There’s no direct command in Scripture about which specific companies a Christian can or can’t hold shares in, and this is a genuine area where thoughtful believers disagree. Biblically Responsible Investing (BRI) is the term for intentionally screening investments to avoid companies profiting from industries like alcohol, tobacco, gambling, or pornography. It’s a more specific question than the broader one we’ve already covered: is investing in the stock market itself gambling?
The Case for Screening These Investments Out
Some Christians reason that owning stock, even a small fraction of a share, makes you a genuine part-owner of that company’s profits, and by extension, its business. If a company profits specifically from something Scripture treats as harmful, some believers feel investing in it, however indirectly, quietly puts you in partnership with that harm.
The Case for Not Worrying About It
Others point out that broad index funds, the kind most people actually invest in for retirement, inevitably include hundreds of companies across every industry, and meticulously screening each one is impractical for most ordinary investors. This view holds that owning a tiny fractional share in a diversified fund is different in kind from actively working for or promoting a harmful industry, and that the more important question is how you personally earn and spend money, not which index a retirement account happens to include.
A Real, Practical Option
For those who do want to screen their investments, BRI-specific funds now exist that explicitly exclude these industries while still offering broad diversification, giving believers who feel strongly about this a real, practical middle path rather than a choice between full screening effort and no consideration at all.
What Actually Matters
Romans 14 addresses exactly this kind of disputable matter directly: “Whoever regards one day as special does so to the Lord… So then, each of us will give an account of ourselves to God. Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another.” (NIV, adapted context) Investment screening is precisely the kind of conviction Scripture treats as a matter of personal conscience, not universal command. What matters most is investing thoughtfully and prayerfully according to your own conviction, without assuming everyone who invests differently is being less faithful.
Ask most people what an asset is, and they’ll describe anything they own that’s worth money: a house, a car, jewelry, whatever’s sitting in a bank account. That definition isn’t wrong exactly, but it’s incomplete in a way that quietly steers a lot of people toward the wrong financial decisions. This is the first piece in a growing series on assets and liabilities, paired with its companion post on what actually counts as a liability.
Two Different Definitions
In traditional accounting, an asset is simply anything you own that has value, full stop. Your house counts. Your car counts. A watch, a piece of furniture, all of it.
But a second, more practical definition has become popular through personal finance writers like Robert Kiyosaki: an asset is something that puts money in your pocket. A liability is something that takes money out. This cash-flow definition is more useful for everyday decision-making, because it forces a different question than “what’s this worth,” it asks “what is this actually doing for me, month over month.”
10 Things That Are Actually Assets (By the Cash-Flow Definition)
A paid-off rental property generating monthly income
Dividend-paying investments that pay you simply for holding them
A marketable skill or certification that increases your earning power
A high-yield emergency fund, which does more than just sit there protecting you from costly debt, kept in a high-yield savings account rather than a standard checking account, it actively earns interest on money that would otherwise be doing nothing, making it a genuine cash-flow asset in its own right, not just a safety net
A business that runs without your constant presence
Royalties from creative or intellectual work
A well-maintained professional network, which has real, if harder to quantify, income-generating value
Paid-off equipment used to generate income, like a tradesperson’s tools or a photographer’s camera
Tax-advantaged investment accounts, a category worth knowing by name rather than treating as one generic bucket: a Roth IRA (contributions grow and can be withdrawn tax-free in retirement), a 529 plan (tax-advantaged savings earmarked for education), and a Health Savings Account, or HSA (one of the only accounts offering a tax break going in, tax-free growth, and tax-free withdrawals for medical expenses, arguably the single most tax-advantaged account available to most people)
Digital assets built for a business, like a large, engaged email list or social media following, which translates directly into future sales and income potential the same way a physical customer base would
The Confusion This Clears Up
Here’s where the two definitions can genuinely conflict, and it’s worth being upfront that this is a real, live debate rather than a settled question. Under the traditional accounting definition, a primary home is an asset, full stop, it has value. Under a strict monthly cash-flow definition, a home doesn’t generate income the way a rental property does, since money flows out every month rather than in. But a strong counter-case exists too: a home is typically purchased at one price and, in most markets over a long enough timeframe, sold later at a higher one, which is its own legitimate way of putting money in your pocket, just on the timeline of a sale rather than a monthly check. Reasonable people, including us, genuinely disagree on how much weight that appreciation should carry against the monthly cash-flow question. We think this deserves its own full treatment rather than a quick verdict buried in a list, so we’ll be dedicating a full series to making the case for homeownership as a genuine wealth-building asset. For now, the useful takeaway is simpler: know which definition you’re using, and don’t let a purely cash-flow framework talk you out of a decision that may be building real wealth on a different, longer timeline.
