0:06  

Stephanie McCullough: Welcome to Take Back Retirement, the show for women 50 and better, facing a financial future on their own. I’m Stephanie McCullough, and along with my fellow financial planner, Kevin Gaines, we’re going to tackle the myths and mysteries of “Retirement,” so you can make wise decisions toward a sustainable financial future. Through conversations and interviews, you’ll get the information and motivation you need, to move forward with confidence. And we’ll be sure to have some fun along the way. We’re so glad you’re here. Let’s dive in. Coming to you semi-live from the beautiful Westlakes Office Park in suburban Philadelphia, this is Stephanie McCullough and Kevin Gaines of Sofia Financial and American Financial Management Group. Say hello, Kevin.

0:50  

Kevin Gaines: Hello, Kevin.

0:52  

Stephanie: Today we have a special guest. I’m excited to welcome Kylelane Purcell. Kyle has spent 30 years writing, editing, and managing communications in our industry, the investment industry. She worked as an analyst at Morningstar, which is a big well-known name in our world. She worked as a manager at American Century, and a VP of investment communications at T. Rowe Price. Then she started her own firm for cell communications in 2005. She’s really taken a huge interest, as we’ll find out, in the sphere of sustainable investing. She is the lead on ESG oriented research and thought leadership at her firm. She’s also partnered with Ben Vivari to start this new sustainable investing initiative called Till Investors. Their mission is to empower sustainable investors with better information. They are the group that I partnered with on my Sustainable Investing Circles, the live webinars that I’ve been doing so far in 2022. I thought Kyle would be a perfect person to bring into our series of communications on values aligned investing. Let’s dig in. Well, Kylelane, welcome to Take Back Retirement.

2:02  

Kylelane Purcell: Thank you so much. And you can call me Kyle, it’s a little bit less of a mouthful.

2:06  

Stephanie: All right, we will do. Tell us, first of all, what do you do today?

2:11  

Kylelane: I’ve run a company for the last 17 years that does financial education and communication work. That’s just called Purcell Communications. Because I’m a big believer in the value of information, the value of a better education. The financial industry does not have a great reputation for explaining what they do clearly. I think that reputation is earned, right? Part of what I’ve done in my time has been to try to work with clients to improve and simplify and make things a lot less jargony and more clear. Over the course of time, I personally have been very interested and very involved in sustainability strategies, sustainability investing ideas. In recent years, me and my sort of partner, Ben Vivari, we’ve co-founded an initiative, a separate sort of business to focus on helping advisors and their clients as well as just individual investors everywhere to understand what sustainable investing is, and if you’re interested in it, how to do it the right way. That’s been a big thing for us. That initiative is called Till.

3:26  

Stephanie: Very cool. When did you start getting interested in sustainability? Tell us a little bit about that journey.

3:33  

Kylelane: Personally, I’m just interested in it by nature. To me, business is not really about making a ton of money. That’s maybe just a personal perspective. What interests me about money is what it can do, and how it can benefit people and communities. My mother loves that quote, she says it all the time, “Money is like manure. It’s only good if you spread it around.” That’s sort of a personal lesson that I grew up with. I’ve always really loved that idea. How can you get the most value out of money? How can money make things work better for more groups of people? That’s always been an interest to me, being in the financial industry for a long time. There’s been sustainable and responsible investing trends for as far back as I can remember, I’m getting a little bit old now, I’ve been involved in this since the 90s. Even going back that far, there’s definitely been interest in it. But there’s also been a lot of pushback about, is it really the right way to use money? Is it really such a good thing for investors to be focusing on? I’ve heard all those different points of view. But I continue to believe that there is a lot of value in this and I think that time has begun to show that that’s true. I think this is the moment to really start looking at what responsible and sustainable investing can be, and why it’s useful for people to be looking at.

5:08  

Kevin: Let me ask you a question because we’ve done a few of these episodes talking about sustainability and ESG. One thing that’s come out is everybody looks at it a little bit differently and has a slightly different thought. How do you look at ESG, as far as maybe not what’s important to you, but which ones do you tend to focus on any portions or think more of?

