Category: Anine Sus

To Think or Not to Think: The Financial Question

I hope you are all enjoying some crisp fall weather, wherever you are.

With my latest quarterly net worth check-in, I discovered that I have nearly doubled my net worth in the three years since I started tracking my progress! The beauty of compounding is at play here: The more money I have invested that is making me money, the more money it continues to make. It’s that simple!

Other than that, I want to update you on what I have been thinking about vs. what I have been (choosing) not to think about when it comes to my money lately. This is sometimes by design, as a behavioral finance trick. Each link in this list will take you to a category of articles on this blog for you to explore further.

  • Bank accounts—I think about them weekly, but don’t always check them that often. My checking account and regular savings account are my most visited; my two high-yield savings accounts are reviewed quarterly for my net worth update, and are regularly invested in whenever I have savings from a biweekly paycheck ✅
  • Budget—I don’t think about it as much as I used to; I have regular payments that aren’t accounted for in my budget ❌
  • Credit cards—I think about them a lot, sometimes multiple times per week. This is the primary focus of my finances: What am I spending and—when it comes time to pay the bill—how much do I owe? This is also a good way to prevent fraud, but your credit providers should be alerting you to any unusual activity ✅
  • Investments—I don’t think about them, but I check my Charles Schwab brokerage account periodically during market shifts (thanks for the heads up, AAII!) and review them for performance and potential deletions twice per year ✅
  • Retirement accounts—I don’t think about them because I check my progress quarterly, I have a system in place ✅

The aspects of my personal finance that regularly haunt me are my bank accounts and credit cards. These are top of mind since I handle them on a short-term basis, whereas my investments and retirement accounts are for the long term. The one area I need to improve is my budget, hence the “x” instead of the checkmark. At this point, it’s next year’s problem!

The state of my retirement accounts

My retirement accounts are doing well, especially when I don’t think about them! I still have my first 403(b) plan account with Vanguard from AAII, and it remains invested in the mutual funds I chose at the start of my retirement savings journey. My second retirement account is with Fidelity from my current job at Red Ventures. It’s a straight up 401(k), so now I have a fun collection of all these letters and numbers!

I’m actively contributing 5% of my salary to my Fidelity account on a biweekly pretax basis, meaning the money comes out of my paycheck before I even get to see it. Meanwhile, with my employer matching most of that contribution, I’m sitting on nearly $6,500 after over a year of steady contributions and positive returns!

I invested my Fidelity account in these mutual funds that were available to me, using the same weights I applied to similar funds in my Vanguard account: 30% invested in the T. Rowe Price Large-Cap Growth fund (TRLGX), 20% in the Fidelity Mid Cap Index fund (FSMDX), 20% in the Fidelity Small Cap Index fund (FSSNX), 20% in Emerging Markets II (ticker not listed) and 10% in the Principal Real Estate Securities Fund Class R6 (PFRSX).

When I invested in these funds back in fall 2024, two of them had higher expense ratios than I would like for my investments: the real estate fund’s was 0.81%, and the large-cap growth fund’s was 0.70%. My investing strategy is to find mutual funds or exchange-traded funds (ETFs) with expense ratios under 0.60%, otherwise we’re getting dangerously close to 1%, which is way too much to be giving any fund or money manager. Thankfully, the large-cap growth fund’s expense ratio has since decreased to 0.55%.

My petsitting venture

This year, I started petsitting cats and dogs. It took off when I started networking through the dogs, finding more animal friends to hang out with. My closest human friends also have some of the cutest cats ever, so I can’t resist spending scheduled time with them when they are required to pay attention to me 😂.

So far this year, I have made over $1,600 from this venture! Since I haven’t been as regular with saving this year as I would like, at the end of 2025 I plan to match the amount I’ve made from petsitting and move it into my emergency savings account.

When I initially drew up my rules for this savings account, I wanted to keep $10,000 in it at all times. However, I’ve learned since that I don’t really need that much money available, even for emergencies. I settled on maintaining my emergency savings at $7,000. In the current market environment, it makes more sense to keep money in my high-yield savings accounts so they can make more than the measly 0.01% interest my emergency savings will.

Some other financial decisions I made since we last talked:

  • I signed a two-year lease for my current apartment so I could lock in the increased rate of $1,450/mo. for the next two years to save myself another $50/mo. increase down the line
  • I chose my health insurance plan for 2026, and went with the lowest tier for around $30 per paycheck

I’ll be back in early 2026 for another portfolio review! Wishing you all a wonderful and safe holiday season.

