Your Financial Toolkit: Now Available!

Ottawa Journal (October08 24 – October 12 , 2012)
David Tilson, MP

We’re all aware of the global economic downturn and the serious impact it has had for governments around the world. It has also made Canadians aware of the complexities of Canada’s economy and the importance of increasing our own personal financial know-how. Fortunately, the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada (FCAC), in collaboration with the Investor Education Fund (IEF) and l’Autorité des Marchés financiers (AMF), recently launched Your Financial Toolkit, a new resource to assist Canadian financial consumers increase their financial knowledge, while also strengthening our financial system as a whole.

Your Financial Toolkit is available on the FCAC’s website at www.fcac-acfc.gc.ca. It has been designed as a free, objective, and hands-on resource available to Canadians to help with managing their personal finances. There are 11 modules offered in Your Financial Toolkit with each focusing on a different financial topic. The modules contain basic information, as well as tools to help you practise the financial skills and apply the information to your own personal situation. Examples of the tools which can be found in the modules include: videos, interactive worksheets, calculators, quizzes, questionnaires, and case studies. In addition, most of the worksheets may be downloaded as PDFs, to allow you to save the templates on your computer and build your own financial toolkit.

An Action Plan can be found at the end of each module. This too, is a tool, which you may use to track your progress and move forward on the next steps to then apply the concepts you learned in the module. Each module also provides additional resources for more information.

Your Financial Toolkit can help you become a more confident and discerning financial consumer by: i) learning the basics of money management in a variety of areas; ii) practising skills to improve your financial habits; iii) learning how to better protect yourself when you use financial products and services; and iv) having the tools you can keep and reuse to successfully manage your money.

There are three ways to use Your Financial Toolkit. You can complete the entire program page by page, use the menu on the left-hand side of the webpage to find topics of interest, or try the self-assessment tool to discover which modules and tools are best-suited to your needs and situation. You also have the option of creating your own Financial Toolkit by saving the proposed downloadable PDFs, featured throughout the program, to your own computer. These helpful resources can be kept on-hand so you may reuse them to manage your personal finances.

Your Financial Toolkit is a helpful and easy to access resource to help you strengthen your money management skills, while feeling more secure about your financial future.