5:33  

Kylelane: That’s a really great question. Because the thing that is so interesting, and so challenging about ESG, is that it really is about your individual point of view. A lot of times, historically, when you’ve gone to create a financial plan for yourself, you bring a few pieces of information, what’s your risk tolerance, how much money do you need, what’s your specific goals, right? And you build a plan around those simple things. To do ESG, to do sustainable investing well, you really have to come at it with a lot more information. What do you care about? If you’re talking about sustainability or do you want to have an impact with your investment dollars, what kind of impact are we talking about here? Do you care about a lot of different kinds of concerns? Or do you care about one topic, one theme, in particular? Are you about climate change? Are you about improving gender diversity? What’s your style? Do you want to completely not invest in any business that does things you don’t like? Or are you more interested in supporting new businesses that are trying to change things, there’s a lot of different kinds of information than has been the case in the past, that you really have to look at for yourself. That conversation between individuals and their advisors has to change a little bit, it has to broaden a little bit in order for the sustainable investor to really find something that’s suitable for them. You could say that it’s more complicated, which I suppose that it is, but it’s really changing the questions that you ask, and thinking a little bit more broadly about what you care about, and what you want your dollars to do. 

7:17  

Stephanie: You’re saying that what occurs to me is, it’s almost the same questions you would ask about charitable giving. Where do you want to give? What causes do you want to support? And how actively involved do you want to be? Do you want to write a check once a year? Or do you want to really dive in and get to know what’s going on and see the impact of your dollars and all that?

7:36  

Kylelane: That’s exactly right. The thing that’s great to me about sustainable investing, or one of the reasons I find it compelling is that you go through that conversation for your charitable contributions, your donations, but what if you could go through that same set of questions, and then make an investment, and then have a return, and then make another investment, and then have a return and making another investment, and all of those investments are being driven by kinda the same set of values as you would with a donation. You can really expand the impact that you can have as an individual, if you go through that same set of questions about the investments that you’re making.

8:16  

Stephanie: Because instead of the dollars just leaving your wallet, or your control, one time and being gone, they’re still under your purview, and you can redirect or…

8:26  

Kylelane: Exactly, you put them out there, they could do some good in the world, then you get a return. Then you get to decide again, where you want your impact to be next. It builds up and creates a lot of opportunities for empowerment. Obviously, no individual investor is going to change the world. But I think as there’s a lot of individual investors who can make those kinds of choices, and together, it really makes a huge change in the way that businesses think about their shareholders and think about the questions that they need to answer and think about the business practices that they are promoting.

9:05  

Kevin: Let’s switch gears a little bit. Now in previous episodes, we’ve talked to people and they invest in different ways to get their ESG exposure. What are your preferred vehicles to get these? Just typical retail offerings that most of us would use or do you use other private investments?

9:26  

Kylelane: The most important thing to me is that people find investments that are suitable to what they’re interested in. That’s the most important thing. I can give you an example of what I think is most suitable for me. What I would say is that, there are funds. I’m thinking about mutual funds and ETFs here, mostly. There are funds and ETFs that do integration. They don’t really have a very different approach strategically to what they want to invest in. But in addition to asking financial questions, they also ask questions about what are the governance practices of this firm? What is their social impact? What is their environmental impact? They’re broadening their perspective there. There are also funds and ETFs that are more theme based or more focused. We want to invest only in companies that are addressing climate change issues, or we only want to invest in companies that have more than 50% gender diversity on their board of directors. Personally, I like the integration approach. I like the idea of being able to put my money with a professional investor who is asking all the companies these tough questions. I don’t think there’s anything wrong necessarily with wanting to do a more concentrated thematic approach. It’s what appeals to me. I will say, though, that one of the big questions is active versus passive. I was looking at these statistics yesterday. I think about two thirds of the money that’s going into sustainable strategies in the US is still going in passively, which is fine. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, personally, I would prefer a more active approach. Because if you’re going to have professional management, I would rather put it with professional managers who are actively thinking about these questions, these environmental, social and governance issues, because it changes a lot, it changes fast. The passive strategies can say, well, we’re going to invest with an index that has the screens or switch to it. Two years from now, those screens may be really out of date. You don’t know if they’re really keeping up with the times and the best ideas out there. You have to look for the right companies that are doing this well, but I would prefer to stick with a company that’s got active funds, where they’ve got a research team that’s really staying on top of changes and data, changes in strategy, and can give you the best shot.

