these extensive internal documents that have been leaked to the Journal documenting Facebook's internal conversations about these situations where in the Middle East and Africa, Southeast Asia, their ad buyers are placing ads that are luring people into the achievement market. They're luring people into the achievement tracking situations who, you know, basically they get flown to another country to do domestic work in a household, their passports are taken away, they're locked up, they're mistreated, they're abused, they're sold into slavery. And Facebook knows it, they know who the traffickers are, they know which ads are being used for trafficking, and they've done nothing to stop it, nothing to shut it down for years. And yet, you know, if somebody places, you know, maybe a biblical reference to marriage between a man and a woman, those things get cancelled immediately, right, shut down, and yet human trafficking is allowed to run rampant on Facebook.

Why? Because the internal documents clearly show that they're like, yeah, human trafficking is a bummer, but their words, we don't want to alienate our buyers. What does that mean? That means they're allowing human trafficking to persist on their platform because they don't want to lose ad revenues.

That is despicable, and that's a strong word I don't use very often, but that is despicable. And, you know, then there's drug cartels. There's one of the most notorious drug cartels in Mexico who posts actual videos of murder and torture on Instagram and uses their platform on Instagram to recruit young, poor Mexican males into their hitmen boot camps.

They've been doing it for years, and Facebook knows about it, they've failed to shut them down, they've tried to, you know, in sort of a pathetic attempt to shut down this profile or that profile. And yet it still goes on, and yet they've, you know, shut down all this other content that, you know, from faith-based people like Eric Metaxas, you know, has been cancelled. And so it's just, it's a huge problem, and the question that we ask as Christian investors is, you know, is God pleased, is God glorified when we invest his money into a company like that, who is, you know, knowingly promoting and profiting from, you know, immorality of the most heinous kind? And that's a really important question for us as modern Christians with real money to really invest and who are seeking to glorify God in all they do.

Yeah. Well, when we come back, Robert, we want to continue to unpack this because that is the question at hand, whether it's Facebook or any number of other companies. You know, we can be in a quandary having to ask the question, as Christian investors, can we in good conscience condemn immoral activities from any company and still own the stock?

Can we be comfortable generating the returns from dividends and other returns? What about our role as owner of that company? We believe this is a conviction matter, but the good news is, no matter what your conviction is, there are options in the faith-based investing space for you to avoid, engage, or embrace companies having a kingdom impact. We'll talk about that as we come back from this break on MoneyWise Live.

Stay with us. Welcome back to MoneyWise Live. My guest today is Robert Netzle, CEO of Inspire Investing, and we're talking about whether Christians should be investors in companies that have objectionable values or are clearly making decisions that conflict with your faith as a believer. Robert, let's talk about this quandary that Christian investors find themselves in, in terms of how we evaluate whether or not to own these companies and what it actually means to be an owner of a stock of a company versus a consumer who buys a product of a company like this.

There really is an important distinction to be made between an owner of a company, when you own the stock, you're an owner of a company, and somebody who shops at a company or uses their products and services. If you're a consumer, listeners here are probably on Facebook. They probably have an Instagram profile. Instagram is owned by Facebook. This is the largest social media platform in the world.

There are billions of people that use Facebook and Instagram. Those users can use those platforms for great things. Promoting God-honoring ministries and all kinds of positive things can come out of using a platform like that. However, it can also be used for evil purposes like we were talking earlier, recruiting people into your hitman boot camps or the drug cartel or luring people into human trafficking situations. Those are obviously immoral uses of that platform. As a consumer, we're responsible for how we're using the products and services that we are purchasing. If you're using Facebook for God-honoring purposes, great. If you're a drug cartel, that's not so great.

There's a problem there. However, as an investor, here's the question. As an investor, can I tell Facebook to send me dividends that are coming from the ad revenues only of the good stuff, or am I going to be earning money from everything that they're doing, including the ad revenues from human trafficking ads, from drug cartel posts, from all these other problematic issues?

I can't differentiate that. As a company owner, as I own that stock, I've got this other responsibility. As an investment, let's talk about this tension that we have as Christian investors. Facebook is one of those ubiquitous stocks. If you own mutual funds or ETFs, it is very likely that you own stock in Facebook. Facebook puts the F in FANG stocks. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, these are the darlings of Wall Street.

