Class is in session. On Tuesday September 23rd, Globe and Mail personal finance columnist Rob Carrick and personal finance editor Roma Luciw visited the campus of Huron College at the University of Western Ontario in London.
This trip was the first of many on-campus personal finance sessions Rob and Roma will do with Canadian post-secondary students. The idea behind it is simple: Although many students are spending – and often borrowing – big bucks to attend college or university, they are under-educated when it comes to personal finance. We wanted to talk with them about how best to manage their money – skills that will help them get off to a good start and benefit them throughout their life.
As Rob wrote in a recent column, the financial trajectory of a current Canadian student will likely look different from that of their parents. “You’ll spend more time and money to acquire an education, and you’ll likely take longer to get your career going and achieve financial independence. There will also be more compromises along the way.”
At the end of the hour, Rob handed out a copy of his latest book: How Not to Move Back in With Your Parents: The Young Person’s Guide to Financial Empowerment.
We started our session with the Huron students covering what we thought were some of the most pertinent topics: student loans - why they are a good investment and strategies for repayment, bank products - which to accept and which to decline, and the job market, including prospects for employment.
Students then weighed in with questions - lots of them. They wanted to know about the macroeconomic trends that would impact them in the coming years, credit cards and how best to use them, how to approach student debt repayment, as well as whether taking a gap year was worthwhile. Many were curious about how to get started on the investing front.
We want thank our partner and co-sponsor, the Canadian Foundation for Economic Education, and Huron’s Clare Tattersall for organizing the September 23rd event.
If you’d like us to come and chat with your students, contact Roma Luciw at rluciw@globeandmail.com or Rob Carrick at rcarrick@globeandmail.com. If you are a student with a money-related question, tweet it to us using the hashtag #genYmoney.