11:58  

Stephanie: Just to back up and define for our audience active versus passive. When I think about it in the general investment sense, a passive manager, I always think of Vanguard, which is right down the road from our office, an index fund for the S&P 500 literally buys the 500 companies in there, and then they don’t spend a lot of time and money researching, do we think Coke’s going to do better than Pepsi, whereas an active fund manager, investment manager is doing that company level research and picking the ones that they think are the best and avoiding the worst. Kyle, in the ESG context, what additional factors is the active manager looking at it?

12:41  

Kylelane: Let’s take the example of an environmental set of data. I think we all are sort of familiar with terms like carbon footprints, or greenhouse gas emissions. That’s data out there that, for the most part, people have heard of. You can go to any company and say, What are your greenhouse gas emissions? What is your carbon footprint? And you can compare that to other firms in the industry. There are plenty of strategies out there, including index strategies that are doing that right now. However, if you pay attention to developments in this field, you see that there are companies coming out all the time, really super genius people coming out with incredible new datasets that are looking more deeply at what activities a company is doing, how they’re executing their strategies, what choices are they making about transportation about the vendors that work with them. Are they as environmentally friendly as the main company is, or is a company just pushing their sort of environmental challenges off to vendors and then claiming to be clean themselves? There’s a lot more information and data and it’s evolving really rapidly. You need to have people that can stay on top of that.

14:11  

Kevin: I also imagine that one of the issues with passive is because it tends to be very simple as long as you meet these certain criteria, then boom. They would be much more subjective to issues of greenwashing, or pinkwashing, or various other fake ESG or exaggerated ESG impact.

14:34  

Kylelane: I would agree with that in general. Now, to be fair, there are definitely indexes out there, I’m thinking of the Just Index, which I think connects with Morgan. I think Morgan Stanley has some ETFs that are based off of the Just Index or there are a few of them that are out there that are I think they’re very good quality and it would be unfair to necessarily label them as being susceptible to greenwashing. because the people who run the index are doing a very good job of trying to stay on top of the best data. But I would, as a general rule, agree with you. Greenwashing is a problem. There is no shortage of companies that are trying to make themselves look good and make their data look good, but are moving the data and moving the numbers around. We don’t have a high carbon footprint, but that’s because our vendors do and we’re not talking about them right now. Right? I’m not sure I’m coming up with a good example right now. But I would certainly agree that without a human brain, and human set of eyes, looking at what is really happening in a company and evaluating that information in a wider context, it’s really easy to game the system. A lot of companies do.

15:51  

Kevin: Yeah, that’s definitely been a recurring theme during this series we’ve been doing Stephanie, of greenwashing, and talking about the different games that some companies want to play or people play with those companies.

