A donor-advised fund (DAF) is an investment account established for charitable purposes. Utilizing a DAF can help you maximize your tax savings while giving to your favorite charities.

Here is an overview of options for investors looking to allocate a portion of their portfolio to farmland.

Investors looking to integrate water risk into their portfolios have a variety of options for earning a return and making a positive impact. Here are some examples.

If your bank requires you to close your current account and open a new one to take advantage of today’s rates, use the opportunity to evaluate if you want to keep your money where it is. You can not only find a new bank with good rates and services, but you can go one step further and find a bank that is using your deposits to strengthen the local community or advance causes that you care about.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was passed in August 2022 to tackle the national debt, healthcare costs, and energy security. This post focuses on Subtitle D, the Energy Security portion. If you are a homeowner looking to make improvements or if you are considering purchasing an electric vehicle (EV), review the opportunities available to you to reduce your tax bill.

Patagonia is an outdoor clothing company long-recognized as a leader in sustainability and environmental activism. The owner and founder, Yvon Chouinard, and his family, recently gave up ownership of the company that was founded almost 50 years ago. Feeling “there were no good options available”, a unique exit strategy was devised that has garnered quite a bit of attention.

The new Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) started trading carbon this July and is the first of its kind.

I have argued previously that asset managers, such as Blackrock and Vanguard, have immense power that they haven’t fully utilized. The recent vote at Exxon indicates that they are ready to change that.

President Biden issued an Executive Order on May 20, 2021, with regards to assessing, measuring, and mitigating climate risk in the financial system. While it is clear that there will be more to come, this Executive Order provides some clarity around where the Administration intends to focus its efforts as it pertains to climate-related financial risk. Here are some opportunities that may present themselves to investors over the next few years.

The ECBs Christine Lagarde is leading the world in questioning making bond purchases in the name of market neutrality.

Vanguard has 3 new ESG index funds. This provides a great opportunity to learn about how to evaluate and compare different ESG funds.

ESG target-date funds are just getting started. Here are the current products on the market and how they compare with traditional target-date funds.

The European Central Bank (ECB) made headlines when they committed to funding 30% of their covid stimulus with green bonds. They will also start buying sustainability-linked corporate bonds as part of their quantitative-easing program and accept them as collateral for loans to commercial banks. The green bond market, which was already exploding with little help from the U.S. government and regulators, will double in size with the plans laid out by the ECB.

Just over 10% of international bonds are experiencing negative yields right now. Some investors hear this and think they should sell or avoid international bonds altogether because it must mean that they will lose money instead of make money. That is not the case.

While larger institutions and community foundations have invested in CDFIs for decades, it was difficult for individual investors to build a diversified basket of CDFIs until fairly recently. Here are a couple options now available to you.

Investing through crowdfunding sites has gained considerable interest but it is important to understand the risks.

A company's role in society has been re-defined. Consumers and employees expect their brands to articulate their values. Next, there will be a push for companies to stand behind what they say.

If you never really thought much about proxy voting, you should take a second look. The proxy vote is the only form of direct communication that most investors will have with company leadership.

The U.S. government came up with $2,000,000,000,000 (or $2T) seemingly overnight in the form of the Coronavirus, Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. That is a lot of zeros - an incomprehensible amount. Understanding how the government was able to do this is a reminder that while the headlines are scary and we are living in unprecedented times, there are many things that are responding exactly as needed and intended. 

While we are not technically in a recession until there have been 2 consecutive quarters of slower than usual or shrinking growth, many believe we are in fact at the end of a very long bull market. More than that, COVID-19 can be characterized as a black swan - an unexpected, hard to predict event, outside the normal range of possibility, that will cause a severe contraction in the global economy.