Member Spotlight: Jim Kreid, Solid Rock Retirement Strategies
Jim Kreid’s original reason for joining Samaritan Ministries was to save money on health care, but, he said, “I have fallen in love with your mission.”
Read The Interview Below Below ↓
Jim Kreid’s original reason for joining Samaritan Ministries was to save money on health care, but, he said, “I have fallen in love with your mission.”
Read The Interview Below Below ↓Jim Kreid offers his clients the opportunity to build their retirement on the solid rock of biblical investing.
The owner of Solid Rock Retirement Strategies, based in Peoria, Illinois, offers his clients “biblically responsible investment” (BRI) options of mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in addition to other investment options. The owners of these funds screen companies for any promotion of or interest in objectionable practices like abortion, pornography, gambling, and other aspects of immoral lifestyles.
“It took me a while to see it,” said Jim, who is a fiduciary and has been in the investments sphere for more than 40 years but only recently began offering BRI.
Jim purchased his firm from his retiring partner about eight years ago and started to change the business.
“I wanted to make it an overtly Christian business,” he said.
He continued to offer the normal array of investment options to his clients but had stayed away from Christian-based investment options. However, after some encounters with Christian business organizations a few years back, he took another look. He was impressed at their development and began offering them to his clients.
“I felt like God was calling me to do that,” Jim said. “So we renamed the business Solid Rock Retirement Strategies based off Matthew 7:24 (‘Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock’).
“It’s been a progression for everything else. It’s kind of been like walking through one door and then God kind of opens up another one.”
BRI first means realizing that your money is actually God’s money, Jim said. Not just your tithe, but all of it. He encourages his clients to reflect on where they have placed their trust: in their bank account, their retirement account statement, or God.
“We compartmentalize our money from the rest of our lives,” Jim said. “I ask people, ‘Do you feel like you have a biblical worldview, and do you see everything through the lens of the Bible?’ If they answer, ‘I do,’ then I encourage them to also invest their money in a biblically responsible way.
“When people do this, it frees them up from having to worry about their money. Most people have never thought about this aspect of their investments. I think the call that God has placed on my life is to raise awareness.”
One way he has done that is through “Values Driven Wealth,” a weekly show he airs on WMBD radio in Peoria on Sunday mornings and one Saturday a month. And, while it was published before Jim changed direction of his firm, his book The Shifting Sands of Retirement and How to Weather Them (2019, Ignite Press) still applies plenty of biblical allusions to the practice of responsible money management.
“The Bible talks about money and money matters more than any other theme,” he said, noting that Scripture contains more than 2,300 verses on the topics of money, wealth, and possessions.
BRI’s approach is fivefold, according to Solid Rock promotional material:
That last point is accomplished when fund managers support Christian organizations, Jim noted.
The three main firms Jim uses to accomplish these ends are Eventide Asset Management, The Timothy Plan, and Inspire Investing, which each have assembled various mutual funds and ETFs.
Jim Kreid and his daughter, Haley Freiburger, talk business at the Solid Rock Retirement Strategies office. (Hannah Ware/Samaritan Ministries)
“Not all fund families that claim to be biblically responsible are screening,” Jim said. “The first thing we want to do is to avoid the bad. We want to screen out the companies that aren’t supporting our values.”
Jim referenced Robert Netzly, the CEO of Inspire Investing, who realized he was supporting abortion through his investments while serving as the president of his local crisis pregnancy center, one of the factors that led him to start Inspire.
“So we want to avoid first, but then we want to embrace,” Jim said. “When I first got into this, my whole thing was ‘avoid, avoid, avoid.’ I didn’t realize the power and the impact that our money can have when we embrace, when we engage. I feel like we could move the culture if people would just do this and support companies that align with their values and take money away from the companies that don’t.”
Jim said that investing in companies that align with biblical values is attractive even to non-Christians.
“If you’re a conservative, I think you’re going to probably fall in line with most of the same things you would as a Christian,” he said.
Of course, he’d prefer that his clients embrace the salvation offered through Christ. As part of that effort, his firm has sponsored theatrical showings with Christian-oriented themes, such as Sound of Freedom and Christmas with The Chosen.
Jim and his staff also have contributed time to Peoria Christian School, helping out with an entrepreneurial class. He is also involved in the national Faith Driven Entrepreneur and Kingdom Advisors programs.
He’s still surprised at the turn his firm and career have made in the past few years.
“I just turned 64, and I’m like, ‘Lord, why did it take You so long to figure out what I want to do with my life,’” he said with a smile. “So I really don’t anticipate ever retiring. I’m having more fun, and it’s such a blessing to be able to have conversations like this with my clients.”
“It’s really more of a ministry than a business at this point.”
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