More articles on rethinking retirement:
Retiring Early: Memoir or Fiction?
Should Young People Still Save for Retirement?
How Much Should I Contribute to My Retirement Account?

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Investing Through the Inferno

A midyear check-in light on the data, some charts and how it all feels.

There’s no way we’re already halfway through 2025—you’ll just have to bear with me as I run it back to April. You remember her, right? A time before it was 90 degrees everyday, before I thought I would burst into flames right on the concrete.

April was the beginning of my tour, Nick Cave in Boston, St. Vincent in New Haven, pour me another tequila soda. Then May in Texas for one suffocating minute, then the madhouse, then the grave. Just kidding—June was another story, but we did it to death, avoided the rain and the heat almost took us out completely. The Kills killed it three times until we prayed for mercy from the sun. No longer our god, we watched it sink behind the stage while the heat tore through Queens of the Stone Age’s set. We don’t even have to talk about how much my credit card statement was after all that, you get the idea!

Net worth & portfolio in the green

April was also when the tariffs brought everyone to me, asking what they should do with their investments. I told my friends, “Don’t look at your accounts,” and then opened every single one of mine to calculate my net worth as of the end of March. My strategy won’t be stopped by the nonsense! At the end of June, my Charles Schwab brokerage account is not only back to where it was before the announcement, but it has now surpassed that amount. I said, “Everything will be fine in, like, two months,” and thankfully, the numbers didn’t make a fool of me like they usually do!

Despite the ongoing destruction of the Earth and the people who live here, my net worth is increasing and my portfolio is profitable. I haven’t been checking my investments as often because I know it doesn’t matter what they look like now. All that matters is I’m keeping my money in the market so it will continue making me more money.

My portfolio of sustainable exchange-traded funds (ETFs) is performing well. When I checked their grades on As You Sow as of the end of June, almost all the ETFs had A’s and B’s. The Amplify Etho Climate Leadership U.S. ETF’s (ETHO) gender equality grade improved from F to B, removing it from the probation it was placed on after my last review. My Schwab U.S. REIT ETF (SCHH) maintains its gender equality grade of C—come on real estate sector, let’s get that up! One of my latest additions, the Stance Sustainable Beta ETF (CHGX), is now on probation with a gender equality grade of F. If the grade doesn’t improve by my next review in six months, the ETF will be removed from my portfolio. Since no changes are needed, my portfolio will remain untouched until then.

Finance charts? Sure, why not?

I have some new resources to share with you all, in the form of charts! I promise I’ll keep it light, but if you’re looking for a free website to track your investments and their performance, FinanceCharts.com is a helpful place for beginners to start. Here’s the Schwab U.S. REIT ETF’s price over the last year. I can see exactly when the beginning of April sent the holding downward, and I can see its steady climb back up to around where it was in March. I can also see that the ETF has some more recovery ahead if it wants to get up to its last high price from September 2024. The charts are interactive and you can select the time period you want to analyze. I don’t usually do much price analysis with my individual investments, but if I ever need more insight, FinanceCharts.com is waiting.

A line graph showing the price movement of the Schwab U.S. REIT ETF (SCHH) over one year, with data points indicating an upward trend and various fluctuations.

Source: FinanceCharts.com.

A few months ago, I read the book “Stikky Stock Charts” by Laurence Holt. For full disclosure, I was sent this book for free so I would review it. You can read my full review on Goodreads, but I found “Stikky Stock Charts” a helpful introduction to using charts. I was able to understand the purpose of them with very simple descriptions of different chart trends. The book itself is quite image-heavy, with a chart on almost every page. It covers significant historical events, like the meme-stock craze, and how certain stocks reacted at the time. This grounds investing in the real world, where it belongs. “Stikky Stock Charts” will be another resource to consult when I’m looking at a potential ETF for my portfolio.

Putting my investments on snooze

AAII taught me well, I can sleep at night. I don’t think about my money much anymore. Of course, I want to save more of it, but I also have to stay realistic. Everything keeps getting more expensive. My life is expanding, allowing more experiences in. This is the life I’ve been working toward, and I get to see the dividends—both literal and figurative—that are being paid out.

Here’s to your portfolio going up in the second half of 2025. I won’t wait this long to check in with you again, but I will wait for the temperature to fall a bit!

