This is the money management program we wish we'd had in high school

Oct 31 2019, 10:30 am

For most of you reading this, high school is well over and done with. But looking back on your transition into adulthood, how familiar was the following scenario?

Leave high school, enter adult life, realize you don’t know how to do adult life, and then wonder why no one taught you how to do adult life.

Our schooling years are packed with classes on isosceles triangles, square roots, and photosynthesis ā€” and let’s not forget mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell. But how many of us in our adult years post-high-school were caught wondering how a credit card even works, what interest and overdraft fees are, or how to do a basic budget?

Forget about classes, like “Mortage 101” or boring online lectures about how to actually do your taxes. Adults from all across Canada are learning how to manage their money through a program calledĀ Money Matters, created by ABC Life Literacy Canada, a national non-profit that’s all about motivating Canadians to educate themselves, including on how to manage their money.

Learning in the library/Shutterstock

The free financial literacy program, co-founded byĀ TDĀ as part of The Ready Commitment, aimsĀ to ease anxiety and boost confidence around money by holding workshops at places like libraries, Native Friendship centres, settlement agencies, and learning centres. And for those unable to sign up in person, they can also access learning resources online.

Money MattersĀ provides workshops and online resources that educate adults on banking basics ā€” like with how to use e-banking and e-transfers ā€” and also on more complicated tasks like figuring out how to do your taxes and make spending plans.

The online resource even offers education about RESPs, how to build credit in Canada, and how to borrow money.

TD Mindpower volunteers/ABC Money Matters

Supporting this kind of educational programming truly takes a village. Money MattersĀ couldn’t be made possible without the support of the hundreds of TD volunteer tutors who deliver the financial literacy program in community learning centres across Canada. And now, TD volunteers are helpingĀ ABC Life LiteracyĀ in yet another way by working with them to draw new insights from their data.

Money Matters map/ABC Money Matters

TD Mindpower: Analytics for Social Good, which launched on October 31, helps non-profit organizations like ABC Life Literacy by collecting data and analyzing it for them. The TD volunteers are helping these organizations use data in the most beneficial and valuable ways possible to increase the impact of their programs.

The TD Mindpower volunteers are data and analytics professionals from across TD, and their work involves a wide array of data-driven expertise, including creating analytics-powered dashboards, forecasting trends, developing new ways of measuring data, and using data to tell their story.

For ABC Life Literacy, TD Mindpower volunteers are not only helping the organization better work with their data, but also improve their reporting and business intelligence to measure how theĀ Money Matters program is helping adults across Canada.

Programs like Money Matters are helping to improve financial literacy levels across Canada.Ā It doesn’t matter if you’re not straight out of high school. Any adults who want to improve how much they know about money and how they use it should jump at the chance to take advantage of this free program.

For more information on how you can take control of your finances, head to theĀ ABC Money Matters website.

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