Women invest their values with Janine Firpo

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Women invest their values with Janine Firpo
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“In the next six years, one of the biggest wealth transfers this country has ever seen is happening. And by 2030, women are going to control $30 trillion in this economy.”

Janine Firpo

Many of us find trips to new places inspiring. For Janine Firpo, what started with a getaway led to a career change which evolved into a whole new way of living.

Firpo is the author of Activate Your Money: Invest to Grow Your Wealth and Build a Better World and co-founder of Invest for Better, a nonprofit that leads women to learn more about impact investing.

What exactly is impact investing? In this episode, Janine leads us through her own transformation and learning path. Her experience helps us better understand why we all, no matter how small our investments, are making choices about whether our money works for or against our values. The episode also highlights the experiences of three women who were educated through Invest for Better’s learning circles. These three women realized that their money was working at cross-purposes with their philanthropy. They made changes to make sure that every cent they invest, whether in a CD, a stock, or a private business, helps to support the values they live in their lives.

“If you’re the kind of person that cares about homelessness, you probably also care about our climate, you probably also care about the environment, growing income inequality, quality of education in this country, racial equity, gender equity, queer rights—you know, all of those things, they’re tied together.”

Genet Gimja

Listen in! [Click for transcript]

Mentioned in this episode:

Related episode:

Janine Firpo is a seasoned values-aligned investor and social innovator, with a long history of working at the intersection of women and their money. In 2017 she left a successful 35-year career in technology and international development to focus on how women can create a more just and equitable society through their financial investments. Her book, Activate Your Money: Invest to Grow Your Wealth and Build a Better World, was published in May 2021 by Wiley. Later that year, Janine co-founded Invest for Better, a non-profit organization that helps women invest their money in ways that align with their values. Janine walks her talk. She is taking action to move all her own assets into investments she feels good about and is watching them grow with market-rate returns.

Ashima Aggarwal is an intellectual property lawyer and litigator who most recently worked at the academic publishing company Wiley where she delivered legal support and oversaw risk management activities as general counsel for Wiley’s Education businesses. Ashima Aggarwal is the Board Chair at the nonprofits arts organization The Laundromat Project and board member at Tatter, a textiles library. Ashima is a voracious reader who loves sharing book reviews and recommendations and enjoys baking and wandering the streets of NYC.

Genet “GG” Gimja is the host of the Progressive Pockets podcast. On it, she responds to listener letters and provides practical suggestions on how to shop, bank, invest, and donate in a way that better reflects our deeply held societal beliefs regarding climate change, poverty, gender and racial inequity. In every conversation with listeners, GG incorporates lessons from her twenty years as a consultant and educator in the private and public sectors as well as her lived experiences as a first-generation American and refugee by way of Eritrea. GG has lived and worked in Africa, Europe and South America, although she considers Washington D.C. to be home. In her spare time, GG is a voracious reader, frequent host of dinner parties, and occasional writer of short stories.

After working for more than a decade in public interest law, Mary Hawkins left the legal field to raise two sons, care for aging parents, and serve on the board of a family-owned business. Her strong desire to have a positive impact on the world never faded and she recently began to dedicate her time to philanthropy and impact investing. Over the past five years with the help of The Philanthropic Initiative and through membership in NEID Global, Mary and her husband, David, have awarded more than thirty multi-year grants from their Donor Advised Fund, mostly to small locally led grassroots organizations focused on the environment, climate justice, and racial/economic justice.

Thanks to Janine Firpo, Genet Gimja, Ashima Aggarwal, and Mary Hawkins for sharing their time and wisdom for this episode.

“Pinky” by Steviasphere on Bandcamp is from You’re My Toy, Literally, 2023.

Photo by Katt Yukawa on Unsplash.

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Women invest their values with Janine Firpo

 

Intro
—

[00:00:27] Janine Firpo: In the next six years, one of the biggest wealth transfers this country has ever seen is happening. And by 2030, women are going to control 30 trillion in this economy.

[00:00:38] Suki Wessling: This is your host, Suki Wessling. Whether you pin it on nature, nurture, or a combination of both, no matter how you look at women in society, you see gender based differences. How women interact with money is no exception. Although there are certainly individual women and men who don’t fit the mold, when you look at financial behavior in larger terms, women have different priorities than men.

[00:01:06] Today’s guest, Janine Firpo, was comfortable in the very masculine world of technology in the 1980s, but experiences in her life led her to think about money in a new way.

[00:01:17] And when she looked around at women and money, she realized that women needed a different method of learning about money and wielding its power. In this episode, we’ll speak to Janine and to three of the women who have benefited from her organization, Invest for Better.

[00:01:32] Janine Firpo: Hi, my name is Janine Firpo, and I’m delighted to be here. I’m a values aligned investor and a social innovator, and I had a 35 plus year career in technology and then in international development, which I loved. Both careers were amazing. And then about seven years ago, I retired, ostensibly, um, and ended up writing a book for women about how to invest their money.

[00:02:04] It’s called Activate Your Money, Invest to Grow Your Wealth and Build a Better World. And I also started Invest for Better, which is a non profit organization that teaches women how to grow their wealth. In the ways that I describe in the book and really helps us to build the world we want to see using our assets to do that.

[00:02:23] Suki Wessling: I want to back up to the beginning of your career, because you’ve had a really varied career. What did you plan to do when you first started out?