Learn more about my investing strategy:
New Year, New Investments, Same Strategy
PRISM Step 4: Selecting and Managing Your Investments
Midyear Portfolio Review and Finding an ESG Benchmark

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Investing in Sustainable Gender Equality in 2025

A new year, another portfolio rule and two new sustainable funds.

Welcome to 2025! Fun fact, 2025 is considered a “square” year since it is the square of 45 (45 × 45). I bet you never thought you’d get a math-related fact from me, let alone a fun one!

I saw a lot more green last year since my portfolio generally did well in 2024, but that was mostly due to only rarely checking my balance. The less I looked at my portfolio, the better it performed. After election results were announced, I peeked at my Charles Schwab brokerage account and saw I was profiting from the outcome. This unfortunate aspect of investing is always in the back of my mind as I reinforce why I maintain a sustainable approach instead of giving more money to large, harmful corporations.

As of December 27, 2024, only one of my holdings is in the red over the long term: the VanEck Biotech ETF (BBH), down 2.6% since being added to my portfolio in early 2023. My best performer is the Tortoise Global Water ESG ETF (TBLU), up 17.6%. This fund used to be the Ecofin Global Water ESG ETF (EBLU), but has since changed its name and ticker symbol. It was one of the first exchange-traded funds (ETFs) I bought back in March 2022 when I started this sustainable portfolio, making it my oldest current holding. Here’s a closer look at what it invests in:

Source: Tortoise Capital.

Unfortunately, the platform I use to grade my holdings on sustainability, As You Sow, gives Tortoise Global Water a D for fossil fuels and gender equality, disqualifying it from my portfolio. At least I’ll be selling this one on a gain!

The rest of my ETFs still have mostly A’s and B’s. The Schwab U.S. REIT ETF (SCHH) has a gender equality grade of C, which still qualifies for my portfolio. My latest addition, the Amplify Etho Climate Leadership U.S. ETF (ETHO), has performed well but grades D for gender equality. If this doesn’t improve by midyear, it will be my next deletion.

To avoid too much turnover, I’m adding a rule to my investing strategy. Since gender equality is the most difficult grade for sustainable funds to earn, instead of removing a holding when only its gender equality grade slips to D, there will now be a formal probationary period of six months for this grade to improve (accounting for the time between my reviews). The rest of the grades—fossil fuels, deforestation, civilian firearms, military weapons, the prison industrial complex and tobacco—should remain at A or B, with a drop to C qualifying them for deletion.

During my last portfolio review, I determined that I wanted to add another holding to the mix to bring my portfolio back to six ETFs for diversification purposes. On my search for a new ETF or two for my portfolio, I went with my tried and true process. I began on As You Sow, filtering first by a gender equality grade of C or higher, then adding grades of B or higher for the rest of the criteria.

A few funds focused on weight loss drugs caught my eye, specifically the Amplify Weight Loss Drug & Treatment ETF (THNR) and the Roundhill GLP-1 & Weight Loss ETF (OZEM). I know these drugs are poppin’ off, and I’m glad those who have struggled to lose weight finally have something that works. But I’m still not clear on their sustainability for the long term. I’m not a huge fan of pharmaceutical companies either, or the advantages they take with people’s lives. Both ETFs were recently incepted in May 2024, so they don’t have much performance data to analyze. They might be better candidates in the future!

Anine's sustainable portfolio changes: one deletion and two additions

Instead, I stumbled on two other ETFs that fit my strategy: the Vert Global Sustainable Real Estate ETF (VGSR) and the AXS Change Finance ESG ETF (CHGX). Vert Global Sustainable Real Estate has an expense ratio of 0.45%, below my threshold of 0.60%. Though it has an expense ratio grade of C compared to its peers, I have noticed this with many of my past holdings. Ultimately, the expense ratio itself is more important. Sustainable funds are going to cost a little more than their peers, that’s part of the deal! AXS Change Finance also has a grade of C for a slightly higher expense ratio of 0.49%. Vert Global Sustainable Real Estate has favorable recent and long-term performance, while AXS Change Finance’s performance grades aren’t as hot compared to its large blend category.

On the sustainability side, Vert Global Sustainable Real Estate has all A grades on As You Sow save for its gender equality grade of B—I’ll take it! AXS Change Finance has a mix of A’s and B’s, with a C for gender equality. I’ll be keeping an eye on that one, but I’m thrilled that I was able to find these funds for my portfolio. The process has become less grueling over the years, partly because I have figured out what to look for, but also due to sustainability becoming more embedded in the finance industry.

Next time, I plan to update you on my retirement accounts (yes, plural!) and net worth. More good news to come!

