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 walk through 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