Susan Daley

November is Financial Literacy Month in Canada, with this week’s theme “Make Informed Decisions”. There are many ways you can make informed decisions, but I’ll focus on making informed decisions based on your personal spending. In this post, you’ll find the different ways to budget and the real reasons for budgeting.

The RESP is a powerful tool to save for your child’s post-secondary education. The power comes from the Canadian Education Savings Grant (CESG), which boosts your child’s education savings substantially. I outline how the CESG works and how you can maximize the grants your child receives.

Your child’s post-secondary education might be decades away, but planning ahead can make that expensive time in your lives much less stressful. One of the major ways to do that is through the Registered Education Savings Plan (RESP), which offers up to $7,200 in incentives for you to save for your child’s education over the long term.

My first niece was born a couple of months ago and it got me thinking about her education savings. There are a number of savings options my sister can employ for my niece in the 18 years before she starts post-secondary school. I outline the various sources, and the pros and cons of each option below.

If you’re looking to fund your own or your child’s education but haven’t regularly saved for several years towards those expenses, there are a number of options for paying for expensive tuition, housing and textbook costs. In today’s post, I’ll outline the 5 ways you can pay for education costs or put away short-term savings for it.

In this episode of Your Money, Your Choices, Susan uses a concrete example of a new graduate paying off student and car loans to show how small differences in your debt repayment strategy can add up over time and save you interest costs and reduce the time it takes to pay off debts.

Financial planners and advisors across Canada suggest you should save 3 to 6 months worth of expenses in an emergency fund. You’ve figured out how much you are aiming for, using some of the guidelines from my last video perhaps.

One of the most overlooked things in personal finance I see from young professionals is the emergency fund. Unfortunately, emergency funds aren’t exciting, so instead people want to focus on other things like buying a house and investing in the stock market.

Index mutual funds and their corresponding ETF’s are very similar in terms of their holdings. So how do you which one is best? Like most things in personal finance, the decision will ultimately come down to your personal situation and preferences.

Paying off debt is a worthy goal and there are some key strategies to getting it paid off more quickly. I outline these strategies in my latest episode of Your Money, Your Choices.