Wishing you all a prosperous 2025!

Explore this topic:
A Look at Top Gender Equality Funds
I read this so you don’t have to! Financial Feminist by Tori Dunlap
A (Very) Brief History of Women in Finance

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Setting Goals With an Uncertain Budget

Hi all, I know it’s been a bit since you heard from me! I was a little busy changing my entire life there for a second, but I’m back. I wanted to wait until everything settled, but that’s not really how life or money works!

I moved into a new apartment at the end of August, and I’m still not sure what my monthly expenses are going to be since I’m paying for cooking gas. Now that my gas meter is readable after the guy from Peoples Gas came by twice to join me in the treacherous, spiderwebbed, possibly rat-infested basement of my 107-year-old apartment building, and I can take baths again without water leaking into my downstairs neighbor’s bathroom, I’m looking at fixed expenses upward of $1,550 per month. On top of all that, I got a new job and now freshly qualify for their retirement account, so my income is also in flux due to those contributions. Once I know the details, you’ll know. Promise you that!

My uncertain budget isn’t going to stop me from setting goals, though. The more I allow money to live in its liquid form in my head, the more I feel like I can actually do something with it. I have also been carrying this new feeling that everything is going to work out, so I’m happy to share that energy with you.

I have two relatively short-term goals that I want to save up for. One is focused on skincare. Back in the day when I was a wee lass with terrible acne, I used to get facials consistently. I’d like to thank my mom for being so understanding and funding that venture, because it really helped my skin at the time. Now that I’m in my 30s, the evil acne hormones are back and I’m about at the end of my rope with them! One of my friends is getting facials regularly again, and I know it’s the only thing that will help my skin in the long run. I just recently changed my skincare regimen to almost entirely Korean products containing rice water—please save me and my microbiome!

My plan is to save up for six facials in 2025, accounting for $150 per facial plus a tip. Being generous with my future facialist and my savings, I’m rounding up to $200 per facial. It will also add a cushion for these savings should I want to spend this money on other skincare next year, or visit a dermatologist. This amounts to $1,200 I’ll have to save for this goal. Honestly, I’ve spent more on travel expenses in the past. I was always so worried about spending too much on skincare, it annoys me that I didn’t do this sooner!

The beautiful thing about setting goals is it changes my mindset. I’m putting this money aside for a specific purpose, so I can think about it as if the spending isn’t really cutting into my overall net worth. I would have spent this money anyway, but having a goal for it gives the spending more structure. Then, when I finally spend the money, it can instead be a gift I’m giving to myself. Here’s to clearer skin in 2025, sheesh.

My second goal is to save up for traveling to the East Coast a couple times next spring. You guessed it, the Kills are touring again! This time, they’re opening for their friends Queens of the Stone Age, a band I’ve always wanted to see live. Also, St. Vincent is opening for the man who gave her a name, Nick Cave. It should be a great year for concerts, and hopefully new music and a Chicago show from Banks! I still have some budgeting to do on this goal, but I’m going to shoot for around $2,000.

The Kills live at Webster Hall in New York City, New York, February 27, 2024

I love being able to afford to see my favorite people whenever I want. I wouldn’t be able to without all this personal finance work I’ve been doing. AAII’s teachings remain at the forefront of my investing strategy. I would like to thank president John Bajkowski, editor Charles Rotblut and managing editor Jean Henrich for their support of the blog from day one and for giving me this amazing opportunity to continue it. Stick around for more of my investing discoveries!

Read these next!
A Money and Music Memoir
The Carrie Finances: Honey, I Shrunk the Budget
My Payday Routine

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Under Budget and Overwhelmed: Real Talk on My No-Buy Year Journey

I’ve been dreading updating you all on my budget and how the no-buy year is going, because it’s not going great! However, I want to be transparent with you all about my finances and how I handle the times when I don’t want to think about money. I split my money feelings into two categories below in an attempt to compartmentalize them, similar to how I distribute my savings to multiple accounts so I can see my goals clearer.

Top

  • I came in under budget for May, which after an expensive first few months of 2024 was much needed.
  • I only overspent by about $50 in June!
  • The loan I took out last year to buy a new mattress is finally paid off, which makes some room in my budget.

Bottom

  • Though I’m actively spending on one of my goals—moving—I still have the psychological toll of watching my savings decrease.
  • My new apartment is more expensive, which stretches my budget a bit, and some of my utilities charges for September are unknown.
  • I bought some clothes that I didn’t really need but made my life easier. Clothes were on my red light list for the no-buy year, but I thrifted them to maintain my sustainable strategy in that area.

