Summary

Stephen Kump, the founder of Charity Vest, aims to shape the world to be more generous by providing everyone with a donor-advised fund or a charitable giving account. He has a background in consulting and philanthropy advising, where he helped major donors be more strategic with their giving.

Stephen noticed the issues and limitations with existing donor-advised funds and felt convicted to build new technology to solve these problems. His mission is to catalyze generosity and enable the millennial and Gen Z generations to give a trillion dollars away through their technology. In this conversation, Stephen discusses his experience as a philanthropy advisor and the importance of generosity. He highlights the character and values of high-net-worth individuals who actively give away a significant portion of their wealth. Stephen also talks about the launch of Charity Vest for Advisors, a white-labeled donor advised fund program that enables wealth advisors to support their clients in strategic giving. He emphasizes the need for advisors to have conversations about generosity and stewardship with their clients.

Stephen shares his admiration for CS Lewis and St. Augustine and expresses his desire to have conversations with them. He also mentions his interest in discussing faith-driven startups with Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator.

Takeaways

Charity Vest is a technology company that aims to catalyze generosity by providing donor-advised funds to everyone.

Stephen has a background in consulting and philanthropy advising, where he helped major donors be more strategic with their giving.

Existing donor-advised funds have issues and limitations, and Stephen felt convicted to build new technology to solve these problems.

Charity Vest's mission is to catalyze generosity and enable the millennial and Gen Z generations to give a trillion dollars away through their technology. High net worth individuals who actively give away a significant portion of their wealth possess certain character traits and values.

Charity Vest for Advisors is a white-labeled donor advised fund program that enables wealth advisors to support their clients in strategic giving.

Advisors should have conversations with their clients about generosity and stewardship.

The bunching strategy, which involves stacking multiple years of giving into one tax year through a donor advised fund, can help clients maximize their tax deductions.

Welcome to the Investing with Integrity podcast. My name is Jeff Talarico I am your host. I am honored and blessed today to have with us Stephen Kump. Stephen aims to shape the world to be more generous. He leads Charity Vest, which is a technology company aiming to catalyze generosity by giving everyone a donor -advised fund or a charitable giving account. He worked for over 10 years as a consultant to nonprofit organizations, philanthropists, corporate leaders, and private equity investors.

most recently with Bain and Company. He's a former US Calvary officer. Thank you for your service, Stephen. We appreciate that. He also holds an MBA from the Yale School of Management and earned a bachelor's degree in economics and management from Georgia Tech. I believe they're the Yellow Jackets, correct? All right. Well, welcome to the show, Stephen. We're so glad you're here with us today. Tell us a little bit about yourself and why you're doing what you're doing.

You got it, Jeff. You're on top of it.

Yeah. Well, thanks for having me on Jeff. Super pleasure to be here. Anytime I get the opportunity to talk about generosity and tools for generosity, it's going to be a fun day. So I'm looking forward to this. My background, as sort of my bio alludes to is been meandering. I consider that a huge blessing. I consider myself the world's like wealthiest man in terms of life experience, at least thus far. Been in the army, had the privilege of leading soldiers all the way up to

helping corporate leaders, Fortune 500 companies be more strategic. And now we're building tools for generosity. And the bridge of all that experience was time after being a management consultant, feeling led to do something more meaningful for the world and for the kingdom. And I became a philanthropy advisor. So using that analytical business consulting toolkit to help major donors be more strategic with their giving. Questions like, hey, I'm really passionate about...

next million dollars that I'm going to give this organization. And so we helped donors be more strategic with their decision -making. And in the midst of all that, pretty much all of my clients had donor advised funds, pretty much all of them. And so I got exposed to the goodness of donor advised funds and how useful they were. My wife and I adopted one and it actually changed behaviorally a few things how we gave. We actually talked.