It seems like they're everywhere. If you read the news, read articles, and listen to advice from Wall Street, it's very easy to come away with the impression that you've got to own these stocks in order to make any sort of money in the stock market. Everybody is investing in them. As a Christian, we want to be good stewards, and part of that is to earn a financial return, preferably with the lowest risk possible. That's a worthy pursuit if we're doing so not from a motive of greed or anything of that nature, but seeking to be good stewards. But there's this tension.

Is there a limit, or should there be? Do we have convictions about the kind of things that we are earning money from? That's the question. The way I encourage people to think about this is, let's say we just line up all the possible investments that you've got.

There's obviously a lot of them, thousands of them. From least God-glorifying, you make an illegal investment in some drug cartel. Obviously illegal, obviously immoral.

Hopefully nobody's thinking about doing such things. Then there's a spectrum all the way up to the most God-glorifying investment, most God-glorifying company you could imagine, and everything in between. Well, what do we invest in? How do we make the decision of what do we invest in? We go to the Bible, 1 Corinthians 10, 31.

It says, whatever you do, whether you eat or drink, whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. This should be the preeminent motivation as believers to glorify God in our investments. From that perspective, I would suggest that we look for the most God-glorifying investments on that spectrum and put God's money into those companies. But what's the first question that comes to our mind is, well, what about these other companies?

Maybe they make more money. If you invest in Facebook the past five years, you've made a lot of money. It's been a good investment. Yeah, they're selling ads for human trafficking and they're promoting drug cartels on their platforms, but they're making a lot of money. Is there room to invest in something that's not quite as God-glorifying for the potential to maybe earn a little bit more money? That's this tension that I think we find ourselves with.

Yeah. Well, and clearly, as you even go back to the spectrum you described, what is the point at which you are not willing to own a company versus are willing to own? And there are no Christian companies. There are believers and unbelievers in these companies.

But clearly those leaders are making decisions about not only the primary business activities of these companies, but how they're using their corporate profits. The good news is a lot of that is now plain and in plain sight as a result of a tool you built called Inspire Insight. Robert, tell us about that, which I think really gives the information to the investor so that he or she can make a decision based on their own convictions. Yeah, that's exactly why we put this out there, inspireinsight.com.

It's a free piece of technology that you can go out and type in a ticker symbol, stock, mutual fund, ETF, whatever you own or want to research, and find all the good, bad, and ugly that's going on from a biblical values perspective. And we all have different convictions, like you mentioned. Alcohol companies is a good example. Some folks may have alcoholism in their personal history, their family history, and they have nothing to do with the alcohol industry. Completely valid perspective. On the other hand, there are others who may not have a problem necessarily with the alcohol industry.

And maybe there's a high-end winery and they have some stock. Well, they don't have a problem investing in those companies where others might. So Inspire Insight gives you exactly that insight into what's going on with investments so you can invest according to your convictions and biblical convictions. The next step is it also provides this Inspire Impact score that we put together that it really is that spectrum. Make it easy to identify those companies that are lower on the scale, less God glorifying, or even extremely problematic from a moral perspective.

Selling pornography, selling abortion drugs, issues like we've been talking about with Facebook, to those other companies. They're looking for a cure for cancer and just operating with ethics and morality. To get back to this tension, because I don't want to leave people hanging there. The Word of God speaks directly into this topic and says in Proverbs 16, 8, Better is a little with righteousness than great gains with injustice. And clearly it's a saying that there's two options in front of you. One of them is clearly more God glorifying than the other. But the less God glorifying option seems to offer the promise or potential for higher returns. We should always choose the more righteous option. Better is a little with righteousness than great gains with injustice. And we should never compromise God's glory in order to chase higher financial returns.

Well, that's right. And the good news is that now through faith-based investing, you have the opportunity to avoid these companies. If that's your conviction, by using a tool like InspireInsight.com or perhaps you want to advocate for your Christian values through direct advocacy or by owning one of a number of faith-based funds that do that on your behalf. Or maybe you want to embrace companies that are actually making a social or a kingdom impact in the world.