What This Actually Means for Building Wealth
This isn’t an argument against owning a home or other traditional assets, those often serve real, important purposes beyond monthly cash flow. It’s simply a case for knowing which kind of asset you’re looking at before making decisions based on the wrong definition. Someone trying to build long-term financial security benefits from deliberately acquiring cash-flow assets, things that work for them every month, alongside longer-horizon assets like a home that build value on a different timeline.
Jesus told a parable about exactly this kind of stewardship in Luke 19:12-27, the parable of the ten minas, where a nobleman entrusts money to his servants before a journey and later evaluates them based on what they did with it, not simply on what they were given. The servant who put his mina to work and multiplied it was commended. The one who did nothing but preserve it, keeping it safely wrapped in a cloth, was rebuked, not for losing money, but for failing to put what he had to productive use. The parable isn’t really about money management technique. It’s about the expectation that what we’re given should be put to work, not just held.
This content is for educational purposes only and is not personalized financial advice.
No, investing in the stock market is not gambling, and the difference isn’t just semantic. Gambling creates risk that didn’t need to exist, purely for entertainment. Investing takes on calculated risk in exchange for a share in something real: the ongoing growth of actual businesses. Understanding that difference changes how the whole question should be approached.
What Makes Gambling, Gambling
A casino game has a built-in house edge. The odds are structured so that, over enough time, the house wins and the player loses, by design. Nothing productive is being built. No value is being created. The money simply moves from one party to another based on chance.
The stock market works differently. When you buy a share of a company, you’re buying a small ownership stake in a real, functioning business, one that makes products, employs people, and, if it’s run well, grows in value over time. Historically, the S&P 500 has averaged roughly a 10% annual return since its inception. That’s not a coin flip. It’s the aggregate outcome of real companies producing real goods and services over time.
The Question Almost Nobody Asks: Is “Safe” Actually Safe?
Here’s the part of this conversation that gets skipped most often. As of August 2026, the national average savings account pays just 0.63% APY, according to Bankrate. Inflation, meanwhile, sat at roughly 3.4-3.5% as of mid-2026. That gap matters enormously: money sitting in a typical savings account isn’t neutral or risk-free, it’s quietly losing purchasing power every single year, even while the account balance itself never goes down.
Put concretely: $10,000 sitting in a national-average savings account for a year earns about $63 in interest, while inflation alone erodes roughly $340-350 worth of that money’s purchasing power over the same period. The number in the account grew. What that number can actually buy shrank. That’s a real, measurable risk, it’s just a quieter, less visible one than a stock price dropping on a screen.
A Tool, Not a Verdict
The honest answer is that the stock market is a tool, and like most tools, it can be used wisely or recklessly. Day-trading with money you can’t afford to lose, chasing hot tips, or treating individual stock picks like a lottery ticket does start to resemble gambling in practice, even though it’s technically “investing.” Broad, diversified, long-term investing, the kind most people actually mean when they talk about retirement accounts and index funds, operates on an entirely different principle: patient ownership in real productive assets, not a bet on a single unpredictable outcome.
What Scripture Actually Points Toward
Jesus told a parable about exactly this kind of stewardship in Matthew 25:14-30, the parable of the talents. A master entrusts his servants with resources before a journey. Two of them put the money to work and it grows. The third, out of fear, buries his portion in the ground to keep it perfectly safe, and he’s the one rebuked on the master’s return, not for losing money, but for refusing to put what he’d been given to productive use at all. “You wicked, lazy servant!” the master says in verse 26. “You should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.” (NIV) The parable doesn’t celebrate the safest possible choice. It celebrates faithful, productive stewardship, and treats excessive caution, not risk itself, as the actual failure.