Career beginnings
—

[00:02:33] Janine Firpo: Oh my God. When I first started out at three years old, I planned to be a doctor and by the time I was nine, I knew I was going to be a cardiovascular surgeon and that is what I spent the next, what, almost 10 years working towards. So I did a lot of stuff trying to get into medical school, and I was a pre med student in college, and it was in my junior year that I realized, you know what?

[00:03:03] I don’t really think I want to be a doctor. After all, I kind of love the science thing. I want to be a biologist. So I graduated and ended up going to graduate school in Florida to study marine biology, and that was really fun for about a year, and then I realized, oh my god, I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to get my PhD and become like the specialist in one little aspect of marine life.

[00:03:30] And by complete happenstance, complete happenstance, I was hanging out at the pool during the summer after my first year in graduate school. I met somebody, I was telling them about my plight, that I had always known what I wanted to do and now I had no idea. And it was like something out of the movie The Graduate, and the guy says to me, Go into the computer industry, it’s the future.

[00:03:56] And this was in 1979,

[00:04:00] and something just snapped in my brain, and I thought, My gosh, I’m going to try that. So I ended up graduating from graduate school with a master’s in zoology and a minor in computer science. And went into the computer industry, which was amazing. It was pre personal computers, even. I worked at Apple in the eighties, which was amazing and had a fantastic career.

[00:04:27] And then after about 15 years, I took this amazing trip to Africa. I solo backpack through Sub Saharan Africa for four and a half months. I saw poverty there like I’d never seen before and I decided I wanted to figure out how I could work in the countries I was visiting in a way that would help solve the problems that I was seeing.

[00:04:51] And that took me a little while to figure out because at the time I thought the only way to work in Africa was to become a foreign service, work in the foreign service. How else do you do this? I mean I’m talking like mid 1995. There were no cell phones. There were no ATMs. None of that stuff existed. So anyway, I figured out how to craft a second career, looking at the role that technology and business thinking, how to apply those to poverty.

[00:05:19] And that led me on a amazing adventure that I never would have imagined for over 20 years doing that kind of work. So that’s sort of the story of my early career.

[00:05:30] Suki Wessling: Trips like that affect people deeply, often, but they don’t usually change their whole career based on it. Why do you think it affected you so much? What did it link to inside of you?

A focus on change
—

[00:05:40] Janine Firpo: So I think that my whole life, for whatever reason, I mean, I told you I started at three wanting to be a doctor. Everything that I ever wanted to do or ever did end up doing professionally or with the rest of my life has always been about changing the world. I feel like we’re here for a purpose and our purpose is to leave the world a better place than we found it.

[00:06:03] And so I’ve always been on that journey. And I was deeply impacted by the people that I met crossing Africa, sub Saharan Africa. The children, so beautiful. I started my journey in Ethiopia. These children were so beautiful inside and out and they were dressed in rags and I just knew that these precious little beings had very little likelihood of living a life of true potential.

[00:06:35] Because of the poverty that while they were very happy as young people, they were going to grow up and they were going to face the realities that existed in those countries and struggle. And I didn’t think that was fair and I didn’t want that for them. And so I wanted to do something to see if I could change so you had that second career, which was after the trip to Africa, and now in retirement, you have a third career.

[00:07:01] I realized it’s not, it’s not retiring. It’s rewiring. It’s like, we’re so lucky. In that when we hit our sixties or our mid sixties, many of us still have a tremendous amount of energy. We’re living longer than we ever had before. I plan to live to be at least a hundred. I don’t know if that’ll happen, but I plan.

[00:07:24] And so, and I plan to have most of that based on the history of both my matrilineal and patrilineal lines in pretty good health and mental acuity. And so, I’m talking about 30, 20 to 30 more years of productivity that I could possibly have. Um, that’s significant. That’s an entire career, right? So I want to use these years in a really meaningful way as long as I possibly can.

[00:07:53] Suki Wessling: And how did you move from this sort of wide view of the world and poverty to a more focused view of helping women learn about investment and money?

[00:08:06] Janine Firpo: So it was a couple of things actually. So as part of the work that I did on poverty, I got introduced to the whole concept of microfinance, which is providing small loans primarily to women, primarily in developing countries to help bring them out of poverty. So I got very, very involved in microfinance.

[00:08:25] So that put me straight in the path of women and money at the same time, because I was sort of a social entrepreneur before that was really a term. And because I was living and working out of the Bay area, I had the good fortune to be involved in a lot of the conversations here about what ultimately became known as impact investing.

[00:08:47] And at the time that I was in those conversations, about 20 years ago now, that kind of investing was really only appropriate for ultra high net wealth individuals, institutional investors, foundations, people with very deep pockets. Which were needed because we had to prove that that kind of investing actually works, that you could actually do something good for the world at the same time that you were doing well for yourself financially.

[00:09:15] So at one point, maybe 15 plus years ago now, I was in one of those conferences and I realized I made these huge changes in my career. I stepped out of the tech industry just as the internet was coming on. I took pay cuts to do what I was doing. Some of my friends thought that I had burned out and I was crazy to go do this work in Africa, as opposed to like riding the gravy train of the internet. And my money was working against me. It was invested in things I didn’t believe in. It was invested in things I was trying to change. And even though I was not the typical kind of investor that was doing impact investing, I made a personal commitment to invest all of my money, starting with my cash. in ways that achieve my goals.

[00:10:07] And because I was working really, really hard, I had financial advisors who helped me do that, only they didn’t get me where I wanted to be. And so when I retired, about seven years ago, I took my capital back. I started figuring this out for myself and I realized in the intervening years, we had gotten to the point where any of us could invest this way.