It's all possible now today through faith-based investing. Robert Netzle has been our guest today, CEO of Inspire Investing. And Robert, we appreciate you stopping by. It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

All right. Your calls are next, 800-525-7000. That's 800-525-7000. This is MoneyWise Live, biblical wisdom for your financial decisions. We'll be right back. We're delighted to have you along with us today on MoneyWise Live. I'm Rob West, your host. We've got some phone lines open today for your calls and questions. We'd love to hear from you. Here's the number, 800-525-7000.

800-525-7000. Before we go to your phone calls, this afternoon I was talking to a good friend who's in the Christian financial planning space. He's the founder of one of the largest Christian financial planning firms in the country. And he was saying, you know, Rob, I concluded recently and shared in a talk that I just gave to a group of believers that two keys to being a steward, an effective steward of God's financial resources are, number one, that we apply biblical financial principles, that we take the counsel of God's word and we apply it to our financial decisions.

And I would agree with that. He said, number two is that we're held accountable. And we can't do that ourselves.

We can't really hold ourselves accountable. And so that's where either having a financial advisor, like a certified kingdom advisor who can hold you accountable, or a MoneyWise coach who can also hold you accountable, I think is so key because when we apply God's principles and then we're held accountable to live those out as we're making decisions, as our income is increasing perhaps, as we get a windfall along the way, as we go through a difficult stretch where we don't have a whole lot and we're trying to figure out how to navigate that. Having accountability in our lives is always good in every area, but certainly that also applies to this area of financial stewardship. So if you're looking for somebody to journey with you as you apply these principles we teach here on MoneyWise Live to your financial life, I direct you to our website where you can find a certified kingdom advisor if you need professional financial assistance or a MoneyWise coach. To find a CKA, just click Find a CKA when you hit the website MoneyWiseLive.org. If you want to connect with a coach, one of the great ways to do that is if you become a pro subscriber to the MoneyWise app, you can schedule 30-minute virtual sessions with a coach at no cost and they can really work with you to set up a spending plan, figure out how you can apply these principles in your life and make the decisions you have before you. We have a special offer going on right now for you to become a pro subscriber at the lowest price we've ever offered it.

You'll learn more at MoneyWise.org slash pro. I'd encourage you to check it out today. All right, let's head to the phones.

We'll begin today in New York State. Hi, Noah. How can I help you?

Yes. Hi, Rob. Thank you for taking my call. So I just got married this past year to my wife, Lauren, and we have never been homeowners before, and I was just curious as to how we would calculate as to what mortgage we could afford to get a house and what would be the best fixed term to have going forward with the mortgage.

Yeah, that's great. Well, first of all, congratulations on your recent marriage. That's really exciting and a wonderful season you're entering into, and as you think about becoming a homeowner, I'm glad to hear that you're really thinking thoughtfully about how much you can afford because the last thing you'd want to do is buy too much house, especially early in your marriage. You don't ever want to buy too much house, but just as you're getting started, with this being the largest transaction you'll likely ever have, you want to make sure you get into something that really fits well within your spending plan so that you don't really cause challenges in terms of accomplishing your other goals, giving first and saving for the future and all the other things I'm sure you and your wife would like to do. As you look at this, I think, number one, you've got to have a spending plan. So you've got to know exactly what's coming in every month, what do your fixed and discretionary expenses look like. Secondly, I would say you want to try to arrive at a monthly payment for a mortgage that includes your principal, interest, taxes and insurance of preferably no more than 25% of your take-home pay.

