Lifestyle Investing: Syncing Core Values With Your Investment Portfolio

In Partnership with APG

Modern culture teaches everyone to value certain financial elements as an investor. Things like retirement and healthcare savings are seen as essentials – and they are. Life insurance is an important plus. There is certainly a valid argument to make for building up these areas of your portfolio, long before they are needed.

But investing shouldn’t stop there. It should go beyond the generic and consider interesting (and occasionally eccentric) ways you can invest in parallel with your passions and interests.

Consider this a challenge to align your investments, not just with your preservation and safety, both of which are priorities in the unstable and unpredictable year ahead – but allow yourself the luxury to stay in tune with your values, too. Here are some thoughts to get you started.

Understand, Add to, and Update Your Core Values

The 21st century is awash with awareness – so much so that it can become difficult to differentiate what your personal values and convictions are compared to everyone else. Be conscious that others motives and motivations need not concern you. This is your life and you’ll want to recognize that others don’t know you and the purpose you have set forth for your life and finances. Yet, understanding your core values (and how they prioritize with one another) is key to healthy lifestyle investing.

In their book “The Self-Confidence Workbook,” Barb Markway and Celia Ampel define values as “the principles that give our lives meaning and allow us to persevere through adversity.” When applied to investing, this breathes purpose, endurance, and long-term stability into our financial activity. You can gain confidence and momentum when you stabalize your values. 

You likely already have many of the pieces of your core values in place. However, it’s worth taking the time to identify them in detail, update them, write them down – and order them by priority. 

Don’t be afraid to loop others in on this process, too. Spouses, family, and business partners can all add valuable insight and input. Lifestyle Investor Justin Donald points out, “It’s important to let others help you create something you value, like the systems you’re trying to create for your family.” The investment expert also emphasizes the importance of maintaining this larger relational perspective as you invest, “The point of making money is to spend it with people you love. Sadly, many entrepreneurs sacrifice their freedom to attain financial success, preventing them from spending time with those who matter most to them.”

Listen to and take advice only from those who have your best interest at heart and discard the rest. Strive to keep a collaborative and updated list of your values at all times. That way, you have a well-defined filter to use as you invest. 

Connect Your Values to Your Investments

Once you have your values in place, it’s time to interpret them in the realm of finance. To use the above example of family, you might find that time with your loved ones is high on your core value list. 

Spending time with family, friends, and loved ones could make passive income investments, such as peer-to-peer lending or high-dividend stocks, a good fit to free up more of the time you spend making money. Other family-focused investment options could include a 529 plan for a college education fund or the purchasing whole life insurance through the Gerber Life Grow-Up Plan.

If environmentalism and sustainability are major points of emphasis, you may want to find investments that support a greener, cleaner future. Investing in renewable energy, green tech startups, or pollution control initiatives are options that quickly come to mind. You will likely have ideas come to your mind that will be a direction you will want to take. 

It’s also worth pointing out that lifestyle investing is bigger than your bottom line. Money is absolutely an essential part of the deal. But when you align your values with your portfolio, the dollars, and cents are easier and simply become vehicles that enable you to turn passions into reality. It also helps you think bigger. How can you invest things like time, learning, and personal effort into the things that you care about?

Whatever your core values may be, it’s worth finding ways to align your investing with those causes and convictions. It can be tricky to see the connections at first, but once you get used to thinking in an abstract manner, it takes to see clearly – it becomes second nature. And the results are just as good for your psychological state as they are for your portfolio.

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