Invest with a vision of a better world

Idon’t think there’s any other way to put this: investing is an act of hope. Hope in your financial future, your family’s future and the future of the world.

Sometimes I joke that if you’re not willing to invest with optimism in the future, you may as well spend your money building a bunker and buying cans of baked beans for the end of the world. Investing without optimism is hard. It’s hard on your finances and it’s hard on your mental state. If you spend every day poring over headlines of doom and gloom wondering when the next market crash is going to hit, it’s difficult to be fully present in the moment.

One of the main changes to my approach to investing in 2021 is the consideration of my values. While before I was focused on “getting it right” and making sure I was doing everything possible to secure my financial future, my focus over the past year has shifted. Now, I’m much more concerned as to whether I’m investing in line with my values.

I’m intentionally contributing to the world I want to see and the future that I want to live in.

This isn’t simply throwing reason to the wind and losing sight of the fundamentals of personal finance, but refining my approach to suit my everchanging needs and objectives. I don’t want to copy and paste someone else’s playbook, but I do want to learn from the wisdom of others as I create my own.

We’ve all had more than our fair share of challenges over the past year, but I think it’s more important than ever to reflect on the way our investments impact our lives and mental health and the role we play in the world.

Investing in a company that doesn’t treat its employees and customers well, has a poor impact on the community and environment and, frankly, doesn’t care about bettering society, isn’t going to have a positive impact on your life in the long term.

My preference is to invest in companies that are doing right by their employees and customers, focusing on a strong company culture, concerned about their environmental impact and doing the right thing even when it’s hard.

I think many of us can agree that we don’t want to be investing in companies that are harming the world. This absolutely doesn’t mean losing a sense of reality and putting every dollar you have into a single clean energy company. It’s more about focusing on investing in a way that empowers you, that gives you a sense of pride and that doesn’t add to your burdens and challenges. Investing shouldn’t stop you from sleeping at night; rather it should offer a more positive vision of the future. Consider what you want the world to look like in the next 10 or 20 years. What companies are going to help build that future? And what companies reduce the possibility of that future? Sure, I’m young and idealistic, but I want to be part of the solution and investing in line with my values is one way to do that. With another good 60-plus years of investing ahead of me, I don’t need to be obsessed with the short-term noise and I can concentrate on investing without the distractions (that is, if I can keep from fallingpreytomyriad cognitive biases).