That's going to ensure that there's plenty left over for everything else. Now, that's just a rule of thumb and that's all it is, but it's a good one to kind of get you pointed in the right direction. So what that would mean, Noah, is that you need to start looking at some calculators online and there's any number of them if you just Google mortgage calculator to try to determine what size mortgage you can afford so that the PITI is 25% or less of your take-home pay. The other thing I would put alongside that is I'd love for you to go into this home with a 20% down payment at a minimum. That's going to ensure you have good equity. So if the housing market were to take a dip, you're not going to be in a situation where you're upside down. It's also going to ensure that with a conventional loan, you don't have any private mortgage insurance, which is an unnecessary added expense that does nothing for you. So that may mean you need to delay this purchase if you don't have that saved up beyond your emergency fund until you get to the place where you've got 20% for a down payment and then the resulting mortgage payment after the 20% down, again with a principal interest taxes and insurance payment of less than 25%. As to the term, obviously the shorter the term, the better, but you may find that getting below 30 years is going to either push you out of the market or cause you to have to wait a considerable period of time. But if you were in a situation where you could do a 20 or 25-year mortgage, obviously I'd be thrilled with that. Does all that make sense?

And tell me what questions you have. Yes. No, that does make sense. And actually we do have a savings and an emergency account already built up, and we would have enough for a 20% down payment. And the bank we were talking to, I also had one question about, she mentioned there would be an escrow account.

I was curious as to what would that be. Yeah, basically what that means is a lot of mortgage servicers will require that you escrow or set aside as a part of your payment every month the amount needed to annually cover the property taxes and the homeowner's insurance because they know as the owner of that property, the fact that that may not get paid is a risk for them. So one of the ways they can ensure that that gets paid every month or every year is by escrowing that and then making the payments themselves.

That will change each year as your property taxes and homeowner's policy change over time. Do you follow? Yes, I do. Thank you for your time. I appreciate it. You're welcome, and I don't have any problem with MS growing.

In fact, most mortgage companies today are requiring that that be done, but stay on top of it and make sure they're not collecting more than they need. Listen, all the best to you guys in the days ahead. Hey, stay on the line. We'll send you a great book called Money and Marriage God's Way that can help you guys get started on the right foot in this area of your life. God bless you. This is MoneyWise Live. We'll be right back. Thanks for tuning into MoneyWise Live, biblical wisdom for your financial decisions. We've got a few lines open. We'd love to hear from you today. What's going on in your financial life? Let's move forward together, apply God's Word, and help you make decisions with confidence.

Here's the number, 800-525-7000. We've got folks standing by to take your call as we speak. Let's head right back to the phones.

Indianapolis, Indiana. Hi, Jeremy. How can I help you, sir? Thanks for taking my call. I've been investing in my 401k at work, and I've maxed it out, and I've maxed out my Roth IRA, and I'm trying to see or get advice or guidance to what else is out there where I can invest in other things, because we're sitting on a decent amount of cash, and I'd like to get it to work to where I can start making some money.

Yeah, very good. I think the first thing, Jeremy, would just be to do some planning to make sure that you know what your target is. I like to call it a financial finish line. We don't want to just—and I'm not saying you're doing this. Perhaps you started later or any number of things could be going on, but we don't want to just accumulate for accumulation's sake. We want to know what our ultimate goal is in terms of long-term, in this case, retirement savings, and then we can determine are we on track, ahead, or behind in terms of what we want to be saving. That's a very freeing exercise because we know how we're progressing, number one. We have a plan that says, okay, we want to maintain this lifestyle in retirement, and here's what we need to do that, but it also frees us up to give more right now. Because if we think about really the only thing we can do with money is there's money we live on, there's money we give, there's money we owe for debt and taxes, and then there's money we grow. And as we move through our financial lives, eventually we cap our lifestyle and say, I really don't need anymore, and so there's no more reason to add to that.

We pay off all our debt, so there's no reason to spend more on owing, and hopefully over time our taxes are declining. Thirdly, we're growing, but at some point we are at least on track to save as much as we need, and so that really just leaves this fourth bucket, which is our giving bucket, and then it gives us the opportunity to put more and more there. So all that to say I would just make sure you're doing some planning so you know ultimately what your target is. Now, assuming you are still needing to add additional savings annually to this long-term savings bucket called retirement savings, then to your point, when you max out your 401K and your Roth IRA, where do you go? I would say you've got a couple of options. If you want to keep it invested and if you want to do it on a tax-deferred basis, you could use an insurance product, so you could use a fixed income annuity. Perhaps somebody like you who's looking to grow this would want to use something like a variable annuity, where a portion of the funds are allocated to different asset options like stocks and bonds and mutual funds. You could also use variable universal life, where you take a portion of it and put it into different investment options, and you're not going to be taxed on your earnings, and then the cash value of your policy is invested in separate accounts, and when you take it out, eventually all the growth and so forth is taxed as ordinary income.