16:06  

Kylelane: I will say this, though, about greenwashing. Because I know that greenwashing is a big concern for a lot of people that are both in this industry, and just everyday investors. I tried to talk with individual investors as much as I can, much to their annoyance, about what their perceptions are. It’s interesting to me how many people are really familiar with the concept of greenwashing, and are like, I don’t know if I really need to get involved in this, because how am I going to tell what’s greenwashing or what’s not greenwashing? And I think that’s a totally fair concern. But I will say this, one of the things that you have to look at with responsible sustainable investing is it is an opportunity for people to vote with their feet. The statistics that I saw yesterday were that I think that total assets in ESG oriented funds, which is the technical term for these sustainability funds, more than doubled in 2021. I’m trying to remember what the specific numbers are. Sometimes it’s hard for me to keep track of all that. But it went from two and a half trillion to 4.9 trillion or something like that. It was a huge, enormous shift in one year. Let’s say that 25 or 30% of that new money went toward funds, or companies that are maybe overstating their ESG, bona fides, right? That’s still changing the industry. There’s still so much happening, and so many expectations that are going with all this new money in this field, that it’s changing the behavior of companies. Companies cannot get away with not answering questions anymore. It’s almost like there’s some competition now, especially with media and institutional investors, and some of the banks out there, they’re asking those tough questions, companies need to be ready for it. The fact that there’s all this movement happening, I think it’s going to shake the greenwashing out pretty quickly, with or without regulation or other things, it’s going to make it really tough to be as successful for very long, if you’re caught greenwashing.

18:30  

Stephanie: For someone who’s thinking, Oh, my gosh, I don’t have that much money in my retirement account, or I only have one or two ESG funds, is it even worth it? What would you say to them?

18:41  

Kylelane: I say everything you do is worth it. Every dollar that you put into this is worth it. I’m coming from a perspective of I think promoting sustainable investing is a grand thing. Because I’m a big believer in accountability. I think one of the things that large businesses have been able to do over the past couple of decades is, Hey, as long as we’re adding another penny or two to our quarterly earnings, we can do anything we want, right? We can mess with customers, we can make life harder for employees, we can mess up our communities, we can do anything we want, as long as it adds another penny to the quarterly earnings. I don’t think that that’s accurate. I don’t think that’s a good long term strategy. To me, sustainable investing is a vote for accountability, right? These companies need to be accountable to their employees, they need to be accountable to their communities, to their customers. I think every dollar that goes toward strategies that are focusing on those kinds of issues is another vote going in the right direction as far as I’m concerned. But you don’t have to put a million dollars or you don’t even have to put all of your money in sustainable strategies. I think it’s perfectly valid to take a little bit at a time, try something, see what your experience is with that and then decide if that makes sense for a little bit of your money or for a lot.

20:05  

Kevin: I’d actually echo your point, what do you think of this theory that it’s also just the bigger the marketplace is, the more dollars that are going into ESG strategies, even if they’re not perfect. It’s almost a virtuous circle. Let’s face it, our industry is very much a copycat type industry, these firms see dollars coming into a particular theme or sector or strategy or whatever, we can all testify to the fact, you’re going to quickly see several other companies jump in with similar products. If we’re lucky, they’ll even start doing it better.

20:43  

Kylelane: I’m 100% on board with that. The virtuous circle, that’s exactly the right language, I think. You start to see these companies competing with each other a little bit, they know that there’s a lot of money out there, that they can tap for their investment needs, for their financing and funding needs. They know that they have to tell a better story than the next guy in order to get some of that money. It creates that virtuous circle. The most important thing is that we move toward a place where being concerned about the impacts you have as a business on your employees, on your customers, on your community, is relevant in your decision making. That’s the end goal here. The more that these boards, and these CEOs, and all of these businesses have to answer those questions, and have to tell those stories, the closer we get to that end goal.

21:41  

Stephanie: Since I think of Kevin as our traditional investment guy, let’s throw some of the traditional investment guy objections to ESG investing at you. Because when you and I were talking beforehand, you said you like dealing with those. Kevin, let’s pretend for a second.

22:00  

Kevin: Hypothetically.

22:03  

Stephanie: That you were ever skeptical about these hippie dippie portfolios, as you may or may not have called them at one point.

22:09  

Kevin: Me? Heaven forbid.

22:13  

Stephanie: What would one of your investment guy objections have been?

22:17  

Kevin: Well, I’m not going to go with the easiest one, which is, you don’t get good performance with ESG. I think we’ve eliminated that objection. We spent a lot of time already talking about it, well, it’s all hypocrisy, that there’s a lot of fake ESG out there. I’m really not doing any good. But let’s go with this one: it’s a fad. It’s like everything else with investments, you turn around, something catches people’s imagination, a ton of money goes in, and then boom, it’s gone. We never hear about it again. 