more about giving, even though we weren't necessarily giving more, just the idea of like setting it aside first and then figuring out where it was going to go. The fruit of that was talking a lot more about giving. So that got our attention. And then the other thing was my clients complained about their donor advised funds fairly frequently to the point where I took it upon myself to have some conversations with a few donor advised fund sponsors kind of going behind the curtain and saying, Hey, what, what?

is the deal here. And the issues were everything from fees to a couple of mistakes being made to like, hey, I really want to do this thing, but the answer is no. All of the whys, when you ask why enough times, all of them for all those issues came back to technology. And I became over time convicted that this was an issue. And moreover, I didn't see anyone building new technology.

for the donor advised fund space. And eventually just felt convicted that somebody needed to step in the space and build some new financial technology for donor advised funds, not just to solve those sort of immediate problems, but also to enable the future of what donor advised funds can do, especially for the millennial and Gen Z generations coming along. They're about to have the be the beneficiaries of the great wealth transfer. And we'll be in the driver's seat of giving here quickly.

And they're used to everything being super simple and quick here. And that is not where donor advised funds have been over the last decade or so. And so we're endeavoring to change that. And our mission statement is to catalyze generosity. We build better tools for generosity. And our vision is that we see the millennial generation give a trillion dollars away through our technology.

That's amazing. That trillion dollars is lining up with, I had a guest a couple of weeks ago that talked about their firm, and they want to do this, this rescue one T, where they want to rescue a trillion dollars from Wall Street and put it back into faith based type investing. So you, they get a trillion, you get a trillion, you know, let's be Oprah for a minute. Everybody gets a trillion, right? So,

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Trillions all around. Trillions all around. Let's go.

Trillions all around, trillions for everybody, just because you're listening to the show today. So let's change gears for just a minute. And I know we touched about your history, your background a little bit, but if there was something about you that not very many people know, what would it be?

Oh gosh, I'll go a silly direction. I love lawn care. And so this would be an alternative career for me is I, I, you know, grew up as a teenager. I had to give up baseball because I was too small. And I took up golf as I, you know, size didn't matter nearly as much in golf. And so played a lot around, you know, municipal courses in my hometown.

Okay.

And through that process, I just came to appreciate great grass. And so that just has like snowballed, especially as I've become a homeowner and have had kids and become a dad and you're looking for hobbies around the house. Lawn care has really become like a point of study for me and I nerd out on it. So maybe if I ever start a podcast, it'd probably be about lawn care. So that's something that I don't think anybody would predict given my day job.

But that's, you know, ask me about lawn care. I'd love to nerd out about that.

So are you the guy in the neighborhood with the sign that says stay off my grass?

You know, I think grass is meant to be used. So why have a lawn if you're not going to have people on it? So I, you know.

You know, I love that outlook. That's sharing what you have. You may have the prettiest lawn on the street and you want kids playing it. I love that. That's great. So when you guys ventured out with CharityVest and you and I've had this conversation about the platform and I think it's absolutely fantastic. You're wanting to make this available to everybody because donor advised funds has kind of been the ultra wealthy thing that those people have been able to have these types of accounts for years.

Totally.

Totally.

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And now you're wanting to take it down to the street level and just the regular mom and pop can have one, a single person can have one. And in doing that, you're teaching more people about the biblical principles of generosity. So with that, why don't you tell us a little bit about, you know, maybe what you're looking for is your average donors, things in that nature.

Yeah.

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Yeah, we're trying to solve kind of the the bookend problem with donor advised funds So you touched on kind of making them more accessible to everyone and I'll talk about that more in a second But there's another problem at the high end for like the cool things that major donors want to do with their DAF, but don't think they can or their donor by some sponsor doesn't have the

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capability to allow them. And if they're a large enough donor, typically they would open up a private foundation. And most ultra high net worth donors that I've talked to don't actually have any pride or desire to run private foundations. It's just a means to an end. It's more about the tool. And from a regulatory and legal perspective, there's nothing structurally stopping ultra high net worth donors from doing much more powerful.

things through their donor advised fund than they currently have. And typically that's a limitation practically based on the sponsor and their systems. And so that's also kind of the other end of what we want to open up. So I just wanted to briefly mention that. But to your point, yes and amen, we believe that everybody can benefit from an intentional giving tool, like a giving account, just like, you know, I'm sure any...