Where This Leaves You
Investing in the stock market, done broadly and with a long time horizon, isn’t gambling. It’s participation in real economic growth, the same kind of productive stewardship the parable of the talents commends. Like any tool, it can be misused, and caution about how you invest is genuinely wise. But caution about whether to invest at all, once you understand what the alternative actually costs, deserves the same scrutiny.
In 1986, a struggling amusement park called Silver Dollar City sat in the hills of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. It wasn’t drawing crowds, and it wasn’t drawing money. A country singer who’d grown up nearby, in a one-room cabin with eleven siblings, decided to invest in it — not just her money, but her name. Forty years later, that decision was still generating tens of millions of dollars a year.
Dolly Parton, who died August 25, 2026 at age 80, built a fortune estimated between $450 million and $650 million — without ever chasing billionaire status, and without a Wall Street background of any kind. Here are seven reasons the woman behind “9 to 5” turned out to be one of the sharpest business minds in entertainment.
1. She Refused Elvis Presley’s People — and Kept Her Copyright
In the mid-1970s, Dolly got the call every songwriter dreams of: Elvis Presley wanted to record her song “I Will Always Love You.” Everything was arranged — until the night before the session, when Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, called with a condition. Presley’s organization didn’t record songs without owning at least half the publishing rights.
Dolly said no. “This is the most important copyright in my whole publishing company, and I can’t do that,” she told Parker. The session was cancelled, and she later admitted she cried all night over turning down the King of Rock and Roll. But she walked away owning 100 percent of a song that hadn’t even become famous yet.
2. She Let That One Decision Multiply for Fifty Years
In 1992, Whitney Houston recorded “I Will Always Love You” for The Bodyguard, and the song became one of the best-selling singles in music history. Because Dolly had refused to give up any of the publishing years earlier, every bit of that windfall came back to her — estimates of her earnings from Houston’s version alone run close to $10 million, and the song has kept generating royalties ever since.
That single decision is a big part of why Dolly’s broader songwriting catalog — more than 3,000 songs — has been valued at upwards of $120 million, with her overall music royalties estimated to bring in somewhere between $6 million and $8 million a year, even decades after most of the songs were written. She didn’t just get paid once for her talent. She built a royalty machine that kept paying her for the rest of her life.
3. She Turned the Windfall Into Real Estate — “The House That Whitney Built”
What Dolly did with the Whitney Houston royalties says as much about her financial instincts as the decision to protect them in the first place. She used a portion of that money to buy a commercial office complex in a historically Black neighborhood off 16th Avenue in Nashville. “I bought a property down in what was the Black area of town, and it was mostly just Black families and people that lived around there,” she explained on Watch What Happens Live in 2021. “This is the house that Whitney built.”
It’s a striking chain of financial decisions: a song became a copyright, the copyright became royalties, and the royalties became a physical, income-producing asset in a community she chose deliberately. Song, to royalty stream, to real estate — that’s not luck. That’s a plan.
4. She Bet On Herself and Built Dollywood
In 1986, Dolly partnered with Herschend Family Entertainment and put her name and money behind the struggling Silver Dollar City park, transforming it into Dollywood. Her 50 percent stake in the park has been estimated by Forbes at roughly $165 million on its own — and that’s before counting the millions in annual revenue the park generates (estimates range from $180 million to $580 million a year) and the thousands of local jobs it supports.
This wasn’t a hands-off investment. Dolly poured her name, her reputation, and repeated personal appearances into the park for four straight decades. It’s a reminder that some of the best investments aren’t the ones you write a check for and walk away from — they’re the ones you stay close enough to actually steward.
5. She Built an Entire Ecosystem Around Her Name
Dollywood was the anchor, but Dolly never stopped there. Her business holdings grew to include the Dolly Parton’s Stampede and Pirates Voyage dinner attractions, a signature fragrance line, cookbooks and bakeware, cosmetics, a wine label, home decor, clothing, and licensing deals across dozens of categories. Rather than depending on music royalties or theme-park revenue alone, she diversified deliberately, spreading her income across businesses that had almost nothing to do with singing.
That instinct traces back further than people realize — in 1980, she negotiated a then-unheard-of $500,000 advance for her 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs album, at a time when few artists, and especially few women in country music, were pushing for that kind of deal. Diversification wasn’t a late-career pivot for Dolly. It was a pattern from the start.