Whew, I feel better already now that we’re all on the same page. Grace Nevitt, who gave me the idea for the no-buy year, recently posted a video with tips for readjusting and refocusing on the no-buy strategy over halfway through the year (we’re so in sync!). She highlights how she has been engaging more in do-it-yourself (DIY) projects instead of using money to solve a problem—and rewiring that connection in your brain. One example is she wanted pink nail polish and didn’t want to buy it, but she conveniently had a red bottle that she mixed with a white bottle. Mixing them also made the consistency of the final product smoother.

Grace also mentions that she is community sourcing from family and friends and relying more on her “buy nothing” neighborhood group. I’ve been trying to do the same with my family and friends for odds and ends I’ll need for moving, which has taken some adjusting as a Very Independent Person.

Remember Your Why

Grace mentions that we should remember our initial reason for doing a no-buy year. Her “why” is that she wants to save up for a homestead in New Zealand, but throughout the year she started focusing more on her relationship with shopping and overconsumption. My “why” is that I want to save up for my goals and generally not accumulate more stuff (especially since I’m moving, my back already hurts enough!).

Without further ado, here is my budget for September:

Though my rent will be $100 more, I will finally have a dishwasher (please clap!), which will save me time and energy. Don’t tell the dishes, but I’ve kind of enjoyed washing them recently—a whole new level of adulthood unlocked. My new place is also closer to some of my friends, which will cut down on travel expenses. I temporarily stopped one of my subscriptions for a vitamin since I have enough of it to last me a while. My sole monthly subscription is Spotify, which recently increased to $11.99. My whole life in music is on there at this point, so I’m not going anywhere unless they completely change the program.

Most importantly, I thought it was time to increase my monthly savings amount. Now that my loan is paid off and I have a little wiggle room, I increased my savings goal from $500 to $530 to begin replenishing the savings I’ll be spending on moving. Grace emphasizes that if we don’t know what we’re spending on, we can’t see where the problems are and where we need to fix the rules of our strategy. Not only do you have to be transparent with your budget, but also with yourself. I want to focus more on having experiences in the second half of the year. Though experiences are technically on my yellow light list, I still have to live my life to make all this budgeting worthwhile!

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The Carrie Finances: The True Cost of Spending

“Money is not just money, it is a representation of time, of opportunity.”
—Cara Nicole

While I was finishing up my recent rewatch of “Sex and the City” and finally embarking on my first watch of the reboot “And Just Like That,” the algorithm plucked the perfect video out of the abyss and presented it to me: “Financially Auditing Carrie Bradshaw” by Cara Nicole on YouTube.

Much like my first Carrie Finances post back in 2021, Cara’s analysis was spurred by the episode in which Carrie goes to the bank and is denied a loan for being an “unattractive candidate.” After spending $40,000 on shoes alone, she only has $700 in her checking account and $957 in her savings account! (About $1,250 and $1,720, respectively, indexed to inflation from 2001 to 2024.)

In Cara’s video, she notes that Carrie’s shopping addiction laid the groundwork for today’s influencers who have normalized overconsumption. The root of that is having an emotional relationship with money. When Carrie slips and falls in a Dior store in Paris in season six and returns to her Russian boyfriend with multiple bags of merchandise, she says it’s because she was too embarrassed not to. If I slipped in a fancy store, I would simply remove myself from the entire block and never show my face again—and definitely not spend thousands of dollars because I felt bad! (One cookie could probably solve that problem, let’s be honest.)

I’m so glad Carrie is fictional so we can drag her. As Cara notes, “judging fictional characters? That seems like fair game.” In one scene, Carrie says, “When I first moved to New York and I was totally broke, sometimes I would buy Vogue instead of dinner. I just felt it fed me more.” Of course, Carrie is romanticizing her past, but let’s not sugarcoat poverty here. What she’s really nostalgic for is the beginning of her independence when there weren’t complicated relationships and a whole messy life to think about. Scarcity made her decisions simple: food or fashion?

It reminds me of the White Stripes’ song “Little Room”: “Well, you’re in your little room / And you’re working on something good / But if it’s really good / You’re gonna need a bigger room. / And when you’re in the bigger room / You might not know what to do / You might have to think of how you got started / Sitting in your little room.”