. . .

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financial planner or any personal finance nerd out there would say, everybody should have a retirement account, at least a Roth IRA, like everybody should have a giving account. It's a useful hopper to be your collection point for giving, especially because it's tax advantaged, but gives you one intentional place to think about the giving pot of money for your life. And so we think everybody can benefit.

at least, at least, if not from a tax perspective, then a streamlining all you're giving from one place perspective, that is actually really helpful. And we think anybody can also benefit from like splitting the decisions of like giving and giving where. And that's what I described in a little bit of my story that you heard of my wife and I, we suddenly talked more about giving because of this donor advised one. It was because we split the decision of, hey, we're gonna give X dollars every month.

But we didn't say it's going to go to YZ charities. But we had a commitment to our church. And then beyond that, it was like, what are we going to give to you? And so that was always a really fun conversation. Anytime a fundraiser came up, it was like, should we allocate some of our money to this? Or like how much? It was...

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can benefit from this idea of a giving account and our technology enables them to run much much lower cost. We've automated all the back -end operations of the donor advised fund and through CharityVest best we now

one in 90 seconds. There are no fees whatsoever to open it up. We only charge fees when and if you choose to invest your balance to grow it tax free, which is a great thing to do. But if you're a smaller donor or you have ultra, like very high turnover on the money that you're putting into your donor advised fund, don't invest and it's free. And so we wanted to create just, we call them on ramps, super simple on ramps to purposeful giving for everybody.

Yeah, you touched on the tax advantage. And what I've run into, and this is really the interesting part, is people who are generous, people who give, yes, they get a tax advantage, but that's not the reason they give.

Yeah.

They give because that's what we're told to do. And in scripture, we're told to be generous. We're told to not let the right hand know what the left hand is doing. Because when we start to think about some of the things that we do and support, you know, the enemy comes in and he kind of tells you, no, you don't really want to do that. But when you give out of a joyful heart, what I've personally found is you can't out give God. No way, shape or form. The more you give, the more he gives.

Yeah. Totally. Well said. And I know Todd Harper and others have said, you've never met an unhappy, generous person. It doesn't exist. No one's ever regretted being generous. So it's just.

Yeah, it's absolutely a gift to be able to step into this. And one of the things that we've discovered is actually behavioral patterns with the tools are helpful to help people get a taste and to step in to that stream. And so that's what's made us so passionate about being toolmakers, forgiving.

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And I can absolutely see we're offering everybody a free account. Just give it a try. Just try this. And as they can see what generosity does, not only for themselves, but the impact that they can have by making a difference in the world of a nonprofit or a church or whatever it may be, it's just a beautiful thing, especially when you are a believer. And the interesting thing is there are a lot of non -believers that still have...

donor advised funds. They still take care of, you know, nonprofits and missions and whether they're a believer in Jesus or not. And that always amazed me that seriously, there are some really big donors out there that have no clue who Jesus really is.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I was listening to an ultra high network donor. I was talking to me about their giving and they described, they said, you know, I had a choice, you know, when it came to selling my company. I could either give these dollars to Uncle Sam.

or I could give them to charities. And I chose, you know what? At least I'll have some control over where it goes. So we'll put it in a donor advised fund. And this person had given not a lot out of their fund yet. They were planning on ramping up some of their giving. That was the context of our discussion. But what an interesting frame of just like, I want to avoid giving money.

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to the government is the reason for their giving. But what was cool about the conversation that we were having is as we were talking about different things that they could do with their money, the energy level in the conversation actually went up as they started to get a vision for the types of relationships and types of things that they could be involved in of being created. It wasn't just like, hey, write a check to a charity, you never hear from them again. But now there's an opportunity to have a relationship with some amazing people.

