Course curriculum

This lecture provides an overview of the entire Personal Finance Fundamentals Series. Please read through it to see what we will be covering.

Part 1 - Balancing your Budget

Chapter 1: How to treat yourself like a company

  • Sets the foundation for how to think about money

Chapter 2: Managing your expenses

  • Learn how to manage and minimize expenses
  • Go through how to create a budget manually, but also how to automate the budgeting process using easy to use technology such as Mint and YNAB

Part 2 - The Cost of Money

  • Discuss how borrowing money has a cost, and lending or investing money can yield a profit
  • Learn about interest rates and compound interest to show why investing can be so powerful and why paying off debt is so important
  • Understand the difference between useful debt (such as a mortgage) vs. dangerous debt (credit cards) using visual examples
  • Understand how small changes in interest rates can have large impacts over long periods of time

Part 3 - Personal Financial Security & Taxes

Chapter 1: Security best practices to protect your money

  • Discuss why online security is important
  • Learn why strong passwords, good password management, and 2 factor authentication are important to set up
  • Discuss basic techniques to protect yourself from identity fraud

Chapter 2: Basics of taxes

  • Learn about the basics of how taxes work
  • Go through a real life example of how to calculate your taxes to understand what your take home pay is
  • Cover resources and tools you can use to calculate your taxes

Part 4 - Personal Savings Options

  • Learn about chequing (or checking) accounts, savings accounts, and emergency funds
  • Learn about the RRSP, and TFSA using visual examples and by stepping through templated spreadsheets to show how each account works
  • Discuss the difference between these accounts and non-registered investment accounts
  • Do comparisons between all of these accounts so students understand how they all work 

Part 5 - How to be financially ready for post secondary education

  • Example walkthrough of post-secondary education expenses
  • Strategies to reduce your expenses
  • Applying for scholarships, getting used books, and more
  • Understand the impact of student loans
  • Learn how to evaluate what program you enrol in as an investment
  • Be able to analyze the return on investment of your degree


Can't wait to see you in the first lecture!

Zack

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