the blue-chip blues

since last summer, when i sat in on my first-ever 401k meeting and was told that if i had any brains i'd start building a diversified portfolio that included some top-notch, dependable corporations like wal-mart and philip morris right that second, i have wondered how i will survive once i turn 65. i do not want to invest in wal-mart. i do not want to support philip morris. i have no interest in funding or benefiting from any business i am not a contented consumer of. but where does that leave me? the most successful businesses, to the best of my knowledge, are almost never the most planet or people friendly, and the trend seems to be for the big, bad companies to get bigger and badder and the earnest, kindhearted endeavors to be mushed into so much opaque goo like fruitflies on a countertop. i feel bad enough about where my paycheck is coming from—ever since sonia shah enlightened me about american pharmaceutical companies' tendency to conduct dubious clinical trials overseas, unfettered by the burdens of informed consent or structured oversight, i have scanned every medical study submitted for publication with a squeamish, twitching eye—and i'm generally quite careful about where i spend it, though i accept that there's no such thing as a perfect business. but if investing turns out to be as essential to my future financial well-being as everyone keeps insisting it is, will my sentimental pinkoism be an option? is this why activism is predominantly a youth-centric phenomenon? is my choice doomed, in the end, to be between my soul and my savings?

at the time of the meeting, my decision was to not devote any time to anwering those questions and to instead go on putting my money into a bank account like i've always done, because i'm relatively young and don't intend to bring any dependents into the world, and at this point even surviving to 65 is a notion i'm fairly ambivalent about. so i'll never retire early and spend my golden years learning how to play the piano and speak perfectly accented gaelic; so what? i'll have done what i believed was right—or at least, i'll not have done some things i was pretty certain were wrong—and that'll be just fine.

but once i turned 28 i found i was unable to stop thinking of myself as 30, and 30 kind of looks like 40, and when i'm 40 my parents will be getting ready to retire, and god knows they're not holding significant stock in coca-cola, or anything at all, and they're still paying off the second mortgage they took out to remodel the kitchen, which isn't quite halfway remodeled, and someday someone will have to take care of them, and it won't be my sister because even though she's finally moved into her own apartment she still stops by my parents' house once a week to demand cash for gas and cigarettes, so it'll probably be me, but if i pay off my car loan just so i can take out a new loan for a condo and never manage to put more than $200 a month into that savings account with its 4.5 percent apr, how will i make sure that they never have to sell that house, which they've dedicated all that time and labor to remodeling, because they can't afford the heating bills anymore? what if someone gets sick? what if a satellite crashes through the roof? what if i have a near-death experience at 43 and decide i must spend at least a year in the rainforest canopy of madagascar documenting the mating rituals of ring-tailed lemurs? how will i afford to pay someone to water my plants while i'm gone?

*sigh* it seemed i would have to start feathering the nest after all, even if only because i am neurotic and plagued by obsessive guilt and an overbearing tendency toward fix-it-ness. knowing i wouldn't be able to wring any satisfactory advice from my coworkers, i turned to other venues. the search yielded both good news and bad, and i would prefer to get the bad out of the way. so.

some of you may already be familiar with the vice fund, a mutual fund that invests exclusively in industries considered immoral, unhealthy, or otherwise distasteful, and which are thus guaranteed to be profitable until the rapture and beyond (the web site refers to them as "recession-proof"—essentially the same thing, but slightly more inviting). it specializes in tobacco, alcohol, gambling, and, curiously, aerospace and defense. i say curiously not because i think the u.s. aerospace and defense programs are spectacular or spectacularly moral—i do not—but because even i would never have thought to categorize them as a vice. a waste of money, maybe, or a national penile implant . . . leave it to the experts, i suppose, to remind me that a vice is simply an unnecessary, self-interested, often misguided indulgence that does the indulger little to no net good, whether that indulger is an individual or country. the fund was started in 2002 and has provided average returns of nearly 19 percent to antihumanitarians devoid of any semblance of a social conscience for the past three years. i had the heartbreaking misfortune to catch charles norton, the vice fund's portfolio manager, speaking to debbie elliott on a recent npr broadcast. if i had to pick one favorite quote, i guess it would be this one:

one of the most important things that we like about these is that the government is a large beneficiary, uh, particularly in gaming and tobacco. what that means is that the government has a financial incentive to, uh, make sure that these industries flourish. . . . we don't perceive socially responsible funds as our competitors; socially responsible funds need to do what's in the best interests of their shareholders, which is all we try to do as well.