22:55  

Kylelane: That’s a good one. I got a good answer for you. Because I was talking to a wealth manager in Chicago, somebody that I’d worked with in the past, and I was having a conversation with him, because his company has moved toward, in a very aggressive way, into not just focusing on sustainable strategies, but also, he’s gotten very involved in community funding organizations and is trying to make a difference in his local Chicago area. I said to him, basically that same question, which is, how do we know that this is going to stick? Because I’ve seen a lot of fads too. I’ve been around a little bit. How do we know that people’s concern about this isn’t being driven by it’s the fad of the moment? And his answer surprised me. What he said was, it’s gonna stick because companies need to hire the next generation of employees. They are all competing over millennials, and Generation Z. That’s coming up pretty quickly here, too. Something like 85, 86% of millennials are very driven by aligning their decisions with their values. If you want to bring millennials into your business and Millennial talent, you have to as a business, not only say, oh, yeah, we care about these issues, you have to demonstrate it, you have to show it. A big part of sustainable investing is the phrase people sometimes use a stakeholder capitalism. Capitalism that’s not only driven by putting another penny on the quarterly earnings for the shareholders, but that tries to balance the needs of employees and the community and customers and shareholders and all of those things together in balance. I would say it’s been very unbalanced. But a lot of millennials have come up and they basically decided we’re not going to take that anymore. You can see the evidence of it all around us in this Great Resignation. It’s remarkable the degree to which companies are having to adapt, to keep their workforce intact. That thinking is really being driven by younger generations. We can say younger generations, you and I, because we maybe got a few gray hairs going, I feel a little gray hairs in the beard and around the temples a little bit. But these millennials are in their 30s. That’s your peak earning years, those are your peak work contribution years, they need these people. That was his point, this isn’t just investors wanting to do good for other people or the nice wanting to be nice to the nice. This is a real challenge for businesses to hold onto their employees. That’s going to drive a ton of change. It’s the bringing together of many different streams that are really creating change in a big way.

26:04  

Kevin: Another objection that has come up in the past is, we’ve covered this a bit, but I’d like to hear your take on it. The problem with ESG is we ignore a lot of stuff and some of that stuff may be good, or getting back to the return question, that stuff’s going to go up as well from time to time, and I want to be invested with that. But if I’m an ESG, I’m not going to be able to invest in 10% of the market, 50% of the market, whatever anybody’s particular perception is.

26:41  

Kylelane: I think that’s why I was talking earlier about how I prefer that ESG integration approach. Where you’re not saying, I never want to invest in oil and gas companies, and I never want to invest in gambling or whatever your personal flavor is, I think it’s more valuable to focus on, I want to invest with people who are asking tough questions to anybody who’s involved. That’s why I prefer the integration approaches, because you can ask legitimate questions. It’s my opinion that there is no bad industry out there. There are good oil and gas companies that are trying to do the right thing with improved technology, more responsible management of resources, more efficiency, that’s okay, as far as I’m concerned, it’s not so much about, oh, that that industry is good, or that industry is bad. I personally would prefer to invest with professional managers who understand those issues are really trying to stay on top of them and know the difference between companies that are doing things the same old way and don’t want to try to innovate or keep up with the times, and companies that are really trying to improve the way the business is being done regardless of industry. That’s my personal feeling about that. I don’t think it’s necessarily a terrible thing to say, Well, I don’t want to invest in oil and gas. If that’s really what your personal flavor is, then you have options out there, there’s a lot of options out there to do that. Yes, when the price of oil goes up, and those companies start making big earnings, you’re gonna miss out on that, and also, when they go down, you’re gonna miss on that too. It’s a little bit of 6 of one and a half a dozen of the other but the most important thing in my mind is that, in order to do responsible investing, you don’t have or sustainable investing, you don’t have to decide that some industries, you’re never going to invest in them.

28:48  

Stephanie: You’re almost going for the best actors in each one and then not skipping entire sectors or industries.