6. She Reportedly Lived on $5,000 a Month — By Choice
Here’s the detail that might be the most surprising: despite a business empire estimated to bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, multiple financial profiles report that Dolly kept her own personal spending remarkably modest — reportedly living on around $5,000 a month, a tiny fraction of what her businesses generated. “I never wanted to be poor again,” she once said of the frugality that carried over from her childhood in that one-room cabin.
That gap between what she made and what she spent is, in plain terms, the entire engine of wealth-building: a strong income, paired with restrained personal spending, rather than letting lifestyle expand to swallow every dollar that came in. It’s a far less flashy secret than owning Dollywood or writing hit songs — but financially, it may have mattered just as much.
7. She Gave Away a Fortune While Still Building One
Dolly Parton was never a billionaire, and by every account, she wasn’t trying to be. A significant share of what her businesses generated was redirected into philanthropy — the Imagination Library, disaster relief, medical research, and her home county’s schools and hospital — even while those same businesses kept growing. Proverbs 3:9-10 says, “Honor the Lord with your wealth, with the firstfruits of all your crops; then your barns will be filled to overflowing” (NIV). Whether or not Dolly framed her decisions in exactly those terms, the pattern of her life — own what you create, turn income into lasting assets, live below your means, and give generously from what’s built — reflects a stewardship instinct more than a purely accumulative one.
References
American Songwriter, “The Story Behind Why Dolly Parton Refused to Let Elvis Presley Record ‘I Will Always Love You,’” 2022
Celebrity Net Worth, “Elvis Presley Wanted to Record ‘I Will Always Love You.’ Dolly Parton Said No,” August 2026
Yahoo Entertainment / Andy Cohen’s Watch What Happens Live, “Dolly Parton Used Royalties From Whitney Houston Song to Support a Black Neighborhood,” July 2021
Newser / Washington Post, “Dolly Parton: ‘This Is the House That Whitney Built,’” August 2021
Finance Monthly, “Dolly Parton’s Net Worth 2025: A Fortune Built From ‘9 to 5,’” 2026
Networth Hub, “How Dolly Parton’s Net Worth Reached $600M,” June 2026
Inc., “Dolly Parton Built a $650 Million Empire by Ignoring the Goal Entrepreneurs Chase,” July 2026
Investormint, “Dolly Parton Net Worth 2026: Music, Dollywood & More,” 2026
This is the second piece in our Investing Fundamentals series. If an index fund is a basket of investments that just tracks the market, a mutual fund is that same basic idea with one key difference: a person is actively steering it.
What a Mutual Fund Actually Is
A mutual fund pools money from many investors, just like an index fund does, and uses it to buy a collection of stocks, bonds, or other assets. The difference is who’s making the decisions. A mutual fund is run by a professional fund manager, or a team of them, who actively research companies, pick which ones to buy, and decide when to sell, all with the goal of beating the market rather than simply matching it.
That active decision-making is the entire sales pitch behind a mutual fund: pay for expertise, and that expertise should, in theory, outperform a fund that’s just passively tracking an index.
The Real Cost of That Expertise
Here’s where the comparison to index funds gets concrete. According to Investment Company Institute data, the asset-weighted average expense ratio for actively managed mutual funds sits around 0.59% a year. Index equity mutual funds, by contrast, average around 0.05%, more than ten times cheaper.
On a $100,000 investment, that’s the difference between paying about $590 a year and paying about $50. Over decades, and compounded, that gap doesn’t stay small. A Motley Fool illustration puts real numbers to it: $100,000 invested for 20 years at 8% annual growth with a 2% expense ratio grows to roughly $320,000. That same $100,000 at a slightly lower 7% return but a 0.40% expense ratio grows to roughly $360,000, a higher ending balance despite the lower raw return, purely because of the fee difference.
Does the Extra Cost Pay Off?
This is the real question, and it’s a genuinely debated one in the investing world, not a settled fact. The honest answer is that the majority of actively managed funds underperform their benchmark index over long time periods, a pattern well-documented across decades of industry research, though certainly not every fund, and not every year. Some active managers do beat the market, sometimes for years at a stretch. The difficulty is knowing in advance which ones will, and paying the higher fee the entire time you’re trying to find out.