well, we already knew that the government *hearts* tobacco, didn't we? and i hope you weren't kidding yourself about how it honestly felt about you. "but," debbie wants to know, "don't you ever feel bad or even guilty about investing in products that do take such a toll on society and, in the case of tobacco, even kill people?" i bet maybe some of you are curious, too; well, mr. norton? don't you?

no, because when you're a serious investor, you have to check your emotions at the door. emotions are the enemy when it comes to making sound investment decisions, so we don't come at this with any personal biases. we come at this just as a purely objective analyst, and in our perspective, those types of judgments have no place in the investment process.

well, i thought, that settles it: i am not cut out for serious investing. i'll have to make one final investment in a new mattress big enough to hide all my money in and/or under, because my emotions refuse to be left anywhere, regardless of the circumstances, and now i'm all worried about what sort of bedevilment my bank might be up to. sorry, mom; i know we grew up in that house and all of our childhood pets are buried next to the deck, but one of us will probably have a pet when you move to your economy retirement village, so we can bury something there, too. dad, you'd better lay off either the beer or the burgers, because i'm not going to be able to help you out with hospital bills for liver and heart problems; you pick one or the other and commit to it. if you need me, i'll be in a fetal position on the floor of my closet, whimpering and cursing the free market. sometimes when i do that i don't hear the phone right away, so go ahead and leave a message, and yes, i am getting enough calcium. oh, woe and anguish, oh sadness and despair, oh world where a successful portfolio manager's number one rule is "don't sample the merchandise."

but you remember, don't you, when i said there would be good news?

socially conscious, or "virtue," funds have been around for years—longer than the vice fund—and while they do pretty well and certainly make investments worthy of their title, most of the funds are affiliated with specific religions. i am not affiliated with a specific religion, and while i feel fine about all of the religions out there, i wasn't sure about throwing my lot in with one i wasn't a part of just to make a few bucks. it seemed, well, sinful. in addition, it's rare to find a virtue fund that's truly virtuous across the board; an environmentally focused fund might look the other way if a company with a strong record of conservation and minimal pollution exercised poor corporate governance, for example, and vice versa. you are forced, effectively, to choose your poison and either inject it into the veins of the working class or dump it into a river. this may be a preferable alternative to zero-conscience investing, but it didn't exactly ring my bell.

well, a few days ago i discovered the blue fund, which offers two diversified mutual funds based on "core progressive values like environmental sustainability, community participation and respect for human rights." companies included in the portfolios are routinely investigated to ensure their commitment to these values—all of them—is sincere and ongoing; they're also required to have made the majority of any corporate political donations to democratic candidates or organizations. while i'm iffy on the political mandate, there is, as i said, no such thing as a perfect business, and since i can't remember the last time i backed a candidate who wasn't a democrat it's not the end of the world for me. and even if i were a republican, if i still felt as strongly about all of those other issues as i do i'd probably be willing to accept the trade-off. this being the wonderfully free country that it is, conservatives are more than welcome to do their best to organize a red fund that accomplishes all of the same goals for the other side. the blue fund portfolios are still peppered with pharmaceutical companies and retail monoliths, but at least they are being watched by people who appear to have clutched their emotions to their chests and barreled right through the door with them. take that, charles norton.

probably, in the end, the ideal approach for me would be to build my own portfolio one fastidiously researched company at a time; but given my utter dearth of investment savvy and the degree to which i overanalyze the merit and morality of EVERY SINGLE FREAKING LITTLE THING, that task is a bit more than i could accomplish right now. at this point i am simply relieved to know that i am not alone in my desire to back things i'm actually happy to stand behind, and that more motivated people who share that desire have created some options for me. it's such a relief, in fact, that it's almost like being 28 again. that means i can wait to fill out that ira paperwork until next year, by which time i'm certain the stock market will be dominated by wind farms, electric cars, and cradle-to-cradle computer manufacturers, making the whole process that much easier. i may get to keep my soul—in all of its pink, blue, and green glory—after all.