140. Activate Your Money by Janine Firpo: A book review

It’s time for another book review! This episode is about a book titled Activate Your Money: Invest to Grow Your Wealth and Build a Better World by Janine Firpo. It is an accessible, handy guide to learning more about investing and the practical changes we can make to align our societal values with our investments. You don’t have to be a billionaire to invest your values, this book has practical advice on how to get started.

Links from today’s episode:

Activate Your Money, the excellent companion site for the book

https://activateyourmoney.net/ 

ICYMI another episode you might enjoy:

Episode#121 New Book Alert: The Social Justice Investor by Andrea Longton Title (recorded before the 2024 rebranding of this show)

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Transcript

Welcome to Progressive Pockets! I go by GG, that’s short for Genet Gimja and I’m your host as we explore the topic of how we can align our values, our beliefs, our desires for the world around us and what we do with our money on a daily basis. I have a hypothesis that we’re leaving some of our power on the table and I want to explore that on this show. What are some practical things we can do to live out our societal values with our daily money decisions?

Welcome if you’re new around here. There are well over a hundred episodes so I hope you enjoy digging into those. Episodes are always concise and the best topics come from your emails, you can get in touch any time at progressive pockets at gmail dot com or ask to be subscribed to the monthlyish newsletter.

One question that I get a lot is asking about book recommendations. I’ve done reviews of adult books, children’s books, and you all seem to really appreciate this, so I’m always happy to talk about books you’re curious about or might enjoy.

Today I want to talk about a book called Activate your Money by Janine Firpo. The full title is Activate your Money: Invest to Grow Your Wealth and Build a Better World.

This is a book that I keep on hand to quickly look things up in all the time. That says a lot. As an aspiring minimalist, I barely keep physical books. I tend to read them and then pass them along. But this is one I’ve hung on to. In fact, I think I might have initially had the electronic version and then bought the paperback version.

There are three parts to the book.

Part 1 is about stepping into your financial power, investing with your heart and mind, and investigating some of your money stories.

Part 2 is about rolling up your sleeves and changing the way you invest to match your social values.

Part 3 is about building a community of support.

The book is ambitious in trying to speak to investors at all levels, people who are brand new, people who are well informed, people who are investing on their own, people who have a financial advisor. I would probably classify myself as being somewhere in the middle. So there were parts that were too simple for me, but I appreciated the chapters that were one step beyond where I am today because it sort of helped me to prepare for that next step of stepping into my own financial power.

I’ll give you an example of what I mean. There’s a chapter on thinking about where you put your cash, and then there’s a chapter on bonds and then a chapter on your bread and butter stock market that most individual investors are familiar with, mutual funds, individual stocks, that sort of thing.

But then the next chapter is about more advanced investing. For example angel investing. Something that I really hadn’t thought about before I read this book and then met someone who was actually doing this. A nonbillionaire like me.

So that’s what I mean when I say that I found it helpful to be able to peek into those chapters that were just one step beyond where I am today. Oh, before I forget, this book is written with women in mind, although there’s a pretty light touch on that. 

But let’s go back to the beginning, before you can even think about changing where you bank or invest, it can be helpful to clarify for yourself what your values even are, on a societal level. And what your underlying money stories are. Janine Firpo talks about growing up with a money scarcity mindset and how that impacted the way that she felt about money into her fifties. I think all of this initial exploration can be helpful as you start to think about socially responsible investing.

After you have a sense of what you care about, the book takes you on a journey to understand where you are now in terms of your money and what you need to prepare for the future. There are some simple tables and suggestions on how to plan for retirement depending on your age. There are some examples of people who have made different choices based on their risk tolerance. So you can see actual examples of how you might lay out your money, for example how much you might decide to keep in cash versus in the stock market versus private investments, for example. It’s sort of teaching you how to be your own financial advisor.

There are a lot of tools on the companion website, for example there’s an excel tool you can fill out to figure out what you have today across different investments so you can figure out if the high level looks the way you want it to. For example, do you like the way the percentage is when you look at how much of your money is in cash versus being invested.

Then you get into the core of the book this is where you are making decisions about how you want to move your money around, starting with your cash, there’s a chapter about the different options we have and the pros and cons of each choice.

Every chapter ends with a list of action steps. I think one of my favorite things about this book is the way financial terms are defined. This is why I keep the book as a reference guide. Rather than googling, I am constantly picking the book up to refresh myself on what a particular term means. There’s a lot of garbage on the internet and that’s why I prefer to pick up this book to look up financial terms rather than just going with the wind and seeing where the internet takes me. 

I also like the personal examples, for example lessons that the author learned the hard way in investing her money.

The chapters on the more advanced investing strategies turn out to not be that advanced after all. There are some absolutely accessible ideas in there.

For example, there are a couple of pages on how to invest in water if that’s something you care about but are not a billionaire. There are ways to invest in water that cost $500. Not a lot and you don’t have to be some sort of environmental scientist.

The section on building community is also an interesting one. I’ve been reading about and thinking about the loneliness epidemic in our modern day lives and there’s something about these giving circles and investing circles that speak to the loneliness epidemic and the other thing that is going on which is that there’s some amount of fear and anxiety about environmental issues, the economy, the threats to democracy.

Building community to try to bond with others with similar values and to work together on having more impact, I mean, it just sounds like a perfect solution to our modern lives and concerns.

So that’s the book. It reads like a handbook. I’d say it’s best for readers who know a little about investing but want to learn more. It’s hopeful. The ideas in the book feel practical, you’re not going to be asked to completely divest from the traditional stock market or give the majority of your money away. It’s a pretty gentle book in that way. Now if you’d like me to cover a more radical approach to lining up your values and your money, let me know, I’d be happy to share that as well.

So to recap, here’s what we covered today:

• Activate Your Money by Janine Firpo was published in 2021, it is a very reliable, professionally written book to educate and inspire investors who want to start to incorporate their societal values into their money strategy
• The book is written for all levels of investors, I think it’s best for people who already know a little but want to learn more
• The suggestions in the book are practical and accessible even if you’re not super wealthy.
• Whether you manage your own finances or you have a financial advisor, there are tips for you
• The accompanying website is also very well done, very high quality and trustworthy personal finance tools and information. It’s not salesy, it’s not gimmicky, it’s just honest financial education explained clearly and fairly

If you have more time today, here’s another episode to check out, that’s episode 121, it’s another book review, for a book called The Social Justice Investor by Andrea Longton.

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Let’s end with a quote…

“Whether you realize it or not, you’re already an investor. Your money is having an impact somewhere, somehow. This is true even if all you have is a savings account. Every entity in which you save or invest your money is using your assets for some purpose. The question is whether this supports the things you value—or undermines them.”

― Janine Firpo, Activate Your Money: Invest to Grow Your Wealth and Build a Better World

Let’s talk again soon!