The Sustainable Finance Podcast: Strategies for LGBTQ and multigenerational investors

Marci Bair and Victor Orozco from Bair Financial Planning joined The Sustainable Finance Podcast in San Diego, Calif.. Celebrating over three decades of service, Bair Financial has expanded its advisory practice from focusing initially on the LGBTQ+ community to encompassing a broad array of clients, including women in leadership and multiple family generations.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation:

Bair emphasizes the importance of adapting to clients’ evolving needs as “life continues to get more complicated, within the financial industry as well as our personal lives.”

“As clients come in, we try and meet them where they’re at and just assess them personally — what’s going on with them, but also financially. And then that ties in with their investments and how their values and their money can work together.”

Orozco adds that different issues will resonate with individual clients, but that in general, people are “looking for an alignment that makes sense to them in a deeper way outside of just dollars and cents.”

Bair discusses their longstanding focus on the LGBTQ+ community and their allies, and how their selection of sustainable investment funds has changed through the years.

“Our clients have grown with us for over 30 years. . . . The biggest difference is the selection of funds, so it means really understanding the space: There could be a fund that has ESG or sustainable language in the title, but it’s anti-LGBTQ — they were against gay marriage, against domestic partner benefits. . . . Just because a fund shows up on a screen as a sustainable fund, it might not align.”

When asked about generational wealth transfer, Bair highlights that senior clients do want to leave the planet in a better place for their kids and grandkids but points out a difference for higher net worth families. 

“It’s the younger generation poking the senior members of the family, like maybe we should look at investing this way? Or doing more things within the community? Or being more impactful with their money and not just writing checks to a charity?” Bair also stresses that millennials in general “are a lot more conscious about where they’re spending their money.”

They talk about using the butterfly effect in expanding understand of and access to sustainable investing, including hiring more advisors, establishing study groups and increasing the number of conferences they speak at.

 “The opposition is louder,” says Orozco, and “the way we fight back is to have more voices.”

Speaking of global economic growth in the face of climate change, Orozco thinks “material sourcing in a transitioning economy and political impatience around regulatory issues” will be key catalysts, and that “we can no longer conveniently ignore” uncomfortable questions about the use of extractives and exclusionary screening in the transition.

For more insights, watch the full interview on The Sustainable Finance Podcast.

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