But it's a way to get more money working for you on a tax-deferred basis. Even though an insurance product is not my first go-to, it is an option that comes into play when your other tax-deferred vehicles have been fully maxed out. Beyond that, you could look at another asset class. So you could say, if we're sitting on a pile of money, we're fully invested in terms of what we're contributing annually in 401Ks and Roth IRAs, should we look at real estate? And this could be a great time to pick up an investment property and diversify among different asset classes. Another opportunity that doesn't apply to everyone would be a health savings account.

As long as you have a high-deductible health plan and you can put in a health savings account, if that fits, if you're in good health and relatively young and you'd max that out every year, that can become a very powerful tool in your retirement arsenal down the road, where beyond a certain age you can even use those funds for non-medically related expenses. So I think you've got a menu of options here to choose from. And again, I think it all becomes a part of the plan that ultimately describes where you go from here. Tell me your thoughts on all that. I guess I just need to sit down with somebody and really see what my plan is. I'm 39. Our home's paid for. We're debt-free. And I'm just trying to – I don't want to work until I'm – I would like to retire early.

We both would. So that's our ultimate goal is to keep investing as much as we can and working now to hopefully when we're like 55, we can exit the workforce. Yeah.

So I think you're exactly right. You do need to sit down with a financial advisor. I can tell you there are some wonderful Certified Kingdom Advisors right there in Indy.

I'd find two or three interviews, two or three of them, find the one that's the best fit for you. And the goal for that session would not be to necessarily turn over your investments to somebody to manage. It really is a planning session to say, okay, we're 39. We want to redirect our time and energy and the Lord's service to something else, perhaps outside the workforce at age 55. What do we need to maintain our lifestyle from 55 forward? And at least then you have a target and you can run some scenarios to say based on what we've currently got and accumulating each year plus some of these other vehicles that I've mentioned, what is it going to take to get there? And I think once you have that plan, you'll have a lot more clarity in terms of where you're going and what tools you need to utilize to get there. So head to our website, Jeremy, MoneyWiseLive.org, click Find a CKA. You can find, again, two or three right there in Indianapolis and I think that'll give you what you're looking for. And we appreciate your call today.

To Carbondale, Illinois. Hi, Christy. How can I help you?

Hi. I owe about $162,000 to my house and I was given, well, we were given some money from a family. About $92,000. And so we're both retired and we don't have any credit card debt. And so I was wondering if I should just put that on the house.

I don't know, you know, what God says. Should I not have this debt? I'd rather put it on the house.

Of course, I would still owe some, but we just get Social Security, both of us, about $1,300 a month. So that's what we've been living on. And this is really nice, but I want to do something I should do with it. I see. No, that's a great question. Let me ask you, apart from this $92,000, Christy, what do you have in emergency reserves, in savings? About $10,000.

Okay. And what are you all spending per month? About $2,000, $2,500 maybe?

What did you say? I'm sorry. What are the total of your, that's okay, what are your total expenses for a month? Well, we get $2,400 and pretty much we're done at the end of the month. I mean, we have one car, but it's an old car, so there's some problems with it. And we live in a hundred-year-old house, and so there's a lot of problems with the house. But I would say we might have a couple hundred left at the end of the month, but not a whole lot.

Okay. I'd love for you to have between six and 12 months expenses in savings. That'd be between $15,000 and $30,000. And I'd love for you to have that in addition to any known repairs you need to do on the house, given its age. And I'd probably set that aside in a savings account and then take the rest and look at putting that against the house. And at some point, if you needed to, you could recast the mortgage to bring the payment down based on this much lower balance, even though it hasn't been paid off yet. So I think the key is shore up your emergency fund, get the house repair fund funded, and then put the rest against the mortgage. Stay on the line. We'll talk more specifically about how to do that during this break. We'll be right back on MoneyWise Live. Stay with us.