There is a version of this man in every congregation. Mid-twenties, first real job, a little money left at the end of the month for the first time in his adult life. He has been listening to Dave Ramsey, he is ready to start investing, and he wants to know which mutual fund to buy.
He is not wrong to be asking. Most men his age have not thought about investing at all, so the fact that he is already looking at the surplus and wondering what it is for puts him ahead of where I was.
What he does not expect to hear is that the vehicle Ramsey points him at is probably the wrong one. Ramsey is genuinely helpful on debt and I would rather a man listen to him than to nobody. On this one question the advice does not hold up, and the stakes are high enough to say so plainly.
The better answer costs a fraction of what Ramsey's version costs and has decades of evidence sitting behind it. It also turns out to sit closer to what the Bible says about faithful stewardship, which is the part that surprised me when I first looked into it.
We're talking about index funds.
What Index Funds Actually Are (And Why They're Boring on Purpose)
An index fund tracks a market index, say the S&P 500 or a basket of global stocks. Where a manager would pick individual companies and try to beat the index, an index fund just holds everything in it. You own a tiny slice of thousands of companies at once.
Your returns match the market. Nobody is picking winners, nobody is trying to outsmart anyone, and the whole thing is boring by design.
Boring turns out to be very good.
The Parable of the Talents and What Faithful Investing Looks Like
The parable of the talents in Matthew 25 is a story about stewardship. A master leaves three servants in charge of his money. Two put it to work and grow it. One buries his to keep it safe and hands back exactly what he was given, and he is the one the master rebukes.
It is not a one-to-one analogy for modern investing. Jesus was preaching about the kingdom, and nothing in the parable was ever meant as advice on an ETF allocation. But something in it speaks to the ethic of stewardship: you are responsible for what you have been given, and responsible stewardship involves putting it to work.
The question runs past "should I invest at all?", which I have answered elsewhere, and into how to do it faithfully. Faithful here means growing what you were given without taking risks you did not need, and without handing a large slice of the return to somebody unlikely to earn it.
There is something in the parable about proportion, too. The master handed out different amounts and expected the same faithfulness from each man. The man with $500 in his TFSA and the man with $500,000 in his RRSP are under the same obligation, and it includes not losing large portions of it to costs nobody needed to pay. That last point is where the fee conversation comes in.
The fee question is one of stewardship long before it is one of math.
Fees Are a Stewardship Issue
I went to school for financial services and carried a mutual funds licence for a few years, before full-time ministry let it lapse. In all of that training, index funds barely came up. The business runs on managed funds and mutual funds and segregated funds, and none of those pay anybody if the answer is to buy the index and leave it.
When I finally understood what an ETF actually was, it clicked. Everything else was really just about making money.
I never sold a mutual fund, so take it for what it is worth.
In Canada, the actively managed mutual funds Ramsey recommends typically carry a Management Expense Ratio (MER) of 1.5 to 2.5 per cent a year. It comes out of your returns whether the fund performs well or badly.
Index funds, specifically the exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that hold them, typically carry MERs of 0.10 to 0.25 per cent. The gap looks small. It isn't.
You have probably seen the version of this that ran on television. Questrade spent years airing ads where an ordinary Canadian asks his advisor what the fees are actually costing him, with a tagline about retiring up to 30 per cent richer by moving. It plays like a dramatization. I ran it anyway.
Two men each put $500 a month away for thirty years, and both earn the same 7 per cent before fees. One pays a 2 per cent MER. The other pays 0.20 per cent.
- The man paying 2% ends with about $416,000.
- The man paying 0.20% ends with about $586,000.
They each contributed $180,000. The gap between them is $170,000, which is very nearly everything they put in, gone to fees. The man in the expensive fund retires with 71 per cent of what the other one has, so the ad was not exaggerating. If anything it undersold it.
Run it on your own numbers with the Compound Interest Calculator, once at 7 per cent and once at 5. The second number is what a 2 per cent MER leaves you.
Over a working life the fee is the largest single thing standing between what the market gives you and what you keep. You pay it to a manager who is statistically unlikely to beat the index, and it comes due every year for thirty of them.
Ninety-Eight Out of a Hundred Managers Lost to the Index
The uncomfortable fact: most actively managed funds lose to their benchmark index over time.
The S&P Indices Versus Active (SPIVA) scorecard tracks this annually. Over ten years, roughly 85 to 90 per cent of actively managed US equity funds underperform the S&P 500, and the Canadian numbers are worse. SPIVA Canada's year-end 2025 scorecard puts ten-year underperformance for Canadian equity funds at roughly 98 per cent. Ninety-eight out of a hundred professionals, paid to beat the index, did not.
Fund managers are not incompetent. Beating an efficient market consistently, once fees come out, is hard even for professionals. The manager who wins one year has a coin-flip chance of winning the next, and the fee comes out either way.
Most of the time you pay the fee and end up with less than the market would have handed you for free. The data is not subtle, and it is very inconvenient for anyone selling actively managed funds.
What Dave Ramsey Gets Right (And Where He Goes Wrong)
Dave Ramsey has helped millions of people out of debt, and his Baby Steps framework is sound. I would rather a man in over his head with credit cards follow Ramsey's debt plan than have no plan at all. He does real good, and I mean that without irony.
On investing he is specific: 15 per cent of your income into four types of actively managed mutual funds, through an advisor from his endorsed network. Those advisors often sell front-end load funds, so 3 to 5 per cent comes off the top before your money has grown by a dollar, and the funds themselves are unlikely to beat their benchmarks. He also runs his examples at 12 per cent a year, when the long-run figure is nearer 10 before inflation and 7 after, which leaves a man systematically undersaving.
