Ethical Pensions

Hi,
I'm 36 and I want to start an ethical pension plan. I couldn't retire with peace of mind if I had invested in weapons, tobacco, alochol or rainforest destruction. What options do I have? I work for a small company on a short term contract without a pension scheme.

There are a few ethical pension funds available, for example [broken link removed] and the older Stewardship Fund from Friends First.

Regards,

Liam D Ferguson
[broken link removed]

thanks Liam, I appreciate the information, I'll check it out

Un-ethical Funds

Are there are explicitly un-ethical funds? Would be interesting to compare the performance with ethical funds.

The last time I looked at Friends First, their Stuardship fund included Statoil, Tesco and Vodaphone. What is ethical about them? Do you have to sell guns or drugs (illegal ones) to be excluded? Are there any pension funds that invest only in environmentally sound businesses such as Airtricity, the Triodos Renewable Energy Fund etc?

Terms like "ethical" and "environmentally sound" etc. are woolly and don't mean the same things to all people. Legal drugs might be unethical to some people. There's no inherent reason that guns are obectionable in all cases (e.g. what about recreational gun usage - clay pigeon shooting, range shooting etc.?). As such this stuff is inherently subjective. For every person who assumes that wind power is the bee's knees there's probably another who feels that wind turbines are detrimental to wildlife and visual amenities. One salient point about some so called ethical funds mentioned in the past is that they can have opaque and excessive charging structures - hardly ethical to the investor?