WHAT IF NONE OF THE FUNDS OFFERED IN YOUR PLAN MATCH YOUR VALUES?

A prospectus is a good place to start to understand basic philosophy. However, if you want to see exact holdings, you will need other tools, as the prospectus generally will only show the top 10 holdings. It’s nearly impossible to know exactly what a fund holds at any given moment, because mutual fund managers may buy and sell stocks at any time, and they only report to the SEC once a quarter, and the SEC only publishes it to their public database once a year. Even if you search long and hard to find every holding in a fund, the search will likely be out of date.

However, there are new tools to help you do this, and we devote chapter 12 to a detailed tour of some of these tools to help you see the gender diversity of corporate boards and the fossil fuel holdings of companies within the most-held funds.

Your company-sponsored retirement plan will probably have approximately 15 to 40 funds to pick from. These are generally a variety of large-cap, small-cap, international, bonds, and other types of mutual funds and ETFs. However, many of these funds do not use ESG principles at all; only recently have new funds been offered focused on gender equity, LGBT rights, human rights, and other issues. Few are fossil-free. This means that if you want specific funds offered to you and the rest of the employees at your company, you will need to talk to your plan administrator. Chapter 13 is devoted to a step-by-step guide about how to approach your plan administrator to request that new offerings be added to align with your values.