What is Socially Responsible Investing? | Mission Wealth

seth we were talking about uh you mentioned at the end of your last segment a little bit about socially responsible investing yes and uh impact investing and like why don’t you mention a little bit about socially responsible investing just so people can get a handle on what’s really available out there yeah so it’s actually been around since the 18th century so back in the 18th century the quakers decided they didn’t want to have any investments that had anything to do with the slave trade and so if you look at modern day it’s now actually becoming really a growing area there’s 13 trillion globally in socially responsible investments and impact investments so what that means is if someone is volunteering in the community they’re buying organic food they volunteer at an animal shelter they’re trying to be intentional and conscious in their lives but if their investment portfolio is not reflective of that because they’re owning a pesticide company and they’re owning companies that maybe uh do animal testing or maybe they own a tobacco company and they don’t believe in you know the tobacco

industry because they lost a family member to you know say lung cancer or something you can actually align your investments with your values now both with positive screens and negative screens so you can actually screen your portfolio so it’s fully in sync with your own values and what’s great is that we’re finding that there’s zero suffering when it comes to return so there’s actually kind of like a karmic support here for people who are aligning their investments with their values and it’s just such a joy to help people really start to go wow i didn’t realize i could do anything i thought i just bought mutual funds and my life was over here and then i volunteer and i try to do good here and i give to charity well you can actually make an incredible difference by making sure your portfolio is both optimized and aligned with your deepest values so do you str obviously you must stress this then when you’re sitting down with a client for the first time to really discern what their values are so that you can select the kind of investments that are going to be it’s not necessarily for everyone but it’s

important that people know that it’s available and so that’s part of our planning process as we make sure they understand here’s how you can evaluate different companies here’s the different qualities you can look at environmental screens social screen governance screens so everyone has their own hot button is it carbon emissions is it child labor practices is it business ethics so people can really customize based on what matters most to them and that really helps them feel more kind of vested also in the financial process because to a lot of people the financial process feels very kind of intimidating and disconnected right so this is a way to feel more connected to your money and to know that your money is doing good in the world