The ongoing relationship
Ongoing planning and investment management for ministers.
Your pay changes. The rules around it change. Your housing allowance has to be designated again every year, before the church pays it, and nobody on the board is going to remind you. This is the part where somebody stays with it.
Why once is not enough
A one-time review tells you where you stand. It does not follow you.
The Checkup is real work, and for some people it is enough. But a minister's finances do not hold still, and a written list from last spring does not know what happened since. Here is what actually moves.
Your housing allowance, every single year
The church has to officially designate it before it pays you, in a definite amount, by real action and not a hallway conversation. Best practice is before the year begins. It cannot be fixed afterward for money already paid. That is one deadline a year, every year, for the rest of your ministry.
Your income, and what kind it is
A raise. A second campus. Honoraria, weddings, funerals, a book. Some of that is W-2 and some is Schedule C, the self-employment treatment is not the same for both, and you find out in April.
Your church plan
Plans change recordkeepers, add options, drop them. A 403(b)(9) can designate part of a retirement distribution as housing allowance. Once the money is in a regular IRA there is no longer anyone with the authority to make that designation. One rollover in the wrong order and that is over.
Your life
A parent needs care. A kid picks a school. Your spouse takes a job with equity. You get a call about a church in another state, and the parsonage question rides along with it.
General education, not advice. Clergy tax rules turn on specific facts, and individual situations vary considerably. Nothing on this page is advice about your circumstances or a prediction of any outcome. Talk with a qualified tax professional about your own facts before you act.
What you get
One relationship. Not a tier you get sorted into.
Your accounts managed
We manage your investment accounts against the model and the risk position we documented with you. They are reviewed on an ongoing basis and rebalanced according to our written policy, not only when we meet.
A planning meeting every year
We work through what moved. Next year's housing allowance designation. What changed in your pay. Whether the church plan contribution still makes sense. Whether the plan still matches the life.
Your tax return read every year
A written review. We do not prepare returns. We read yours, and we get your CPA whatever statements and documents they need.
Your whole picture in one place
Online and current, including the accounts we do not manage, so decisions get made against the real total rather than one statement at a time.
The short questions answered
As they come up, without scheduling a meeting and without a separate bill.
Where the line is. Work that requires new analysis, projections, statements we do not already hold, or an additional meeting, gets scoped and quoted before we do it. We would rather put that boundary in writing than let it blur. We do not prepare tax returns. We do not draft legal documents. We review insurance. We do not sell it.
If you are somewhere in the middle
Twenty years is a long time to drift.
Most of the ministers we talk to are not near retirement and not new either. They are fifteen or twenty years in, doing fine, and quietly unsure whether fine is going to be enough. Nobody sat them down at thirty-five. Nobody has sat them down since.
That is the season this is built for. Not a crisis. A hand on the wheel. Once a year somebody who understands how a minister gets paid looks at the whole thing with you, tells you what changed and what it means, and helps you decide the next thing. Then does it again next year. Nobody drifts on purpose. It happens because there is never a meeting on the calendar that asks the question.
If you are earlier than that, the case is stronger, not weaker. The decisions in front of a minister at thirty-five are the ones that are still open.
What it costs
Two fees, and you pay one of them, never both. Which one depends on how much we manage. The other is waived in full.
If we manage less than $100,000
$199 a quarter, or $249 for a couple. A flat fee, so it does not move as the account does. Investment management is included at no charge and there is no management fee at all. There is no minimum to start.
If we manage $100,000 or more
The management fee below, and no planning fee.
| What we manage | Annual rate |
|---|---|
| First $500,000 | 0.90% |
| $500,000 to $2,000,000 | Nothing |
| Above $2,000,000 | 0.40% |
Read the middle row again. Your fee is $4,500 a year at $500,000. It is $4,500 at $1,000,000. It is still $4,500 at $2,000,000. There is not much difference between managing $500,000 and managing $1.5 million, so we do not charge you three times more because the account grew.
We do not bill a dime on your church plan.
How it begins
It starts with the Checkup. Every time.
Whether you are still deciding or you already know you want help, the first engagement is the same one.
We are not willing to manage a minister's money before we understand the minister. Not just the balances. What you are actually building toward. What you are worried about at three in the morning. Whether you plan to preach until you cannot stand up or hand it off at sixty-two. What your spouse pictures when they picture retirement, because it is usually not the same picture, and that matters more than any allocation we could pick.
That is what the Checkup is for. We go through your situation carefully, you tell us what matters, and we put what we found in writing. By the end of it we know you and you know us.
So it is not an audition. It is the first real work of the relationship, and it is why nothing we do afterward is generic.
If you already know you want help, nothing is lost by starting here. It is the same ground we would have to cover anyway. It just happens on purpose, in writing, before anything gets moved.