Why Someone Might Still Choose One
Mutual funds aren’t without a real case for themselves. A skilled manager can make judgment calls an index simply can’t, avoiding a struggling company before a downturn, or moving into a sector before it takes off. Some specialized markets, less efficiently priced than a broad index like the S&P 500, may genuinely reward active management more than others. And some investors are simply more comfortable with a professional making the calls rather than a fund that has no ability to react to changing conditions at all.
The Practical Takeaway
Mutual funds and index funds aren’t opposites so much as two different bets. An index fund bets that low costs and broad diversification will win out over time. A mutual fund bets that expert judgment is worth paying more for. Neither bet is inherently wrong, but the fee difference is real, it’s measurable, and it compounds right alongside your returns, which makes it one of the most important numbers to actually look at before choosing between the two.
What Is a Mutual Fund? A Beginner’s Guide (this article)
Index Fund vs. Mutual Fund: The Ultimate Investing Showdown (coming soon)
This content is for educational purposes only and is not personalized financial or investment advice. Consider talking with a licensed financial professional before making investment decisions.
Imagine one jar. Inside it, instead of coins, are tiny slices of thousands of different companies, the coffee shop chain, the phone maker, the grocery store, the bank down the street. You do not own the whole coffee shop. You own a sliver of it. And a sliver of a thousand others, all in the same jar.
That jar is basically what an index fund is.
What an Index Fund Actually Is
An index fund is a type of investment that pools your money together with thousands of other investors, then spreads that money across a huge basket of companies, sometimes 500 of them, sometimes thousands. Instead of you trying to guess which one company will do well, you own a small piece of all of them at once.
The most common one you will hear about tracks something called the S&P 500, the 500 largest publicly traded companies in America. When you buy a share of an S&P 500 index fund, you instantly own a tiny piece of all 500 of those companies. Apple, Coca-Cola, Walmart, your bank, your phone carrier, a little piece of each, all at once, all in one purchase.
Why That Matters More Than It Sounds
Picture a man standing in the middle of a city, and every building around him, the bank, the grocery store, the office towers, is his. Not because he built each one himself, but because he owns a small piece of every business inside them.
That is the picture worth holding onto. Most people who try to pick just one or two individual companies to invest in are making a bet, a guess about which business will win. Most guesses are wrong more often than they are right, even for professionals who do this for a living. An index fund sidesteps the guessing game entirely. You are not betting on one company. You are betting on the whole economy moving forward over time, which, historically, it has.
Why So Many Beginners Start Here
Instant diversification. One purchase, hundreds or thousands of companies. If one business struggles, it barely moves the needle on your whole investment.
Low cost. Because nobody is actively picking and choosing stocks, index funds typically charge much lower fees than funds run by a manager trying to beat the market.
A strong long-term track record. Over long stretches of time, decades, not months, broad index funds have historically grown steadily, even with plenty of bumps along the way.
Simplicity. You do not need to read quarterly earnings reports or watch the news every day. You buy, and you leave it alone.
What Index Funds Are Not
They are not a get-rich-quick scheme. Nobody doubles their money in a month with an index fund, and anyone promising that is not talking about index funds. They also still go up and down, sometimes sharply, especially in the short term. The value is not in avoiding risk altogether, it is in spreading that risk across so many companies that no single failure sinks you, and in giving your money time to grow rather than trying to time the market perfectly.
A Word on Patience
There is something worth noticing here that goes beyond the mechanics. Scripture does not glamorize the person chasing a windfall. Proverbs 13:11 puts it plainly: wealth gained hastily will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little will increase it. An index fund is, in a sense, the financial embodiment of that verse. Slow. Steady. Unremarkable in any given week. And that is exactly the point.
Getting Started
Most people buy index funds through a retirement account, like a 401(k) through work, or an IRA you open yourself, or a regular brokerage account. You do not need thousands of dollars to start, many brokerages let you begin with whatever you can set aside, even a small amount each month. The goal is not to get in perfectly. It is to get in, and stay in, for a long time.
The Investing Fundamentals Series
What Is an Index Fund? A Beginner’s Guide to Investing With Confidence (this article)
Index Fund vs. Mutual Fund: The Ultimate Investing Showdown (coming soon)
This content is for educational purposes only and is not personalized financial, legal, tax, or investment advice. Consider talking with a licensed financial professional before making investment decisions.