And that's like one of the things that for anybody out there who is listening to this and may not be super engaged in giving yet, like some of the best people on the planet are involved in nonprofits, especially really well -run nonprofits. And people often tell me like, well, what's a well -run nonprofit look like? You kind of know when you interact with a well -run nonprofit, it's pretty self -evident.

Because you get to know them you hear their heartbeat. Their thinking is clear. They're excited They have a lot of energy and vision and they're getting you excited and it's and it's not just woo and like soft stuff but no they're talking about like really concrete things that they're doing and what they're aiming for and It does suck you in and you're like, wow, these are some of the best most amazing inspiring people and like Giving is an opportunity to step into that

and be a part of it and partner with it. And the good nonprofits view donors that way, like our partners, you're stepping in, you're joining the team. And so that is just like such a joyful process. And so describing some of those opportunities really got this major donor super excited and got them a taste of a vision for life that they didn't have before, which is kind of cool. So back to your point, Jeff, of like, hey,

Somebody who's like not a believer at all, who gives to merely avoid giving it to the government can find a vision for like how they can have a richer life through this process. Kind of neat.

So let me ask you this, do you guys have anything in place or any tools to help even believers and non -believers alike when they make a decision to support a nonprofit? I mean, are there tools to help them realize that, yeah, that one's really a good one or that one, you might want to reconsider.

We try to put out good content to help donors know the difference. We don't want to get into the business of adjudicating which nonprofits are good or not. There are plenty of institutions out there that do that type of thing. It's a tough game to be in, generally. Certainly, we don't want to jump in and not do an excellent job. Whatever we want to do, we're going to do it and make sure it's excellent.

So it's not a space that we really wanted to jump in, but we do want to educate donors and how to think about and detect ineffective versus effective nonprofits. The one thing that we have done, and this is part of a broader trend in philanthropy, is we've launched collaborative giving funds on our platform. They're called community funds, and essentially they're social donor advised funds. They're funds that you or anyone can jump into and...

give into everybody can see the balance, see what the fund has given to over time. There's one administrator who has all the grant making rights, the money out decisions on which charities to support and when And we're seeing that grow like exponentially on the platform, but we allow folks to set up these funds and recruit capital. And so one of the things that we've found is that we've had a number of donors.

tell us in either feedback or just outreach and let us know that it really inspired them to get money off the sidelines because they found someone that they trusted. Some of our funds are run by philanthropic or nonprofit experts in particular fields. And so, you know, they are trusted authorities on like which charities are good or when, when the money is going to go out the door, it'll be highest impact. And that's recruited capital off the sidelines, which is, which is awesome.

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We want to empower folks on our platform with tools. We want to be the tool maker and then put a powerful tool in their hands and then let them go use it rather than, you know, be in the business of adjudicating what's good and what's not. But certainly we want our tools to help to that end for more capital to flow to effective nonprofits for sure.

So what you're talking about with these social funds, these causes that come up just out of the blue sometimes, there was a community foundation, which is an organization in this town that helps people do donor -advised funds. But when Uvalde had their shooting at the school, Rob Elementary, a year and a half ago, they immediately set up a support fund for people to donate directly to that to help impact that.

Mm.

Hmm.

So it's these types of funds that can immediately take impact out there that can help in situations that I really think is really cool. So even if we've got some advisors listening on this call and it's something that's important to them or something happens in their community, they can jump right on and they can create something for the here and now. Like the tornadoes that are happening right now in the Midwest. Cool.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And what's so cool about the, even the example that you described like a tragedy or a disaster, you know, oftentimes there's this like flash in the pan moment where everybody wants to jump in and give and do something. But a lot of times the needs aren't quite as flash, you know, that second they're going to unfold over the next few months, even as the sort of situation fades out of the new cycle and.

having an intermediary, someone who collects the money and can allocate it out at the right times can be much more effective because they know the needs on the ground and they know the right timing, et cetera. So these types of funds like the one you mentioned with the Community Foundation, so, so, so effective. And so we've seen some of that pop up on our platform too, which is awesome.