He writes for a mass American audience about debt, and he has commercial relationships with the advisors he sends people to. The investing half of his advice deserves a hard look before a Canadian adopts it, because our banks' mutual funds carry some of the highest fees in the developed world, often 2 to 2.5 per cent. If you have money in one, go and find the MER.
What to Actually Buy If You Are Canadian and Starting Now
For most Canadian investors the simplest approach is the all-in-one ETF: a single fund holding a diversified portfolio of global stocks, sometimes with bonds, at very low cost.
Three you'll see recommended consistently:
- VEQT (Vanguard All-Equity ETF Portfolio): 100% global equities, management fee 0.17%
- XEQT (iShares Core Equity ETF Portfolio): 100% global equities, management fee 0.17%, MER 0.20%
- VGRO (Vanguard Growth ETF Portfolio): 80% stocks, 20% bonds, management fee 0.17%
Vanguard cut VEQT and VGRO from 0.22% to 0.17% in November 2025 and BlackRock cut XEQT to 0.17% a month later. Published MERs lag a fee cut until the fund's next year end, so older write-ups still quote 0.24% for the Vanguard pair. What you pay going forward is closer to 0.20%.
These are one-decision investments. Open the TFSA, which takes about fifteen minutes online, buy one thing, set an automatic monthly purchase, and then leave it alone for decades while you own a tiny slice of thousands of companies across the world. There is nothing to pick and no moment to time, and the size of the first deposit matters far less than the fact that the account now exists.
You can buy them through Wealthsimple's self-directed account, the one I use myself, or through Questrade. Both allow commission-free ETF purchases, and the expertise required runs to about this: open a TFSA, click buy. The TFSA vs RRSP guide will tell you which account to fill first.
The whole thing asks you to start and then to stay out of your own way.
Why Boring Is a Spiritual Virtue
Complexity flatters a man, and I know because it flattered me.
Early in my investing life I went aggressive. It worked for a while, which was the problem, because I read the result as skill and stayed in long after I should have got out. What I was really buying was the feeling of being engaged with my money.
Men who feel they ought to be more engaged are drawn to picking investments or hiring somebody to manage the portfolio actively. It feels like stewardship, and it looks like taking the talent seriously. More effort, better outcome is how most things work, so it seems fair to apply it here.
The evidence says otherwise.
Investing is one of the few places where the intuition reverses. More activity and more switching produces worse results, and the data has been consistent about it for decades. The managed fund's cost, the drag of trading fees and the tax bill on frequent buying and selling all add up against you.
The biblical model of patient accumulation is not flashy. The ant in Proverbs 6 stores provisions slowly across a whole season. The woman in Proverbs 31 buys a field and plants a vineyard out of her earnings, working on a timeline of years. Patient, low-drama accumulation is the pattern across the wisdom literature.
Index investing is the financial equivalent of that posture. You accept market returns, keep fees low, and hold long enough that a bad quarter stops being information. The boredom is doing exactly the work it should.
Where to Start This Week If You Have Never Invested Before
VEQT or XEQT if the money is more than ten years away, VGRO if you will want it sooner. The Christian Investing Guide covers the rest of the ground: the RRSP versus TFSA decision, investing alongside giving, and what to do if you are starting late.
Nobody is grading your strategy. Start being faithful with what you already have, and the strategy will keep for another day.
What I Hold, Since It Is Fair to Ask
I own VFV, which is the S&P 500 and nothing else, alongside two Canadian income holdings, XEI and FIE. The reasoning is plain enough. One part is meant to be safe and growing. The other is meant to pay me while it sits.
That is more concentrated than the global all-in-one I just recommended, and the income side costs me more to hold, with FIE running around three quarters of a per cent against VFV's nine hundredths. If you are starting this week, start with the boring all-in-one and you will have made a better first decision than I did. I came at this from a different direction, and I am not rewriting my holdings to make an article tidier.
What It Looks Like a Few Weeks Later
Picture that same man a few weeks on. TFSA open, first $500 of XEQT bought, $250 a month going in automatically. Nothing about his week looks different, and he has done the thing he had been putting off for two years.
Nothing here is a lottery ticket and nothing here retires him at 40. He has begun doing something small and faithful with what he was given, which is what stewardship looks like at the beginning.
Investing belongs near the back of a Christian man's life, one practice among many, running in the background while you attend to the things that matter more. A growing TFSA was never the point. Your hope was anchored somewhere else entirely, and the account is part of caring well for your family and building generosity over time.
Index funds are boring. Buy the whole market. Pay as little in fees as possible. Leave it alone for decades.
That is the most faithful investing advice I know how to give.
Common questions
Are index funds biblical?
Scripture does not name index funds, but the wisdom it commends fits them well: diligent, patient, humble stewardship over what you have been given. An index fund owns the whole market cheaply and admits you cannot reliably predict winners. That humility and low cost make it, for most people, a faithful way to invest.
What is the most Christian way to invest?
For most Christians it is the boring one: a broad, low-cost index fund held for decades inside a TFSA or RRSP. It avoids the pride of thinking you can beat the market and the waste of high fees. Faithful stewardship usually looks patient and cheap, and it rarely looks clever.
Isn't owning the whole market un-Christian because some companies do wrong?
It is a fair concern, and there is no perfectly clean portfolio in a fallen world. Screened faith-branded funds often cost more and still hold plenty you might object to. Owning the broad market cheaply, then giving generously from the growth, is usually a more honest stewardship than most of those products.
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