By Brennen Schmertmann
Catholic Investor
Welcome to the Catholic Investor section of The Catholic Messenger. My name is Brennen Schmertmann and I will be your captain for this flight. I am a financial advisor with SBS Financial in Moline, Illinois. My specialty and passion is Catholic values investing. This new column for the Messenger will appear the fourth Thursday of each month as I use my years of education and finance experience to help everyday Catholics invest with their values. We’ll look at how to analyze securities (stocks, mutual funds, etc.), questions to ask your advisor, seeing if Christian mutual funds are what they claim to be, and much more. First, a little bit about me:
I was born, raised and currently live in Bettendorf. I grew up Catholic attending St. John Vianney and Our Lady of Lourdes parishes in Bettendorf and Our Lady of the River Parish in LeClaire. After graduating from Pleasant Valley High School, I attended the University of Northern Iowa where I earned a B.A. in Secondary Mathematics Education. I returned to my hometown and taught math at Bettendorf High School, primarily Algebra II and Pre-Calculus, and coached football on the side at Bettendorf Middle School.
I met my wife in 2015 and we were married in 2017. From 2018 to 2024, we had five children, one of whom is watching over us with Jesus. As my family grew, God was calling me to a different path. So, I left teaching and switched to finance, first selling life and long-term care insurance with Mutual of Omaha. Then I began living out one of my dreams by working with my father at his company, SBS Financial. Here I was given a blank canvas and began working on building faith-based portfolios for Catholics, which other Christian denominations can also use. My hobbies include spending time with my family and their various activities, golf, reading and investing.
Now that you know a little about me, I want to discuss my purpose and mission for these articles. Money, investing, retirement and building wealth are all topics we think about in our daily lives. Most of us have our 401ks through work or IRAs that we have started up with our advisors. Our advisor then puts our money into a diversified portfolio of mutual funds, ETFs, alternatives and more. Then, sometime in the future, we will be able to retire and live the good life on the beach drinking delicious beverages with little umbrellas in them.
However, have you stopped to consider whether your investments align with your values? How do you know? If you own a stock in a company, you know what you are invested in. If I own a share of Pepsi, then I own part of Pepsi. If I own a share in Large Cap Mutual Fund A … well, what do I own? What does that even mean? Too often people assume that the stock market is complex and intricate or that investing is affected by the whims of weather, what day it is, what I had for breakfast, or what the magic eight ball predicted. This isn’t the case and you also don’t need sophisticated mathematics to invest in the markets either. Peter Lynch, a renowned Wall Street investor, said, “If you can add eight and eight and get reasonably close to sixteen, that is the amount of math you need to be able to invest.”
What we need to remember is that behind every stock is a company and behind every mutual fund is a collection of stocks, which is a collection of companies. The questions we all need to be asking ourselves:
- Does this investment align with my values?
- Is this a financially sound investment?
While I can’t give you the answers to those two questions, I can provide you with the tools necessary to come up with the answers. That is the purpose and mission of these articles. To pull back the curtains of finance and give you the tools necessary to make informed decisions. To figure out how an investment aligns with your values. To figure out how current events and policies affect your portfolio. Follow through on the answers with your advisor.
I look forward to spending time with you each month. Tune in next month for our topic on “Catholic Values Investing: Why it is more important than you think.”
(Securities and advisory services offered through LPL Financial, a registered investment advisor. Member FINRA/SIPC. LPL Financial and SBS Financial are separate entities.)