So what you guys are doing is the same thing that some of these money managers are doing when they talk about impact investing. They can, someone can donate money or invest in a company that totally

the area they're in. And this is just doing it a different way. Instead of investing for a return, we're investing because it's the right thing to do. That's not about right.

Yeah, well said, Jeff. Well said. It's awesome.

Sometimes I don't know what I'm talking about, but sometimes I might hit it on the spot. So let's, let me ask you, is this something, has this been a passion of yours for a long time, this generosity journey that you're on?

Look, you're on it today.

Yeah, for the last decade or so, I mean, so about a decade ago is when I became a philanthropy advisor. And very quickly I got, you know, baptized into the world of generosity. One of the things that struck me was the quality of people that were my clients, like pretty much categorically. So just to give you a quick snapshot of who my clients were.

These are people who are high net worth or ultra high net worth, who pretty much all were trying to give a ridiculous portion of their net worth away. Like most people, I think, would agree on the word ridiculous if we were to see the numbers. Like most, in most cases of their net worth, they're trying to actively give it away. And so I think just categorically that the person that, and we can discuss chicken or egg, but...

the person that arrives at that conclusion, like I should give most of my money away. And there's quite a bit of it and I want to do it strategically, is a certain type of person. And I'm talking about their character and all of the non -financial things about their life. And that is what I think really caught my attention on a heart level very early on of like, oh, there's actually a deeper stream here that like,

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what is up with that and try to jump in it. So, cause these are, these are people who weren't just going on about their worldly riches, but going on about a much deeper story that money was merely a bullet point in, I mean, just like way, way down in importance, which is certainly not mainstream culture at all. So that got my attention. And my wife and I were also,

the beneficiaries of some extraordinarily generous people early on in our marriage that has not left us. We talk about to this day. And so I think just a such a clear picture and I hope everybody gets the opportunity and has a story like this of just people in their life who are incredibly generous to them to get a sense for like what generosity, how generosity can change the world.

There's kind of an adage that's been flowing around for probably about the last decade in Christian generosity circles that generosity begets generosity. And you see that pattern in the Bible as well in a few different places, but just like God himself is generous. He so loved the world that he gave his only son. And then like what is...

part of the response of receiving the gospel and seeing the beauty of the gospel. It's like, well, we want to give our own lives away. And so that pattern is just incredibly powerful. And I think it's a cool way for the gospel to show up in super practical ways in daily life by giving.

That's awesome. That's such great insight and, and God has opened your eyes to that, which is, I wish more people would be able to see that. So that's really cool. So when, when you're talking about having this, this passion to give away, you know, Ron blue at kingdom advisors, he always says how much is enough and what are you going to do with the rest? So as a kingdom advisor, these are conversations we are having with clients.

You know, how much is enough? I mean, do you, you can't take it with you. You know, the old story is you've never seen a hearse with a U -Haul behind it, you know, with all the possessions. You can try, but you know, it's not going to work. So what are you going to do with it? And, and there's a lot of people that I have found in the, in the Christian side of life, not, not necessarily the secular side, the Christian side of life who really have hard conversations with their children saying, you're not getting it.

you're not getting it all. Because what does that do? Where is their dependency on God if they're just given everything?

Yeah. Yeah.

So it's just another avenue in being able to show God's strength and his ability to truly, if you truly believe he will take care of you, he does.

Yeah, totally.

All right, so now you've been hanging around now with some advisors. You were at the Kingdom Advisors Conference this February, and that's where I met you. And what kind of reception are you getting from the advisor world?

Indeed.