[00:10:29] And there was 20 years plus of research that proved we did not have to give up financial return. And I knew that women wanted this. I knew how women use their money when they got a little more because of what I’d seen in Africa and southeast Asia and all the rest of the places I was working. I knew women cared about how their money was used and how their money was invested.

[00:10:53] And so I decided I’m going to help make it easier for other women who want to go on this journey. They shouldn’t have had the uphill battle that I had. And that’s why I wrote Activate Your Money.

[00:11:04] Suki Wessling: in her book, Janine Firpo refers to her mother as my first investment teacher. I asked her to talk about her relationship with her mother and what her mother taught her.

[00:11:14] Janine Firpo: Well, my relationship with my mom was mostly good, but like all mothers and daughters had its fraught moments as well. But what was amazing about my mom. Well, she was really a self made woman in a time when that was not so okay, right? So she taught herself real estate. She ended up getting involved in buying and selling real estate. She taught my sisters and I how to do that. We were her crew during our summers to help her rip out carpets, refinish floors, paint houses inside and out, clean them, etc. We helped her. And it’s not like my mom sat down and taught me something like from a book or, or that she sat down and she gave me lessons on how to be smart about money.

[00:12:11] She did it through, through exposing us to her experiences. She did it by being open about money. So a lot of times we’re very closed about that, particularly in families. Families don’t talk about money. They don’t talk about money to their kids. My mom didn’t do that. My mom invested in the stock market and she would tell us, I’m investing in this company and that’s why I’m, this is why I’m doing it and I’m so excited.

[00:12:39] And then we would hear, Oh my money, it’s going up. over the last quarter I made this much. I’m so happy. And then she would be, you know, a little bit later, she like the market has crashed and I’m not worth as much as I was before. And I’m devastated. And so, we learned because she talked about it. And I have to say that the biggest gift, one of the biggest gifts my mom ever gave us was that she was open about this right till the very end of her life.

[00:13:11] And she actually made decisions to divest herself of some of her assets to us before she even died. So she set up accounts for my sister and I, moved money into those accounts before she passed away, and if we wanted, we could have spent that money, right? It was in our names, it was our bank accounts, but we knew that it was my mom’s, and we knew that it was there if she needed it, and the level of trust between my mom, my sisters, and myself was so high.

[00:13:43] That we all knew that no one was going to do anything other than the agreements we had. And we knew that my mom was being absolutely fair to each of us. And so when my mom did pass, there was never even the remotest question or inkling of jealousy, desire, all of the ugly things that tend to bubble up when people pass away and there’s some money involved, regardless of how little or how much it is and I just think that’s a legacy to my mom and the openness she had about money.

[00:14:17] Suki Wessling: That’s really interesting to think about, because most people put that wall between money and their family relationships, and they feel like having money involved in family relationships will, will poison the relationship. No, it’s money doesn’t you know, doesn’t figure in here.

[00:14:33] But in, in a sense, what she did was she did the complete opposite. She made money into a positive part of your relationship and your, your relationship with her.

[00:14:42] Janine Firpo: Exactly. It was incredibly powerful. I cannot tell you. I mean, I know so many people who, when somebody dies, that the issue of money becomes a crippling piece of what they have to deal with afterwards. For example, women who have a spouse that dies, and don’t know anything about the money and all of a sudden they have to solve for that at the same time they’re going through the grieving process of loss or parents who don’t tell their kids about what’s going to come down financially either that there are debts to pay and not enough money to cover it or that there is a windfall that nobody knows about and then the kids are gonna I mean it’s It’s crazy to me how taboo this subject is, and particularly for women, and I think it’s just time to end that for good.

[00:15:38] Suki Wessling: I actually remember strongly when I had a friend when I was younger, who the friend was middle aged and her father died and her mother was left completely helpless. She had been a military wife. She had never actually even used money. Because they bought everything on the base, and she just walked in and they just put it on her account.

[00:15:59] She, she had never written a check. And that’s an extreme example, but I think that it’s true that for a lot of women, For a lot of relationships, a lot of heterosexual relationships, it just seems like maybe you, maybe you enter the relationship where the man already knows more about money or at least exhibits more, self assurance about money decisions.

[00:16:22] And so then the, that you just sort of fall into it. And if you have a long relationship that can become very solid in your relationship, those, those roles.

[00:16:34] Janine Firpo: It’s historic. It’s baked into how we have been acculturated as women. I mean, it wasn’t until I was in college. That women could write, open a bank account on their own without a man co signing for them. I was in college, right, a lot, and I was oblivious to the fact that that was the reality. But I can’t imagine a life in which I didn’t have the right to my own money and my own choices around money.

[00:17:06] I remember as a young girl seeing women that we knew who were 100 percent dependent on their husbands for their social lives, for money, for everything. And then at some point the husband would decide, you know, I’m not that happy with you anymore. I think I’m just going to go leave and have another life.

[00:17:30] And the women were bereft. They had kids, they were responsible for those kids. They, they were bereft. And I made a decision when I was a quite young girl, I will never be that woman. I will never be, um, unable to care for myself. And so we, have been taught this, and it’s, again, it’s time for us to, to change the narrative and to have a new story about ourselves in money.

[00:17:55] And particularly because In the next six years, there’s one of the biggest wealth transfers this country has ever seen is happening. And by 2030, women are going to control 30 trillion in this economy. So we have incredible power and potential that we have never had before. And I really want to see us step up into that power.