The White Stripes was a band that limited themselves to the point of liberation. By setting restrictions on the art they could make as a two-piece band, they created something entirely new. As Jack White’s solo career took off, he had more and more resources available to him, including an entire record label to manage. Without limitations, the music wasn’t grabbing fans as much anymore, and many of my friends eschewed his solo career altogether. I don’t think he’s ever been able to get back into that little room.

Cara also pushes the importance of having an emergency savings fund of three to six months of living expenses, which Carrie clearly doesn’t have. The closest she gets to investing is in the first episode of season six. She is invited to ring the bell for the start of trading at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on the first day that the New York Star newspaper, in which her column is published, begins publicly trading on the exchange.

Afterward, Carrie says to her friends, “It was so exciting, it almost made me want to invest in something!” Miranda chimes in, saying that she doesn’t invest anymore because it’s “too volatile” (even though she’s a lawyer?) and Carrie spits back, “Exactly, I like my money right where I can see it: hanging in my closet.”

I cringed watching this scene of four educated women deny that they needed to invest simply because it’s something men do. Yes, this was the early 2000s, but even Lois Frankel’s book “Nice Girls Don’t Get Rich” from 2005 had better lessons than don’t save and “just invest in clothes.”

Though this is fiction, we consume it—that’s the operative word. We consume this art and expect our lives to mirror it. This also goes for what we see on social media, what we overconsume because we see people constantly buying things that we believe are improving their lives. There’s more value in what you do with your life than what you have. The true cost of spending is what you’re not saving it for, what you won’t have in the future because you want to build up your life now. It’s a trade-off, but do you want to start strong, or end strong? I’m going to try for a balance of both!

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Midyear Portfolio Review: Rebalancing for Sustainability

When my midyear portfolio review came around, I knew I would be selling one of my holdings: the Global X Wind Energy ETF (WNDY). It’s my worst performer, and when I checked its sustainability grades on As You Sow as of July 1, 2024, the fossil fuels grade had slipped to C—time to kick this exchange-traded fund (ETF) to anywhere but my portfolio!

Since I’m removing a holding, I thought it best to find a replacement. I want to be able to maintain investments in at least five ETFs in my Charles Schwab brokerage account for diversification purposes. On the flip side, I have to keep in mind the limit on the benefits of diversifying my investments. Going way back to the first book I read about investing, fittingly titled “Investing 101,” author Michele Cagan, CPA, says that “it’s usually not advisable to have more than six or seven mutual funds at a given time, or you can start to counterbalance your efforts to construct a strong portfolio.”

I started my search for a new sustainable ETF where I left off—with the VanEck Environmental Services ETF (EVX). Last I checked, this ETF fit my strategy on As You Sow with all A’s except for a fossil fuels grade of B and a gender equality grade of C. It also had an attractive expense ratio at 0.55%. To my dismay, the gender equality grade fell to D, disqualifying it from my strategy. This solidifies why I review my portfolio twice per year. An ETF might be attractive one month and then quickly lose its sustainable standing the next. Performing a monthly or quarterly review would produce too much turnover for what I can afford with the size of my portfolio (around $6,000) and the time I want to commit to investing.

Instead of planning my attack via the fossil fuels grade, I chose a different approach. Since it’s difficult for funds to grade well on gender equality, I filtered based on high gender equality grades of A or B. The first few contenders I found were quite colorful, with gender equality as their only A grade.

The Impact Shares NAACP Minority Empowerment ETF (NACP) certainly has a goal in mind: gender equality in addition to racial equality, investing in large- and mid-cap companies “with strong racial and ethnic diversity policies in place, empowering employees irrespective of their race or nationality.” As vital as this focus is to improving the world we live in, there is less attention to environmental issues, with a fossil fuels grade of F. It has been hard to find funds that can do it all, but I know they exist!

Further down the list, I stumbled on the IQ Healthy Hearts ETF (HART), which has grades of A for fossil fuels, gender equality, military weapons and tobacco, and grades of B for deforestation, civilian firearms and the prison industrial complex. Its purpose is a bit more focused: It’s “designed to deliver exposure to global companies that help people prevent cardiovascular disease.” Somehow, it manages to have attractive sustainability grades while also improving people’s lives.

Gritting my teeth, I checked AAII.com to see what the expense ratio was: a cool 0.45% with an expense ratio grade of B. This fits my strategy, and it will save me some money! The ETF hasn’t been around long, but it has grades of A or B for three-year, one-year and year-to-date returns.