Yeah, it's been nothing short of awesome. I mean, we've truly just been blown away with the reception that we've gotten generally. I mean, as you can imagine, particularly from the Kingdom Advisors audience, broadly defined, but from advisors in general, secular oriented ones included. So we just launched our Charity Vest for Advisors product about the same time as Kingdom Advisors, officially. We've been talking to folks unofficially.

for the last few months knowing that we were going to launch it, but we launched it a few weeks ago and it made the announcement right about Kingdom Advisors and we partnered with a group called One Ascent down in Birmingham, Alabama, a Kingdom Advisor firm. They were very much at the conference. And so they're active on the platform launch with their advisors and clients, which has been phenomenal. And we've been stacking up launch partners behind them with other firms who...

want the same thing. And so just to give you anybody listening a snapshot of what we're talking about, CharityVest is our donor advised fund that we built that I was describing earlier that we've made free donor advised funds for everybody. And that is for consumers, anybody off the street. But we've also created, and this is what we launched recently, CharityVest for Advisors, which enables any wealth advisor firm to launch their own donor advised fund program.

And the key part about that is it's white labeled and we allow custom investments, custom billing schedules on the investments themselves for the advisor. We enable collaborative giving to be a part of the experience like we were talking about earlier and enable advisors like full co -pilot access to be their client's partner in giving. So they can see everything, they can do stuff on behalf of the client and even creating a donor advised fund is super easy.

You just basically create it for your client, send them an email, and then they click a button to approve it and boom, they have a donor advised fund. So we've tried to take the same approach that we took to like donor advised funds generally, which is like super easy on ramps. Let's lower the fees. Let's make it a beautiful experience and let's enable them to do stuff that they weren't able to do before we entered this market. And so that's what we're doing with Charity Vest for Advisors. Just to give you a snapshot there.

But it's been great. We've got, as of the time of this recording, 14 launch partners that are going with us and launching it, which has been awesome to allow advisors to say, hey, we do philanthropy, and we're launching our own DAF as kind of the headline, a part of that.

That's amazing. And let me just make this clear to the listeners that you don't have to go through an advisor to get this charity vest. Will open it up an account for you by yourself. I'm correct on that, right?

Yep, totally. So that's normal charity vest is for consumers off the street, donors come one, come all it's free. And then charity vest for advisors is our product that we partner with advisors to serve their clients with. And that's the white label part. Yeah.

That's awesome. And, you I can see for advisors, I mean, this is going to play a crucial role in them because if we are, at least those of us in the, in the BRI side of this, that truly talk about stewardship and generosity with our, with our clients, it gives us a platform to say, now we can help you with this. And in doing that, it's, it's streamlining your process. You're streamlining it for us. You're, you're trying to help us the best you can to streamline the whole process and

Absolutely.

and to still help the client controlling their assets and helping them along the way. And they get to see the fruits of their labor immediately. And that's the other fun part about this.

Yeah, that's awesome. I'd love to hear some of your stories, Jeff, but in the short time that I've been in the advisor space, it's just, it's been mind blowing to me the degree to which clients want to look to their advisor for giving help. Like how much should I give? Where should I give? Is this a good, this is what I want to do. Is this a good idea? And it's sort of been as a philanthropy advisor, it's been kind of mind blowing.

So.

in a sense, but beautiful all at the same time and really helped us get convicted of like, oh, we need, we need to partner with financial advisors and give them tools and support services and backup to enable them to not defer those conversations or like deflect, but rather like embrace, take up, look at it as an opportunity to add value to their client and be more comprehensive and have a richer picture of money and all those things like you were talking about. So.

So again, I can't tell you enough how much this was actually needed for advisors, because we do. We have, for years, have helped clients with their RMDs from their IRA, because there's a little known tax law that if they give directly from their IRA, they're not taxed on that money as their income, but it counts as their RMD. So that helps a lot of people who don't need the income. But we have many more that

that have non -qualified money that says, I want to give, what's the best way to do it? And you're just giving us another tool in our tool belt, enabling us to help these clients. And that's very much appreciated. So let's button this thing up a little bit. Okay. If there were three people that you could talk to that asked them anything in the world, hit their mind, find out about them, who would they be? And they can't say Jesus, because everybody wants that one.