[00:18:18] Suki Wessling: Coming up next on the Babblery, when women have power over our money, what do we do with it? Some of the women who have joined learning circles formed by Invest for Better talk about the deep impact that working with a group of women on personal finance choices has had on them.

[00:18:36] I

[00:18:42] Ashima Aggarwal: Really was thinking about what is my role in my community and what is my role in this world beyond the work that I’m doing, the family that I’m raising, and so my values are really to do what I can to support the communities that I’m a part of in whatever way I can, with my time, with my energy, with my financial resources, whatever that might be.

[00:19:11] GG: if you’re the kind of person that cares about homelessness, you probably also care about our climate, you probably also care about the environment growing income inequality, you probably also care about, uh, quality of education in this country, racial equity, gender equity, queer rights, you know, all of those things, they’re sort of tied together.

[00:19:35]

Segment 2
—

[00:20:27] GG: We don’t have safety nets, you know, we are not, trust fund kids. We are not expecting anyone to come and save us. Our retirement is really up to us, like most Americans.

[00:20:38] Suki Wessling: This is your host, Suki Wessling, and we’re talking about women and investment with Janine Firpo. I was interested in talking to some women who had taken part in Invest for Better’s Learning Circles. Genet Gimja, who goes by GG, was inspired to re evaluate her family’s donations during the pandemic.

[00:20:55] GG started a podcast about her efforts to learn more about donating to causes she supported.

[00:21:01] GG: In one of these meetings I had with my husband, we were talking about our giving. And then the next topic on our agenda was our investments. And we were going through our different investing accounts and where the money was situated. And it just occurred to me that there were absolutely companies in our portfolio that are actively working against the things that we’re donating money towards.

[00:21:28] As I was looking for information about, you know, I didn’t even know what to call it at the time, but lining up my values and my money, I came across the Invest for Better website. And there was so much good, free, accessible information that anyone could understand, even if you’re not, you know, a financial planner or something like that.

[00:21:54] Suki Wessling: GG noticed a difference in the way her husband thought about money.

[00:21:58] GG: I don’t think that I worry about our financial future in the same way that my partner does. And I don’t know if that’s just gender, cultural norms, upbringing, but I really do think for him, I, I just don’t. I don’t think he would feel like he were a good partner if he did not put that as his top priority. So once I understood that, I realized that I actually needed to come to him with data.

[00:22:29] Suki Wessling: Janine says that her research shows that not only do women have a different relationship with money, but advice for women is radically different from advice that is written for general audiences.

[00:22:39] Janine Firpo: We have been taught to save our money, which we do. And in fact, some of the research that I’ve seen suggests that women on average save 70 cents on the dollar in cash. Which means that year on year we’re actually losing money because what we have in the bank doesn’t actually keep up with inflation.

[00:23:01] If you look at articles that are written for women, they tell us to save, they tell us to spend less money, they tell us that we’re not very good with being an investor, and if you look at similar articles written for men, they tell them how to grow their wealth and how to invest. Yesterday, I read an article that was in Kiplinger, if I’m not mistaken, that was talking about Things women can do to save more for retirement.

[00:23:27] Again, that was in the title. Save for retirement. Well, I read the article and one of the recommendations, the primary recommendation, was put money in a 401k. Great recommendation. That is not saving. That is investing. When you put money into a 401k, chances are that money is going into a fixed income vehicle, a stock vehicle, possibly something else, but it is an investment.

[00:23:53] It is not going into cash in a savings account. And so the fact that articles are still being written, telling women to save and using the word save with what’s actually investing perpetuates this kind of a problem. And just out of curiosity, I did a little Google searching to see what comes up when you put men and savings into the search engine.

[00:24:20] Articles about women. Articles about how women and men’s savings are different. Articles about how women save less or more than men. I could not find a single article like the one I read recommending that women quote unquote save in their 401k with men. Not a one. So again, it’s not surprising that we have these behaviors and these attitudes.

[00:24:50] It’s what we’ve been taught we’re capable of.

[00:24:53] Suki Wessling: I studied linguistics as an undergraduate, so this is something of interest to me, that we have embedded in our language a lot of our beliefs that we don’t even hold consciously. If you called up the person who wrote that article and you asked them open ended questions about, do you think that, you know, women should save money and men should be investors, they’d say, What are you talking about?

[00:25:19] There was this baked in sense that women should save, that women are the nurturers, the ones who care for things, the ones who take care of our houses, and that the men are the ones who go out and take the risks.

[00:25:33] Janine Firpo: You’re right. And we are the ones who take care of things. But what’s interesting is we do that with our money too. So for example, when one of those women I talked about in my life in microfinance, when she gets a little bit more money, the first thing she does is she feeds her kids. And then when she feels like her children are nourished, she sends them to school.

[00:25:57] That is not how men spend their money when they get a little bit more money. It is not. So women care about this stuff. And in the same way in the work that I’m doing now, when women get a little bit more money, when they start to think about investing, they want to invest in their families, in their communities.

[00:26:16] They want to think about how they can uplift women and girls. They want to support products and services that are targeted to women that address the needs that we have, that we have never had followed up on before. They want to make sure that they’re investing in a way that we’re offering a safe, sustainable environment to our children and our grandchildren.

[00:26:39] We care about the future generations and what we’re handing off to them. And we want our money to be in support of those things.

