At Switchfoot Wealth, our mission is to make Sustainable Financial Planning the default.
In particular, we believe our profession – financial planning – has to make profound changes to account for, and mitigate against, the climate emergency our world is facing.
We believe that Sustainable Financial Planning is the way to achieve this change.
Unfortunately, delivering true Sustainable Financial planning simply isn’t possible right now. In fact, it probably never will be.
Why?
Well:
- Our world is facing a novel, wicked and dynamic problem in climate breakdown and biodiversity loss. We are in a poly-crisis of nature, climate, plastic, pollution chemical and social inequality. These problems form an unbelievably complex and interwoven pattern.
- Within the world of sustainable investment options, there is imperfect data, risk of greenwash and risk that well-intentioned investment are co-opted by a corrupt system to maintain the status quo.
- At the root of all this is an economy that is not taking nature into account.
Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say that the system IS working well. It’s doing exactly as it’s meant to do – just for the wrong purpose.
So, whilst we can strive to deliver Sustainable Financial Planning, really we can only do “the best we can.”
We must recognise all this nuance and understand that we must make imperfect decisions with imperfect data.
But this imperfection should not stop us.
Far from it…
What CAN We Do?
Just because the contexts and systems we are operating in are flawed doesn’t mean there is nothing we can do.
We can:
1 – Advocate For System Change
First, at Switchfoot we’re proud to be deeply involved with conversations around system change – acting as advisors and partners to key players within the financial planning and investments arena.
We make our Sustainable Financial Planning methodology available for free for other advisors and partners.
We need to fix our broken systems, and everyone can play a role in advocacy for this.
2 – Deliver The Best We Can For Clients
Second, for clients we can “do the best we can” right now.
This includes helping clients align their money with a sustainable and survivable future, taking into account the most relevant climate predictions.
This endeavour is inherently flawed (due to the reasons covered above), but should not prevent us from exploring with clients the impact of the world on their financial plan, and the impact of their plan on the world.
We can help clients to plan for and adjust to the effects of climate breakdown (to a point) and we can help them to invest their money in line with a survivable future (to a degree.)
Ultimately, though, we are utterly dependent on a whole economy transition to happen if we are to achieve anything close to true Sustainable Financial Planning.
The Journey
At every stage of this journey, we should strive to do the best we can.
If you’d like to learn more about how this could look, I encourage you to explore our Sustainable Financial Planning guide.
We’re actively working towards delivering our mission with clients, businesses and partners. If this blog or the guide resonates with you, I’d be delighted to chat.
—
Sebastian Elwell
Founder, Switchfoot Wealth