28:53  

Kylelane: That’s exactly right. There are innovations out there everywhere. The most important thing is to focus on the firms that are trying to innovate, trying to think in a responsible manner about how to balance the needs of all of their constituents, as opposed to the companies that get their fingers in their ears, and they’re going la la la la la, and they’re saying, we want to make money the way we’ve always made it and to heck with the rest of the world.

29:25  

Kevin: That’s really interesting, because there are and I think we’ve touched on this before that there can be trade offs within this space. What is the quote unquote, better company to use one of your examples, an oil and gas company that is very responsible, treats its waste the right way, and it’s very inclusive, as opposed to an electric vehicle maker that’s a frat house, so to speak. There’s going to be trade offs. Yes, you have a bigger carbon footprint with the oil company, but there’s a lot of other factors to consider that could make it get more appealing to some investors in this space. Correct?

30:09  

Kylelane: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I am also thinking about that electric vehicle manufacturer that acts like a frat house. It’s not very appealing to me personally. But the point, I think, in my mind that this is why in the work that we’ve been doing in our Till Initiative, where we’ve been trying to educate people about how do you find the right investment for your particular flavor of sustainable interest, or your particular set of values, you want to be looking for those things. This is, again, why I like the idea of having active professional investors involved, because it is very easy for a company to say, “Oh, well, we’ve got this very green product and that makes us great. Then don’t look at anything behind the scenes, don’t look at how we treat our employees or where the mining we’re doing to get our batteries is, don’t look at all that.” 

31:07  

Kevin: Pay no attention to the issues behind the curtain. 

31:10  

Kylelane: Exactly. I’m 100% with you on that.

31:14  

Stephanie: Are there any big or upcoming trends in the industry that our audience might not have heard of that they might be interested in since you’re an industry watcher and into the communication side that you might be aware of?

31:27  

Kylelane: I’ll tell you what really interests me, Stephanie, is there is a remarkable transfer of wealth that we are right on the brink of now. There’s actually two of them, because there’s a lot of conversation about how millennials are going to inherit all the money of the baby boomers. But what’s going to happen before that happens is that all that money is going to women. I’ve seen different statistics from different sources, but most sources I’ve looked at agree that within about five years, women will own more than 50% of the total wealth in the US. Sorry, Kevin.

32:18  

Kevin: I got nothing.

32:19  

Kylelane: I’m not sure it’s, I’m not sure it’s showing up in my bank account. But we’re working on it. But I think that that’s remarkable. Another thing that I would say about that is that I see women, especially I think the sort of over 40, over 50 set of women being a lot more interested and focused on what having that wealth means. What I mean by that is that, for the most part, in the past, when you had money in your investment portfolio, it only had one job, and that was just to make more money. But as these questions have come up about, can we invest more responsibly? Can we try to focus on more sustainable business practices? The questions that that money is trying to answer they started to grow. It’s certainly true that, again, it’s north of 85% of women who want to invest in a way that aligns with their values. And their values are, they’re a lot broader than just making more money. That’s a lot of money that’s going to be pushing in this direction. That’s a lot of influence that women are going to have, as we go forward. I’m very excited to see where that leads because I just know from my own career, that environments where there was a healthy blend of men and women were just very different from environments where they were exclusively men, or exclusively women to be fair. I think when you have that diversity, you have better thinking, better ideas, better opportunities, and overall better management. I’m very excited to see where this leads. 

34:12  

Stephanie: Well, I’ll tell you about working with, very often as I do, women on their own. Very often they’d have inherited some money, and there is a feeling of responsibility, great responsibility. They want to be sure they’re being smart about it, but also, they’re taking care of the legacy of whomever is the right spouse, parents, sister, whomever had this money, earned this money that is now theirs. I’m not saying women haven’t earned their own money, of course they have. But this transfer of wealth, there is a feeling of this mantle that has been laid on them. I’m excited personally, because I think sometimes there’s guilt that comes along with it also, who am I to now have this money? Whatever size it may be. It could be $10,000. It could be $10 million. But sometimes there’s still this guilt.  Sometimes the solution is, Oh, I’ll give it away. Well, you don’t have to, you could also look out for your own and your family’s financial security, while you’re also making steps to make the world a better place. I think that gets more women interested in investing, and addresses some of this feeling of responsibility we have.