Sustainable Development Goals
—

[00:26:46] Ashima Aggarwal: Hi, my name is Ashima Agarwal. I am an intellectual property lawyer and litigator. I’ve spent the last 18 years of my career as in house counsel at an academic publishing company. I left in December to take a break and think about what I want to do with the second half of my career. Over the course of really my entire life, had been saving money very much under my father’s guidance. So he had been saying to me since I was 20 years old that I needed to start an IRA and he had been managing all my saved money for me.

[00:27:25] And I got to the point where I was thinking about my career and what’s next and really wanted to do a deep dive on my finances to think about what was possible. And came across the concept of values aligned investing probably in a Facebook group.

[00:27:42] Suki Wessling: The language of values aligned investing contains lots of jargon, so we’ll try to keep it to a minimum. But there is one term that Janine says is important to understand, and that’s Sustainable Development Goals, or SGDs.

[00:27:56] Janine Firpo: When I started doing this work and when impact investing first began, people were talking about investing your values. Well, what are your values? And a lot of those early conversations were about very intangible things like, well, I value family or I value integrity or I value community.

[00:28:15] Which are great. It’s great to understand that, but those kinds of words are not gonna help you make an investment decision. Sustain. The sustainable development goals are 17 objectives that were, developed by 35 countries and then codified by 193 countries in the United Nations in 2015, and they are very tangible objectives, each of which has specific metrics that are trying to be achieved. They are things like ending poverty, climate, clean climate, clean water, sustainable cities and communities, gender equity, um, education for all. These kinds of things, they’re very, very tangible. And there are governments, corporations, industries, individuals that are working to achieve these goals by 2030.

[00:29:12] They have become in a way a de facto standard within the impact investing space because they’re measurable and they are clear. And so when we teach women about values aligned investing, we introduce them to these goals and we suggest that they choose somewhere between one to five of them for their own investment thesis and their own investment opportunities.

[00:29:33] Because in this space, you’re going to have to make choices. You’re never going to get the perfect company, the perfect investment that hits everything you want it to hit. So you have to know what are your priorities and what are you going to, where are you going to give up one thing because you care more about another thing.

[00:29:52] Ashima Aggarwal: There was so much happening in our country and I was learning a ton because of the racial justice uprisings. I had just joined a nonprofit board myself. So I really was thinking about what is my role in my community and what is my role in this world beyond the work that I’m doing, the family that I’m raising, so my values are really to do what I can to support the communities that I’m a part of and I think a lot of the decision making that I’ve done has been driven by that, and by support I mean in whatever way I can, with my time, with my energy, with my financial resources, whatever that might be.

[00:30:39] Suki Wessling: You mentioned in your book that your advice is to choose five of them, more or less, to really focus on. And so the first question I had when I read that was, they’re all great goals. How do I choose?

[00:30:52] Janine Firpo: It’s true. They are great goals. So it’s like anything, you know, you, you go through them, you look at them, you pick the ones that mean the most to you. You put it away for a little while, you come back, you feel like, do those still feel right to me? And, um, I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, but I use a practice sometimes of feeling into something.

[00:31:15] So I, if I had like six, I would, um, Sit with each one for a little while and just feel into it and see how that fits with me. Um, but actually we have not had, in having done this now with over a thousand women, we’ve never had a woman say, I can’t pick just five. And some of them pick fewer. So, um, I think it is doable, but you’re right.

[00:31:40] They are all great. When you start really thinking about, well, what do I want to prioritize? It’s not as hard as you would think.

[00:31:48] Suki Wessling: Yeah. And it seems like they, they do overlap to a certain extent because decent work and economic growth overlaps with gender equity.

[00:31:57] Janine Firpo: Exactly.

[00:31:59] Suki Wessling: So would it be too personal for me to ask you what you chose, what, how you focus your own investing?

[00:32:07] Janine Firpo: I, it’s not too personal, and I was afraid you were going to ask me that, because I don’t remember exactly. I know gender equity is definitely one of them, and then I think my others are, so that’s number 5, and then I think the others are like 10, 11, 12, and 13, actually. So the others have to do with climate.

[00:32:26] They have to do with, um, sustainable cities. So I actually think there’s something really important in how we live and how we build the future. One of the areas that I’m really interested in is this idea of cradle to grave and how we think about what we’re producing and manufacturing, not just in The creation of it, but also what happens to it when we’re done and how do we start to have a more sustainable, recyclable, economy?

[00:32:55] So that’s a big piece of it for me. And social justice is part of it too.

[00:33:00] GG: I think what was really key for us was not getting paralyzed in that analysis because, you know, if you’re the kind of person that cares about homelessness, you probably also care about our climate, you probably also care about the environment growing income inequality, you probably also care about, uh, quality of education in this country, racial equity, gender equity, um, queer rights, uh, you know, all of those things, they’re sort of tied together.

[00:33:34] Suki Wessling: Janine Firpo’s approach, rather than separating values from moneymaking, connects them together. She connects clean neighborhoods to local banking or recycling to social justice. She says that the drive to make money ended up obscuring many of the old fashioned values that are now coming full circle as environmentalism.

[00:33:54] Janine Firpo: It’s like we have become such a society driven by consumerism and the goal of manufacturers is to create stuff that decays or breaks down quickly so that we have to go buy more. But the end game is that it all just ends up in the landfill.