Now that I have my portfolio actions, I just need the money to make it all happen. I liquidated the SmartyPig high-yield savings account goal I set up for investment funds. Unfortunately, I didn’t reach my goal of $2,000, but we’re going with what we have—which is just over half of that. With the proceeds from selling Global X Wind Energy, I should also be able to add some shares evenly across the rest of my holdings to ensure the cash in my portfolio gets put to work.

Now that I’ve been able to successfully find a fund that fits my strategy, I have a bit more hope for the future of sustainable investing. Because of this, I expect to add another holding to the mix to bring my portfolio up to six ETFs at my next portfolio review. Stay tuned to see how it all goes!

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A Money and Music Memoir

Back in 2021 when I was still gathering my ideas for this blog, I started a money playlist. When I was prompted to think about my relationship with money, some of the first things that came to mind were song lyrics. My parents raised me on the blues (my dad’s favorite) and hard rock (my mom’s favorite), so now my brain acts like a very specific music encyclopedia filled with all my influences and the hybrid genres of modern music.

Each song on the playlist represents a memory for me: “Addictions” by Lucy Dacus from her album “Historian” is a song about some long-ago failed relationship, with the lyrics, “Buy-low-sell-high kind of guy / Invest your time in what’s worthwhile / Was I a risk without reward or did I make you proud?” The album came out in 2018, the year after I began working at AAII. I recall listening to it on the train into the city, feeling like I was part of an inside joke—I had just become entrenched in this investing language, and it was used in a creative way I hadn’t thought of before. I started to notice other finance phrases seeping into my own writing, like “last in, first out” (an accounting approach). I was beginning to see how this thinking could be applied to all aspects of life—everything took either time or money, everything was a risk, but would it be worth it?

Of course, I had to include the classic “Taxman” by the Beatles. “Revolver” (1966) was one of my first Beatles albums growing up. My dad had the CD, and he would play it in the car for us. Later when I became independently interested, he would let me listen to it on my beloved, consistently broken Walkman. I never took the lyrics seriously until I was an adult, “Should 5% appear too small / Be thankful I don’t take it all.” Now with a financial education, I know that 5% is quite a lot, especially when it comes to fees. In fact, 1% is still too much for you to be paying anyone to manage your money. The Beatles are using satire in this song, assuming the point of view of the greedy government, but many British musicians (including the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie and Adele) have had similar complaints about taxes when they reached fame. The more you make, the more they take!

“Suga Mama” by Beyoncé might be my favorite song she’s ever done. In it, she subverts the skewed power paradigm between a man and a woman. Not only does she have enough money to be independent, but she can also take care of a whole man, buying him whatever she wants? Go off, girl. The song practically drips with feminist confidence with the lyric, “let mama do it all.” This is Beyoncé after all! She has proven herself to be capable of more than anyone thought possible, breaking down race, gender and genre barriers to be able to express herself and reclaim her past without feeling trapped in any predetermined box. She has so many great songs about money, and I wish I could include them all, but “Suga Mama” is one I keep coming back to. When I got tickets to see Beyoncé in 2023, it was the first song I started blasting to celebrate! Recently, the friend I went to see her with jokingly asked, “Where are the sugar daddies!!!!!?????” I responded: “BROKE” 😂.

The lineage of influence in music is a fruitful topic for me, so the playlist includes some cover songs along with their originals. In addition to “Credit in the Straight World,” first written by Young Marble Giants and popularized by Hole, we have “List of Demands (Reparations)” by Saul Williams, later covered by my favorite band the Kills. Williams is also a poet and all-around creative person, much like Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince of the Kills, who have deliberately been independent musicians in a greedy industry. The song starts with the lyric, “I want my money back.” Williams says of his song about power and freedom, “I’m tired of the hustle and the make-believe hustle. I’m tired of buying into ideas that divorce me from my potential. I’m tired of having my potential explained in terms of money.” Williams expresses how easy it is for art and hard work to be exploited and lists his demands for getting free from the perpetual capitalistic churn.

I hope you enjoy the playlist! Let me know what songs come to mind when you think about money so we can grow our money music library together.

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On Money and Transparency: Wealth and What It’s Worth

Somehow in 2024, we still live in a world where people are afraid to talk about money. Capitalism dictates that our worth is based on what and how much we have in terms of money, material things, etc., and there is less emphasis on who we are as individuals.