35:19  

Kylelane: I would say, because I’m a bit old and in this industry, and I think it’s worth pointing out that if you really go back and you look at the history of the financial industry, it’s never really been structured in a manner that was all that welcoming to women. 

35:40

Stephanie: You think?

35:41

Kylelane: I do think.

35:43

Stephanie: I would agree.

35:44  

Kevin: I thought we’ve done an excellent job.

[laughing]

35:49  

Kylelane: I can pull my punches a little bit here. 

35:51

Kevin: Swing away.

35:52

Kylelane: At the end of the day, women have not really been invited into those conversations for decades, decades and decades and decades. The focus of those conversations, the types of priorities and ideas and strategies that have driven investing in the past just haven’t really reflected the interests, or the values of women. That just is what it is. It’s not at all unexpected, that women who are sort of receiving inheritances now, or transfers of wealth into their world now, are sort of throwing up their hands, like I am now in charge of something that I have sort of been excluded from, for most of my life. How do I even get started with this thinking? Not to mention, if you are a woman who does want to bring your values and your beliefs into your decisions, that’s a conversation that even very few advisors are quite prepared to have, right now. That’s a big thing. So it can be really difficult to figure out where to start. But I would go back to what I said earlier, absolutely, you can be a philanthropist, you can find ways to use your money to support the causes and organizations that you care about. But there’s an awful lot to be said for supporting those same values in an investment environment where you can get money back, maintain the health and the financial well being of yourself and your family, while also having additional money to then go out and make additional impact investments for later. There’s a lot to be said for that, you can have a lot more impact over the long run if that’s something that you want to do, where you where you feel like I have values, I want those values to be reflected in the way that I use my money. This is the way to sort of maximize your power.

38:00  

Stephanie: Awesome. I love that. Well, I think that’s a perfect note to wrap up on. Of course, obviously, we could go on for days and days, because this is a fun topic and great people, but in the interest of not putting all of our listeners to sleep, Kyle, if people wanted to follow you, where could they find more information?

38:18  

Kylelane: I would say we are on Twitter as @Till, and we are on LinkedIn as Till and you can find our website on tillinvestors.com.

38:29  

Stephanie: Excellent. We have been working with Till to put on our sustainable investing circles series of webinars, which will likely go on in the future. We’ll definitely link to all these things in the show notes. Kyle, thanks so much for being with us today.

38:41  

Kylelane: Thank you so much for having me. This is super fun. Super fun for me.

38:45  

Kevin: Glad you could join us. OK, interesting, don’t you think Stephanie? It was good. The funny thing is, I actually got a few takeaways from this, but they were less ESG-centric and a little bit more broader focus. For example, I found it important, and this actually does connect the whole ESG conversation, what she was saying about, she’s investing in what works for her. It’s not some arbitrary standard, what she thinks she should or should not be doing, but actually sitting down, knowing what she wants to do, what she doesn’t want to do, and figuring out how to make that work for her. I thought that was really important.

39:29  

Stephanie: That’s one of the things that I connected with Kyle when I first met her is that she’s not one of these dogmatic, there’s-only-one-way-to-do-it people. She takes a very educational approach. She’s a communications professional, and let’s give people the information and knowledge they need to find their own, like she said, your own style of doing this. I love her pointing out that even the actions we take that we might feel on our own are small, are building this crescendo. Companies are changing their behaviors, you can already see not only investment companies, but companies that are being invested in right, the end, publicly traded companies are having to step up and not only report this data, but change their behaviors because investors want to go this way. I love seeing the actual impact of it.

40:22  

Kevin: Absolutely. What did you take away?

