For decades, investors have maintained two separate mental folders: one for investments, returns, and performance, and another for values, faith, and giving. This separation assumes that capital is morally neutral until deployed philanthropically. However, Steven Libman, founder of Investing With Purpose™, contends that this assumption is costing investors more than they realize—both financially and in terms of impact.
Libman, who has spent 15 years building a multifamily real estate firm, champions a counter-premise: stewardship is not a subset of finance but the entirety of it. Once investors adopt this framing, the silos between tax strategy, portfolio allocation, and personal values collapse into a single question: 'What is my money actually building?'
The separation between investing and values did not happen by accident. Libman argues it was deliberately sold by a financial services industry focused on product distribution rather than stewardship. Investors were told to chase returns, ignore the underlying activities of their capital, and express their values through charitable giving from after-tax proceeds. The result is a generation of investors who give generously from returns while their portfolios fund ventures they have never examined.
The tax conversation is similarly siloed. Most people experience the tax code as an annual reckoning rather than a year-round planning tool. They discover what they owe in April, treat the number as inevitable, and move on. The idea that tax strategy and values strategy could be part of the same proactive framework—structured in January, not reconciled in April—has rarely been presented.
“Stewardship isn’t a category of finances,” says Libman. “It’s the whole thing. When we read the parable of the talents, the master doesn’t grade servants on one line item. He thinks about what they did with everything they were entrusted with. Your tax dollars are entrusted capital too.”
The dominant model in values-aligned investing has been the exclusion screen—a list of what not to own. Libman argues this is the lowest form of values alignment and the least useful starting point for investors who want their capital to build something tangible. His reframe is simple yet consequential: purpose-driven investing is not the screen you run at the end; it is the lens you build through from the beginning. That lens should cover every line item, including the tax line.
“What is your money building?” is the question Libman puts to investors before any other. Not what it is earning, but what it is going towards building. The practical steps that follow are sequenced deliberately: get clear on core values, write them down, audit what you actually own, measure each holding against those values, and then ask whether your tax strategy serves the same mission or works against it.
For investors who have never connected these dots, the entry point is an audit, not a liquidation. The goal is not to blow up an existing portfolio but to create an honest picture of where alignment exists and where it does not, then start making intentional moves.
“Purpose-driven investing isn’t the screen you’re running at the end,” says Libman. “It’s the lens you’re building through from the beginning. And that lens should cover the tax line items too.”
The connection between tax strategy and values alignment is more direct than most investors realize. Capital retained through intelligent tax structuring—bonus depreciation, cost segregation, and K-1 carry-forwards—is capital that can be redeployed toward causes, communities, and investments that reflect an investor’s priorities. Capital handed to the government unnecessarily is capital that cannot be used for those purposes.
Libman’s framing draws on a biblical precision argument: the obligation is to give Caesar exactly what Caesar is due—no more, no less. Overpaying taxes out of ignorance is not humility; it is poor stewardship. Every dollar that leaves unnecessarily is a dollar that cannot be reinvested, donated, or deployed toward an investor’s mission.
“You can’t manage well what you refuse to understand,” says Libman. “And the moment this all gets pulled under one owner, which is you, there’s no silo anymore. You become the silo.”
The investors who will navigate this cycle most effectively, in Libman’s view, are not those who separate these conversations most cleanly but those who stop separating them entirely. More information on the firm’s investment philosophy is available at investingwithpurpose.org.
