Hey Future Funders family, happy Monday.

The last few years have been financially tough on families, so a big focus for us this year is to help you earn more money.

So we were wondering…

Ok, Let’s get to it.

Was this email forwarded to you?

Is “ESG” Investing A Scam?

🚀 What’s happening: Environmental, social, and governmental (ESG) has become a very popular term over the last few years in the world of investing.

But the once seemingly positive attributes of ESG have been weaponized against almost every company you are invested in.

Where did the ESG come from? How is this movement affecting your investments? And why are investors now becoming more skeptical? These are all questions that we explore in our topic of focus.

 Dining With Winning With Money

Jack Woerner (pictured with his wife Shay and dog Whisky) is a former personal finance teacher turned money coach focused on helping couples and families create and build wealth.

We met him a few months ago and connected on our mutual passion of helping families become financially independent.

Whether it’s helping you get out of debt, learning to save a little better, or thinking about a plan for the kids, Jack has helped hundreds of families meet their goals.

For anyone that is curious on how money coaches work or have a burning finance related question, he agreed for a limited time to offer one FREE 30 minute call to any of our readers. Just fill out a quick form here.

📉Interest rates aren’t moving down…Yet. The Federal Reserve held a meeting noting that they don’t expect to start lowering interest rates in March (more likely they start in May/June). The reason was that growth remains strong and inflation still slightly elevated. Almost on que, the monthly jobs report two days later showed the U.S. add +353k jobs vs. expectations of +185k (so a lot more) with strong wage growth. What this all really means is that unless we get some unexpected economic downturn (more on that below), interest rates aren’t likely to come down meaningfully until the second half of this year.

🏦 Banking woes. Eyes are firmly on the banking industry again as New York Community Bank reported unexpected losses this past week due in part to high exposure to the weak commercial real estate sector (the stock dropped about 40% on the week). Following this news, we also saw a Japanese bank and a Swiss bank report big losses also tied to their U.S. commercial real estate holdings. It’s too early to tell if this will spread (we tend to think no), but the next few weeks will be critical to watch for similar headlines as the banking industry is one of the few that almost entirely relies on if people perceive it to be healthy or not.

📱 CEO woes. You know when you see that jerk kid on the playground wreaking havoc on everyone, and their parent rightfully threatens them in public, but probably bribed them into submission afterwards with some ice cream? Yea we’ve seen this movie before.

CEOs of social media companies testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in a hearing filled with fire works… and little action. These hearings just continue to feed our suspicion that none of these people actual care about our kids and use these hearings as a way to distract us while pressuring social media companies behind close doors to do what the government wants. Now more than ever it falls on us to protect our kids from these increasing threats.

🔎 Phony as a $3 bill. Fraud and scams cost the US Consumer over $7 billion in the first three quarters of 2023 alone. But data shows that if you are aware of a specific scam you are 80% less likely to engage with it. For 2024, these are 5 scams every family should know about and watch out for. 

💸 And the award for best investors goes to… U.S. Congress. A recent report revealed that 32 members beat the S&P 500 index in 2023. While they are probably just getting lucky (insert eyeroll here), if you want to follow their moves yourself, you can. Two hilariously named ETFs called NANC and KRUZ track all democrat and republican stock picks.   

📜 Quote Of The Week

“Let’s get married and have kids so instead of doing fun stuff on the weekend we can go to a kid’s birthday party where everyone coughs.”

- @simoncholland

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