[00:34:12] It ends up polluting things. I mean, when I was a kid, my dad used to fix stuff. Like if the toaster broke, my dad took the toaster apart and he fixed it. Can you imagine doing that anymore? I sort of feel like we need to go back to a time where things are actually, you know, where they work. I just read something the other day that made me happy.

[00:34:36] Um, which is, it sounds like about 10 percent of the clothing sales are now second hand goods. In part, that’s because people can’t afford new clothes, which is a terrible thing. But in part, it’s because people recognize that just this throw away mentality, particularly in the fashion industry, you know, the short use mentality is not what they want.

[00:35:03] So they are happily buying secondhand clothes rather than buying new. I hope that continues.

[00:35:09] Suki Wessling: Yeah. And, and I’ve definitely seen those sorts of, you know, my kids are both young adults and seeing those changes in young adult culture is really, really exciting, I buy some of my clothes from a company that takes back old textiles and promises to do something with all of them, even if one of the things is to grind it up and turn it into something, you know, but they, they, recycle everything they get back, which is really exciting.

[00:35:38] And my scientist father would have said earlier in his life, maybe he’s changed his opinion now. Dad, how’s your opinion? Um, he’s 91 and he was a chemist and he used to say, Oh, recycling

[00:35:52] Janine Firpo: Wow.

[00:35:52] Suki Wessling: it doesn’t make any sense. It costs more than it, than it costs to create something new. But now we’ve lived to the point where we see that we are actually borrowing from a bank that we didn’t. acknowledge the existence of. We didn’t acknowledge that we were borrowing money when we created all these plastics.

[00:36:12] Janine Firpo: Yeah. You’re, it’s a really good point. I mean, the microplastic issue is huge.

[00:36:16] Suki Wessling: Some of the advice you give in your book is really sort of common sense, but at the same time, it is radical in that it really forces women to face some things that maybe they don’t. necessarily on a daily level want to. And one of the things I noticed you recommend writing a written financial plan.

[00:36:37] What does writing down a plan do for you, even if you’re not someone who has a huge amount of money to invest? What, what does this do for you?

[00:36:46] Janine Firpo: Well, it’s like writing anything. It helps synthesize your thinking. It helps you get really clear on what you want. Yeah. In one of these plans, it talks about your risk. What is your risk appetite? So that you understand that. It talks about how you want to allocate your money, like how much do you want in cash?

[00:37:09] How much do you want in fixed income? How much do you want in stock? How much do you want in these other asset classes? Which is actually a very important decision. One of my financial advisor friends told me that how you choose to allocate your capital is actually more important to your longterm financial health than what you choose to invest in.

[00:37:30] So we focus a lot on what we choose to invest in and we don’t think about how we’re actually allocating our money. So it helps you think about that. It helps you clarify your values or if you’re doing this yourself, it’s a tool for you to base your investment decisions on. It makes those investment decisions easier.

[00:37:49] And it’s something that you can go back to and change over time. If you have a financial advisor, it’s something you can share with your financial advisor. When women go through our core curriculum in Invest for Better, they actually walk out of it with an investment policy statement, which is what you’re talking about.

[00:38:07] So it’s part of the process and they develop it as they go along in conversation with other women.

[00:38:12] Suki Wessling: You’re listening to the Babblery’s episode on women and investing. When we come back,

[00:38:18] GG: I think it kind of makes sense that we’ve come to the conclusion that at the end of the day it’s, it’s a dog eat dog world. It’s look out for yourself, you need to make some money and not be a Pollyanna hippie who’s also trying to think about, you know, the planet or people.

[00:38:38] Suki Wessling: Did GG really say that or is there more to it?

[00:38:41]

[00:38:41]

Segment 3: You’ve got some money, where do you put it?
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[00:39:26] Suki Wessling: I’m your host, Suki Wessling. We’re exploring the idea of values focused investing with Janine Firpo, whose book Activate Your Money is aimed at women who don’t want their money to be working at cross purposes with their advocacy work.

[00:39:39] We’ve been listening to women who have taken part in the learning circles managed by Janine’s organization, Invest for Better. We turn now to one of those women who has a unique relationship to her family’s money as a full time manager of their philanthropic work.

[00:39:53] Mary Hawkins: My name is Mary Hawkins. I am a individual philanthropist and impact investor. I’ve been working at that full time really for the past five years or so and I am a member of Invest for Better. My journey to become an impact investor, uh, started with my interest in philanthropy. So as I became more involved and more knowledgeable about philanthropy and joined some philanthropy groups to, Continue that learning journey. I learned about impact investing through them and I really was concerned that I didn’t want any investment dollars I had to be at counter purposes to what I was doing with my philanthropy.

[00:40:43] Suki Wessling: Janine’s book covers the usual topics you might think about when you think about investing, but it also moves into territory that’s unusual in books for small investors. I asked her about private investing, in which an investor puts up money for a business rather than investing in stocks and bonds.

[00:40:59] This is a particularly unusual topic to cover in a general interest book because such investing is usually done by the very wealthy. But Janine has a different point of view.

[00:41:09] Janine Firpo: One of the reasons why I wrote the book the way I wrote it is because I feel like all of the financial information we get is such a thin slice of knowledge. And I wanted women to have access to as much as I could give them, based on my 30 plus years of investing and based on the knowledge of all the women who helped me write that book.

[00:41:29] I was in my probably late fifties when I learned that there was even such a thing as private investing. When I learned that I could even consider The idea of being an angel investor and investing directly in non publicly traded stocks. Whenever anyone ever talked to me about investing, whenever I read anything about investing, it almost exclusively talked about the stock market.

