I don't have those skills or abilities. So I don't seek out alternative small-scale lending opportunities to use as investments. If a business is unable or unwilling to seek traditional financing through a local bank then I'm suspicious about whether it is some place I want to put my money anyway. My parents have been sucked into those sorts of "affinity" investments and have been burned.
So I just use "plain Jane" index funds for our modest retirement savings and trust Vanguard to know what they are doing. I'm being frugal that way because they have the lowest fees and are actually investor-owned rather than corporate-owned.
For a while I dabbled in 'socially conscious' funds like Pax World and some others. But after a while the filters they used just seemed arbitrary and I didn't see the point. Is say Wal-Mart, which destroys downtowns, underpays its workers, and causes suburban sprawl better or worse than say Exxon which treats its employees well but produces the gasoline that we all use? Pax World says yes, I'm not so sure myself.
I honestly don't know anything about Everence's mutual funds. But a quick glance at the holdings of their main growth fund suggest that it is basically like most other large cap tech-heavy growth funds. https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/fund/mgndx They are a little heavier in Apple, MIcrosoft and Google than the actual market, and maybe a little more tech heavy than I'd be comfortable with. But it's honestly not really that different from an ordinary index fund.
Here are the top 25 holdings of the Everence Praxis Growth Fund for which you pay an annual fee of 0.79% or $790 for every $100,000 invested (https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/f ... x/holdings)
Here are the top 25 holdings of the generic Vanguard S&P 500 index fund for which you pay an annual fee of 0.03% or $30 for every $100,000 invested (https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/fund/voo/holdings)
I'm hard pressed to see what difference or extra value I'd be getting from Praxis for all that money. Multiply that 0.79% fee over a 50-year lifetime of investing and over that time, Everence will have skimmed off almost 40% of the value of your investments (0.79% x 50 years = 39.5%). During that same 50-year time period, Vanguard will have skimmed off 1.5% of your investments (.03% x 50 years = 1.5%). A 0.79% fee might sound reasonable for a single year. But no one invests for a single year. You have to multiply it for your entire investing horizon to understand the cumulative impact. Is it worth it to end up with an account balance 40% lower over 50 years? Only you can decide if the value provided by Everence is worth that price.