40:25  

Stephanie: She made the point that investing along the lines of ESG is a vote for accountability. I think that’s an interesting perspective. I remember taking economics in college, and it was all about value for the shareholders and improving the financials of the company. Then there could be these externalities, like, if you were polluting, there’s not really a financial cost to that. Or if you were treating your employees like crapola, and they were turning over as long as you had new employees, that wasn’t, there wasn’t a cost. I think this is an interesting way to work within capitalism, as an investor, to encourage better behavior and actually start to put costs on those behaviors that are less sustainable. Getting back to the whole sustainable thing. It’s like, treat your employees well, they’ll stick around a long time. That’s sustainable. Treat your community well, they won’t rise up against you. That’s sustainable. Don’t pollute the whole planet we’re living on right. I really love that word sustainable, because I think that’s the whole point, how long can we go on just squeezing more pennies out to improve earnings, without paying attention to the broader context in which we all live?

41:43  

Kevin: Right? That’s actually one of the benefits of whether it’s a fad or not, but this increased attention to these ESG issues, actually leads to more people, governments, whatever trying to find ways to quantify what they’re doing, how they’re doing it. By doing so it’s easier to come up with costs, the legitimate accounting cost of having to write a billion dollar check to the EPA, because we were dumping our garbage in the river. That’s something quantifiable that all investment analysts can get behind. Because yeah, in the past, I think some of the problems have been, it’s like, well, how do we account for that? Just pick some random? No, there’s actually more reporting either demanded by investors or the government or just internal desire to do a better job. It makes this whole concept easier, as well as assigning some real value to what’s being done or not being done.

42:51  

Stephanie: And then you know me, I love the whole conversation around women and money and how women tend to take a different approach when thinking about their money, and have not traditionally been invited into the halls of investing. What does it mean that there’s going to be this huge transfer of wealth and more women controlling more dollars? We all know, I think the world will be a better place in that instance. But it’s because of this alignment of values. Because women tend to think of the money more as a tool to do something, as opposed to a scorekeeping like, I’ve won, I’ve died with the most dollars.

43:25  

Kevin: Well, and this was actually the first thing I wrote down in our interview that for me to bring up was the saying her mother that Kyle’s mom had was, money’s like manure, it’s only good if it spreads around.

43:37  

Stephanie: I’m gonna read you the quote, because I like this quote, I use it in my talks. It’s a quote from Thornton Wilder, the playwright, he says, “Money is like manure. It’s not worth a thing, unless it’s spread around encouraging young things to grow.”

43:49  

Kevin: It’s one of those things that I heard at one point and totally forgot about. Now what she says he’s like, this is a great quote, because it highlights what money really is. This has been one of these themes throughout our entire podcast is, money’s a tool. That’s all it is, you’re going to use it for whatever you want to use it for. However you want to use it for, like you just said, it’s not keeping score. You have money, you want money for a reason, because you want to use it for whatever reason you want to use it for. But don’t lose sight of that. It’s a tool.

44:24  

Stephanie: That’s totally it, Kevin. Money on its own is neutral. What are we going to do with it, which is how we begin all our conversations with our clients. What’s going on with you? What are you trying to accomplish? All right, as usual, we could go on and on, but we are going to wrap it up there today. Thank you so much for being with us. We’ll talk to you next time. It’s goodbye from me.

44:45  

Kevin: It’s goodbye from her.

44:50

Stephanie McCullough: Be sure to subscribe to the show and please share it with your friends. Show notes and more information available at takebackretirement.com. Huge thanks for the original music by the one and only, Raymond Loewy through New Math in New York. See you next time.

45:05

Disclaimer: Investment advice offered through private advisor group, LLC, a registered investment advisor. Private advisor group, American Financial Management Group, and Sofia Financial are separate entities. The opinions voiced in this material, are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice, or recommendations for any individual security. To determine which investments may be appropriate for you, consult your financial advisor, prior to investing. This information is not intended to be substitute for individualized tax advice. Please consult your tax advisor regarding your specific situation.