Money can take the form of ambition, leading people to seek further education for higher-paying jobs like a lawyer or a doctor. In this way, we give up our time in the present in hopes of receiving more money (and freedom) in the future. We believe we are making ourselves more “valuable,” but by whose standard? I find that this line of thinking can quickly descend into elitism: This person doesn’t have the same ambitions as me, so what’s wrong with them? Why don’t they want to be “successful” like I am?

Material success does not equal happiness for everyone. Some people will become a CEO just to say they did it—not because they truly wanted it, but because the world told them that was what success looked like. Climbing up the corporate ladder just to be at the top doesn’t make a good leader. There are people who can lead in their own way, those who are more fulfilled working behind the scenes, whose talents lend themselves to middle management. These people have jobs to do just like anyone else, and the CEO who got there by thinking it was the finish line will soon learn that there is a lot more responsibility and transparency that comes along with having that level of power.

When I think about money and transparency, I return to how money was taught to people growing up. Was it an emotional topic? Were the discussions stressful for children, or did they help them understand the family finances better? A study from Forbes looked at how different generations talk about money, and how comfortable they would be discussing salaries with their coworkers.

Not surprisingly, baby boomers had the lowest percentage of the four generations. In addition, “not only were respondents from older generations less likely to have grown up in families that frequently talked about money, but they were also less likely to report positive experiences from such discussions when they did happen.” Twenty-one percent of baby boomers reported that the money talks were stressful, whereas just 10% of millennials felt this way. As transparency about money has improved over the years, we can see the positive effects this has on how people approach it.

The sentiment around salary transparency continues to evolve, and it seems to have had an overall positive impact on hiring and retaining employees. In the Forbes study, millennials were the generation most comfortable talking about salaries. I was happy to see this as a millennial, as I have been trying to implement this practice in my life more as I get older. I have friends who make more money than me, and good for them! They work hard and I value them just the same as someone who makes less than I do. Money can be emotional because we allow it to be, but it doesn’t have to dictate how much we value ourselves or others. At this point in my personal finance journey, I would put a lot more value on how you manage your money than how much you have.

Check out the AAII PRISM Wealth-Building Process to start your own personal finance journey.

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Digging for VanEck Sustainable ETFs

As I gear up for my next portfolio review at the end of June, I poked around As You Sow’s website to determine if there were any new candidates for my sustainable investing strategy. I began by looking for any mutual funds or exchange-traded funds (ETFs) with fossil fuels grades of A or B. This produced a list almost exclusively of mutual funds, which I am not currently investing in. I started considering a few of them, until I saw their expense ratios. My cutoff for expense ratios is 0.60%, and many of these funds were above 1.00% or even 3.00%—anything this high is the same as throwing my investment dollars into a pit and lighting them on fire!

Not to be defeated by how difficult it has been to find investments that are actually sustainable, I looked at my Charles Schwab brokerage account to see how my current ETF holdings were performing. One of my ETFs in the green, but not the best performer right now, is the VanEck Biotech ETF (BBH). It has all A grades on As You Sow—making its positive performance even better knowing that by investing in this group of companies, I am not killing the earth! This got me thinking that VanEck might have some other good candidates for my portfolio.

At the VanEck fund family page on As You Sow, it displays all funds that are gradable in its database. Since I’m searching based on a high fossil fuels grade, I can see that grade in the last column on the list of funds and narrow my choices based on it.

The VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH) has all A grades except for gender equality, which is D. No surprises here, the technology industry has a long way to go before it is equal for women and all genders, but I’m looking for a gender equality grade of C or higher for my portfolio. The VanEck BDC Income ETF (BIZD) looked promising with all A’s but an N/A for gender equality since there wasn’t enough data for a grade. Technically this fits my strategy, so I went over to AAII.com to determine if it was a good fit based on performance and expense ratio in the ETF Evaluator. Though its performance has been steady, its expense ratio is an alarming 11.17%! That performance is certainly not worth 11% of my portfolio’s value, so this ETF is off the list.

I scrolled further until I found the VanEck Environmental Services ETF (EVX), with a fossil fuels grade of B. The rest of its grades are A except for—you guessed it—gender equality at C. This fits my strategy, so let’s all cross our fingers and hope the expense ratio won’t eat into all this investment’s potential …

This expense ratio of 0.55% comes in just below my cutoff of 0.60%! VanEck Environmental Services has earned a potential spot in my portfolio, as it also has average performance over the long term (grades of C) and an A grade for the most recent quarter.

I will perform a similar search to see if I can find anything better when it’s time for my portfolio review. I have a little more peace of mind knowing that there are some hidden gems that will fit my strategy—I just have to do more digging!

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