[00:41:55] It’s like the stock market, the stock market. But you know what? If you look at the way rich people invest, they are not big investors in the stock market. They’re doing a lot of private stuff. As I started to learn a little bit about more about how wealthy people invest, because I started knowing those kinds of people, it’s like, wow, this is interesting.

[00:42:16] And so private investing I now do, and I think it’s important, particularly for women, because female cEOs in this country get two percent, a little over. 2 percent of all the venture capital that is invested in startups. 2%. and people of color, women of color, it’s even worse. It’s like a percentage of a percent. It’s so tiny, it’s ridiculous. So, if we are going to empower female entrepreneurs, if we are going to empower businesses that are actually developing solutions, tools, things for women, medical solutions for women, I mean it’s shocking to me that we don’t have more research on different kinds of ailments that affect women.

[00:43:05] We don’t, because men aren’t interested in doing that research. We need to support the women who are. And so for those women who have the ability and have the capital to put some of it into private investing. It’s so, so important to be able to put more women into positions of power. It’s so important to be able to give more women who are leading companies the money they need to do that.

[00:43:28] So it’s really important for that. It’s also actually on a personal level, really fun. I mean, some of the most fun that I’ve had in my investing is getting to know these like amazing female entrepreneurs out there who are just doing, um, incredible work and getting to know them and learn about them and hear about their passion and follow them and put my money to work behind them has been an absolute joy.

[00:43:54] So mostly private investing is for accredited investors, which means that you either have to make 200, 000 a year as an individual or 300, 000 a year as a couple, or you need to have a million dollars in net assets, excluding the value of your home.

[00:44:10] If you’re in the financial industry, you can be an accredited investor and so on and so on, but more or less. Private investments are more available for accredited investors than for non accredited investors who don’t meet those criteria. But even for non accredited investors, you can use crowdfunding platforms to invest in companies that you care about.

[00:44:29] And one of the things that’s really interesting to do is to invest in companies in your own community. I’ve done that and it’s been really fun.

[00:44:38] Suki Wessling: You also mentioned a lot about, keeping your money in your local community. And one thing you talk about is instead of going with the big, well known banks, going with local banks. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about why. And also a little bit about risk, because I know a lot of people think, Oh, well, isn’t that more risky?

[00:44:59] Janine Firpo: So the why goes back to how is your money invested? And so while you may not think about your savings or your checking account or CDs or things like that, that you own as investments, they actually are. Because every dollar you have, every dollar you’ve put somewhere for safekeeping, every dollar you’ve invested, Somebody is using it for something.

[00:45:23] And personally, I want to know what they’re using it for. I want to know what they’re doing with my money. And I have no visibility into that with any of the major banks. And when I do hear about some of the things that they’re doing, it doesn’t make me really happy. So I have moved all of my assets into two local financial institutions.

[00:45:42] One of which is actually established as a triple bottom line bank, and they are providing, both of these groups are providing loans. to underserved populations in my community to help them get school loans, home loans, car loans, the things that they need to improve their lives. The big banks don’t do that.

[00:46:05] So I know that the money that I have in the bank is actually helping my community. And one of my banks even sends me updates from time to time about things that they’re doing with the money that they have. So that is really powerful. Your money is a safe. in a financial institution that is, under FDIC authority or under something called NCUA, the National Credit Union Association.

[00:46:30] So both of those institutions safeguard our investment, our savings, up to two-hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Most of these local banks are either FDIC or NCUA, if they’re a credit union, approved and certified, and they are, your money is safe. So, no, you’re, and, and actually in some of the biggest meltdowns of the big banks that we’ve had, the smaller banks have survived that.

[00:46:58] So you definitely want to be sure if you put money into one of these institutions that they are FDIC or NCUA. um protected But then you’re good.

[00:47:08] Mary Hawkins: When you’re, involved with a group with other women and they’re, and they’re sharing their knowledge and expertise or questions or roadblocks that they ran into it’s, it’s a very helpful space to, you know, even, even a group together can try to help solve an issue that somebody has run into or have suggestions to try something else.

[00:47:27] Suki Wessling: I was surprised to learn about how popular investment clubs are when I read Jeanine Firpo’s book, but not surprised that they’re popular with women. It’s common for women to seek out small groups for activities. A cultural holdover from communal kitchens and childcare, I suppose. The women I interviewed all joined clubs formed by Invest for Better, but Janine’s introduction to investment clubs happened much earlier.

[00:47:51] Janine Firpo: Back in the early 90s, there was a group of women from the Midwest who got together in a club to teach themselves how to invest in the stock market. Actually, they started in the 1980s because at the time, That’s what you did, right? That’s what my mom did.

[00:48:06] That’s what I did as an early investor is I bought individual companies in the stock market. So they got together, they started investing that way and they ended up writing this book called the Beardstown Ladies. And that book did the pre internet equivalent of going viral. And it resulted in literally tens of thousands of women Investment clubs sprouting up all over the country and I was in one of those.

[00:48:31] I was in one in San Francisco. We called ourselves Fog Bank. We’d get together every month at somebody’s home. We’d have dinner, we’d have wine and then we’d get down to the business of figuring out what we were going to invest in. And I had a blast and I was in that for several years and then things happened.

[00:48:49] I moved. I have been in investment clubs two more times since then and I have to say that every time I have learned more from being involved in those clubs than I have learned almost any other way. And they were fun. And I built relationships. So when I was writing Activate Your Money, I really thought about it as a way that women could use the book to put themselves in investment clubs, book clubs.

