Clean money when you retire

In the spirit of recycling, I’m re-sending an email I sent in April this year as I think it’s worth repeating.

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Do you worry that your efforts to improve climate change will be far too tiny to make a difference?

Here are some fun numbers:

• Around 12 million Aussies are currently employed.
• Our superannuation alone equates to around $3 trillion (with 12 zero’s – $3,000,000,000,000).

When you retire, your super money will be waiting for you… but until then, it’s used to pay for stuff.

When you contribute money to your super, you’re literally loaning money to big companies to fund projects, which makes you an investor in those projects. When they make money, your super grows.

Those projects could be lots of things – often they’re things like coal mines, weapons, or other “dirty” industries.

There are super funds who specifically don’t invest in dirty industries, and instead invest in clean projects like renewable energy – Future Super and Australian Ethical are two (more are listed on the Market Forces website). They call this divestment (the opposite of investment – as in, divesting money away from dirty industries and investing in clean ones). From the Future Super website:

“We seek to identify investment products that avoid or reduce harm, and when these don’t exist, we partner with like-minded investors to create them. We also seek to invest some of our capital in impact investments, which directly address climate change or inequality. This realises the potential that our divestment unlocks.”

If all 12 million Aussies switched to one of these funds, and moved $3trillion+ out of dirty industries, it’d cripple them. Better yet, it’d fund the projects that are designed to repair the damage that the dirty ones created.

Your super still grows. You still end up with money when you retire. But this way, you’ll know the money came from something that made Future You’s world better, not worse. It’s also something that actually helps more clean projects get off the ground, which we’re going to need a lot of in the next few years.

All it takes – seriously – is spending a few minutes switching super funds, and you’ve made thousands of dollars of impact.

Whether you’ve got a few grand or several hundred-thousand in your super, that number will grow the longer you work – what would you rather spend it on?

So… can little old you make much impact? Yep! And let your friends and your staff know they can as well 😉