I love it.

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No, it's good. That's awesome. All right, so I'm going to go with dead folks. I feel like it's cheating a little bit to go with anybody who's alive. Because there's a chance that you might be able to make it happen anyway. But all right, so my dead folks that I would seek out. First of all, CS Lewis. Nobody has been more formative, my faith, than CS Lewis.

And I would love to hear his testimony of how he met the Lord more specifically. I would love to pepper him with questions on that. Because it seemed to be a process. And I, like many believers out there, I don't have a moment where I was like, you know, prayed the prayer, I became a Christian, you know, I grew up in church, but like, it's very unclear to me when I first like really started following Jesus. I can tell you...

Bracketed it was some time between you know this age and this age when I you know really clicked in But but I certainly know where I'm at now But CS Lewis really seemed to be a process and he was super formative and helping me understand like where where am I even at? intellectually with God for God around God all the all the things so He would be one of them certainly gave me the framework for why even value generosity

So he helped form my mind in following Jesus quite a bit. On a similar plane,

Yeah, I'll go, for a second, I'll go St. Augustine. I'm a what you call an armchair theologian, so I have zero actual theological credentials.

And no one should follow, you know any theological teaching that I spit out, but I appreciate it and St. Augustine's been super formative for me in understanding my faith and I'll connect it to generosity I'm sure to make a broad connection generosity so st. Augustine's theology is all about what you love that we're loving things and that Like what we love is ultimately what we value and that drives our decision -making so that there's your

10 second, way too simplistic summary of St. Augustine theology, but it's helped me see that my daily life is forming what I love. And ultimately what I love is driving the decisions and sort of the outcomes and makeup of my life. And so the act of giving can actually shape what I love. And that simple idea of like, it's expression.

and actively shaping what I love is a big part of why I value giving and I think tools matter in this space. So I would want to talk to St. Augustine and be like, hey, what do you think of Charity Vest? First of all, is this cool? You want to use it? I'd love to have him as a user. But then I'd love to talk to him about his theology and if you've ever read anything about Augustine, he's got a weird life story in which all that fits. So yeah.

Yeah, and then right now I'm big on, I'm trying to figure out prayer as a start. You know what? I'm going to go with somebody who's alive actually. I'm trying to figure out what a faith framework for startups looks like and build this out. I'm a Christian. I happen to run a startup about giving, but at the end of the day, it's a fintech startup. We're like building software that moves money.

And he's written a lot about startups and what makes them tick. And I don't think he's a believer. I would guess that he's not. But I would love to run by him a lot of thoughts about how a faith driven startup might be completely different and run him through that framework to see what he thinks and ultimately see if we couldn't catch a vision for some deeper conversations and seeking with him. So.

Alright, so there's my three.

That's cool. That's cool. There's your three. I love that. So, but you touched on something that makes me want to bring up and ask this question. You get to bring your faith to work every day. And I don't know, is that new for you? I mean, I understand you were in the army before, but bringing your faith to work is a beautiful thing. And does it affect you? Do you enjoy that part of it that you get to do that?

Yeah.

Yeah, well, let me qualify something. Although I'm a faith -driven entrepreneur and I am wide open about my faith publicly that my

team knows that.

Charity Vest is a secular company. So not everybody on our team is a believer and we certainly don't serve just believers. We're serving secular folks in all sorts of places. We serve some secular workplaces with some giving funds, etc. So we're in lots of secular environments and that was intentional. I believe that ultimately what we're doing is a culture shaping activity that we're trying to bring

redemptive storylines into secular places and bring signposts to Jesus ultimately. And how we do that matters a lot. And so in a sense, like I am bringing my faith to work in that regard, but we're also a secular company, which is a good thing to qualify. But what I would, what that sort of leads me to want to say in response to Jeff and anybody else that's listening is like,

You know, everybody brings their faith to work. And I would challenge that like, there's not a separation between Sunday and Monday, um, at all. And, uh, the older I get, not supposed to be for some people there are in their minds, but I would advocate. Gosh, get a vision, ask for a vision, talk to mentors about what it can look like to bring your faith to work. Um, because there's a lot of aspects.