[00:49:15] We actually have a free curriculum online that you can use to run a book club using Activate Your Money. And while I was writing the book, I met another woman named Ellen Remmer, who’s from Boston. And she was actively putting women into investment clubs to teach them how to invest in alignment with their values.

[00:49:36] And so when my manuscript was done, Ellen and I decided it’s time to join forces. And so we came together, we took my book, her Clubs, and we created Invest for Better, which is a nonprofit that we spun out on September 15th, 2021. And we have been putting women into small groups since then, teaching them how to invest their values using elements of my book and, other curriculum that we’ve developed over the last couple of years.

[00:50:06] And women love it.

[00:50:07] Mary Hawkins: I also have just not been shy about asking anybody I meet in who’s not in interested in impact investing. you know, I, I’ll ask, I’ll come right out. You have no, females on your board. Why not? Or your board is all white people. Why is that? You know, I’ve just, I’ve, I’ve lost my shyness in that realm.

[00:50:25] Janine Firpo: They feel so empowered and heard. They love having the opportunity to actually talk to other women in a safe space about this subject. It’s something that most of them have never done before. I was just in Philadelphia and there’s a group of women there who had created a club. They all came together. We met together.

[00:50:48] There were a group of women who are thinking about forming some new clubs. The level of enthusiasm they had and excitement about both the relationships they’re making with each other, as well as what they learned and the investments that they’re making. were really heartening. It was just great to see what they have done and where they’re planning to go.

[00:51:08] So I think it’s all of those things. It’s community and relationship. It’s knowledge building. It is. confidence building and it’s just, it’s fun. They’re having fun.

[00:51:20] Suki Wessling: And that’s always important.

[00:51:22] Janine Firpo: Absolutely. Money should be fun. I mean, you know, that’s the thing we think about money as this scary, horrible thing. If we have a lot, maybe we feel really guilty about it, that we shouldn’t have it. If we don’t have enough, we’re, we feel bad and under pressure. Um, It’s always this thing that’s sort of hanging over our head in some way or the other.

[00:51:48] And it’s not a topic we feel comfortable talking about. It’s not a topic we want to share with others. I, I think they say that people are more reluctant to talk about money than they are about sex. It’s crazy. I mean, If we want to be smart, if we want to be successful financially, if we want to grow our wealth, the way we’re going to get there is not figuring this all out ourselves. I would much rather get on the phone with a couple of women and say, what did you do in this situation? Or how would you think about that and have them help me make those decisions or learn from them? Much, much, much rather take that approach. So we just try to help women do that.

[00:52:32] GG: if you think about the erosion of our social networks, of our pensions, you know, of our health care, of our education, you know, free and high quality education that was once available in our country, if you think about the erosion of all of those public goods, and at the same time, the example of you you know, the billionaires who are only prioritizing profits. I think it kind of makes sense that we’ve come to the conclusion that at the end of the day it’s, it’s a dog eat dog world. It’s look out for yourself, you need to make some money and not be a Pollyanna hippie who’s also trying to think about, you know, the planet or people.

[00:53:16] Janine Firpo: I think it starts with some inspiration. It starts with understanding what’s possible. It starts with understanding what’s possible for yourself as an individual, and then what’s possible for us collectively. Because I think that’s where there is a lot of hope. The world for better or for worse, whether we like it or not, is driven by money.

[00:53:39] And that money has been controlled for a very long time by a relatively small group of men. And they made up the rules. And those rules excluded us. It doesn’t have to be that way anymore. In fact, because of the transfer of wealth that we talked about earlier, things are changing. And we as women now have the power to step into that.

[00:54:02] Ashima Aggarwal: Taking the time to really think about what my relationship with my money was, where I had learned that, and then to give myself permission to think about it in a completely different way and decide what that was going to be has been incredible, it has given me so much peace of mind about my money that I just didn’t have before

[00:54:28] GG: So how do we earn our money in a way that is more aligned to our values?

[00:54:33] Mary Hawkins: always looking for something that’s women led or in some way is benefiting women through the services or products, that it provides. We’re also looking for, companies that are having a positive environmental impact or not a negative one. So maybe the circular economy or, clean energy. Things of that nature.

[00:54:54] Ashima Aggarwal: I have a 14 year old. I think a lot about, money and teaching my child about money and the role that money is going to play in their lives.

[00:55:06] GG: So it’s been quite a journey. I have loved it. learning about this, sharing, you know, what we’re experiencing and just becoming really an evangelist for this type of information.

[00:55:18] Mary Hawkins: The boat needs to be rocked.

[00:55:20] GG: I signed up and just have not looked back since.

[00:55:24] Janine Firpo: And we have the power to decide. What are the rules of money going forward, what’s the value of money going forward? What do we want our money to support going forward, and how can we collectively start investing what we have? in ways that support that future, that future of community, that future of women, that future of sustainability, that future of justice.

[00:55:53] How can we use our capital for that? And when you think about what is possible there, that is super hopeful.

[00:56:04] Suki Wessling: Thanks to Janine Firpo for sharing her work with us. You can find more information at investforbetter. org. Thanks also to Mary Hawkins, Genet Gimja, and Ashima Agarwal for sharing their experiences. You can find GG’s podcast at progressivepockets. com. The song, Pinky, is by Stevia Sphere on Bandcamp. Thanks for listening.

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