In this week's newsletter: 

• Can you reinvest your retirement into environmentally friendly companies? Our reporter tried it.

• Tips for managing your finances in uncertain times.

• If tariffs raise prices, will rescinding tariffs lower them?

• The national debt vs. deficit, explained.

• How to treat yourself when you’ve taken a vow of poverty.

I want to make my retirement account more environmentally friendly. Thing is, this goal is in the same camp for me as learning to sew my own clothes, play the cello or speak French conversationally — I love it in concept, but the reality of actually accomplishing those goals is beyond daunting.

The latest season of Marketplace’s “How We Survive” podcast examines the rise and fall of ESG investing, or investments that consider environmental, social and governance factors. The last episode focuses on reducing your carbon footprint by examining the investments in your retirement portfolio. 

“It turns out that moving your investments to a climate-friendly investment option is the single most impactful thing that the average American can do for climate change,” Alex Wright-Gladstein told Marketplace’s Amy Scott. Wright-Gladstein is the founder and CEO of Sphere, a company focused on climate-friendly investing.

That line got me thinking about my own retirement account. I am by no means rich — no one goes into public radio to become a millionaire — but my retirement savings are the single largest sum of money I’ve invested at the ripe old age of 26. So I want to feel good (and secure) about it.

So I went out on a personal quest: To more closely examine what investments my 403(b) — the nonprofit version of a 401(k) — held, interrogate the environmental impact of those investments and see how easy it would be to change them.

Although President Donald Trump has a habit of slapping on and then rolling back tariffs, these duties may have lasting effects on consumer prices, making it difficult to reset the proverbial clock on trade. 

Products that Americans want to buy from around the world currently face a tariff rate of at least 10%, which has consumers bracing for price increases. Tariffs are a tax that U.S. importers pay to the U.S. government. Importers can pass them along to you in the form of higher prices or just eat the costs.

Even if the tariffs are later removed, experts told Marketplace, the prices for some goods may not fall back to their original levels if demand is high or companies have to reorganize their supply chains.

This week’s splurger is Sister Monica Clare. She’s the Sister Superior at the Community of St. John Baptist, an Episcopal convent in New Jersey, and runs the popular TikTok account @nunsenseforthepeople. She’s on “This Is Uncomfortable” this week and her memoir, “A Change of Habit,” is out now. Here’s Clare:

Nuns take a vow of poverty, which is a strict practice of only buying what we absolutely need. That does not mean, however, that we do not sometimes fail to uphold that vow. Most nuns that I know have two main indulgences: yarn and books. Try as we might, we cannot seem to stop buying too many books and enough yarn to cover the world in several knitted blankets. My latest indulgence was the book “How to Know a Person” by David Brooks. I stopped into a local bookstore recently for the sole purpose of telling the proprietor about my upcoming book, steeling myself to avoid buying anything. It did not work. I bought the hardcover version of “How to Know a Person” instead of waiting for the cheaper paperback, and I spent $30 on it. Truly a Holy Poverty fail, but I can't WAIT to read it.

They’re related, but not quite the same — and they both affect you in ways that might seem invisible but are real. Marketplace’s Sabri Ben-Achour explains.

Lab-grown diamonds have been around since the 1950s, but for a long time they were kind of taboo — most jewelers wouldn't even sell them.

Enter the pandemic: Companies like Brilliant Earth and Blue Nile flooded social media with sleek ads. People realized they could buy lab-grown diamonds visually and molecularly identical to mined diamonds for a fraction of the price.

For instance, a pair of 1 carat diamond earrings (that’s roughly the size of a pencil eraser) costs more than $3,000 dollars. But a lab-grown version only costs about $800. 

“That is scaring the hell out of the diamond industry,” Edahn Golan, a diamond industry analyst told us. “Did you ever see a kid riding a bicycle and then, all of a sudden, the front wheel starts wobbling? That's kind of what happened to the natural diamond industry.”

Tony Wagner wrote this newsletter. Janet Nguyen reported our story on tariffs, Alice Wilder produces “Defend Your Splurge” and Stacey Vanek Smith reported our story on the diamond industry.