There's not supposed to be.

to our vocations, the things that we're called to, that are true for everyone. If you're a believer and you're a follower of Jesus, we're all missionaries. Every single one of us, we're all pastors in some regard, some of us without with authority, formal authority, some of us without. But at the end of the day we're all missionaries and pastors, missionaries to people who don't know the word pastors to other people who do. And gosh.

the Holy Spirit is active and working and can create the miraculous no matter where you're at. And the Lord was kind enough with me to show me some miraculous circumstances in the army. I was a relatively young believer and trying to figure out what my faith in work was like when I was in the army. And I was literally praying in the barracks one night. So...

imagine giant room, you know, waxed, polished floors. And, you know, I'm on this metal bed and there's a guy sleeping above me or we're all trying to sleep for like our three hours or whatever. And I'm praying and asking God to help me figure out like, what am I, what am I doing here? And literally a couple minutes later, as I was like about to drift off to sleep, this guy rolls over from my top bunk and is like, Hey, you're a Christian, right? He's like, yeah.

And I was like, yeah. And he's like, yeah, I'd like to do that. You know, I'm like, do what? And he's like, become a Christian. Like, I think I, I don't know why, but I just woke up this morning and I couldn't shake the fact that like, I need to get right with God and you're a Christian. And so like, would you help me do that tomorrow? And the very next day we talked about it over breakfast. We went and saw the chaplain. He was baptized the following week.

Wow.

became a believer. Literally, like barely even talking to the guy. I knew his name. That's like as much as I was doing, but it was just kind of the Lord to be like, hey, you're a missionary. Congrats. Ready? Go.

Amen. What a story. I mean, that's the way God works. You would have never ever thought that that's how he would answer the prayer you asked.

Yeah, never, never.

That is so cool. All right, so last thing. What didn't I ask you that you're dying to tell us?

Oh, goodness. Let's see. Let's see. We've covered a lot of good stuff here, Jeff. Holy cow. For your audience, I'll throw out some free chicken, as we say here in the South, I live in the Atlanta area, some free chicken advice out there if anybody is not aware of the bunching strategy for your clients.

All right, all right.

you

I'd love to take 60 seconds and give you an overview of the bunching strategy for your clients. All right, so bunching strategy, everybody's tracking the standard deduction. So all of your clients eligible for the standard deduction. And if you have clients that give to charity, especially if they're tithers, and especially if they own a home, you might have some clients that give and have some substantial deductions, but they don't...

Go for it.

clear the standard deduction and you're like, oh, you're just giving, you're not clearing the standard deduction. Bunching is taking multiple years of giving and stacking it in one single tax year. And doing it through a donor advised fund is actually a really effective way to do it because through a donor advised fund, you can put multiple years worth of charitable good giving and what you would otherwise give over that time, put it all in a donor advised fund in one year, get the tax deduction.

And then you can set up recurring gifts or give over time out to those charities over that like two or three years, however much you stack. And the charities don't know the difference. But your client gets a much higher tax deduction. So over that three year period or whatever, the total income tax deductions that they get is higher than it otherwise would be by taking the standard deduction for that same time. So we've written a good bit on our website. You can look it up.

where we explain this much more succinctly than I just did, but hopefully that is a teaser for the bunching strategy if somebody's never heard of it before.

Awesome. Well, Stephen, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it. I know my listeners are going to be overjoyed with knowing now there's something else out there for them to help them, as well as the other advisors that might be listening on this today too. So ladies and gentlemen, it was Stephen Kump again with Charity Vest. We are so thankful he was with us today. And Stephen, thanks for being on the show. We'll talk to you again soon.

Yeah, super fun, yeah.

Thanks so much, Jeff. This is super fun.