Knowledge of wealth

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This article was published 30/09/2023 (924 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There may be no free lunch in the financial world, as it’s often said by money pundits, but there are a ton of free resources to learn about personal finance.

And one of Canada’s best — GetSmarterAboutMoney.ca — just got a bit richer with useful, timely information. Devised and managed by Canada’s largest regulator of financial markets, the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC), it recently underwent a makeover, and the new and improved GetSmarterAboutMoney.ca website officially relaunched late this month.

“We recognized the way investors get information is changing, and technology is changing, and that meant we needed to update the website to reflect that,” says Tyler Fleming, director of the investment office at the OSC.

Much has changed since GetSmarterAboutMoney.ca first launched more than 15 years ago — from the rise of cryptocurrency to soaring home prices to budget-shattering interest rate spikes. Technology has changed the game too, and so, the OSC has incorporated not just new content but recent innovations.

“We’ve introduced a recommendations engine that uses artificial intelligence to help people on their learning journey by serving up information, resources and tools based on their interests and activity on the website,” Fleming says.

As well, the OSC has infused behavioural psychology principles into the design to make it more user friendly so investors, borrowers and budgeters can find the right information they need to make more informed decisions.

The site even includes a new section called the ‘Psychology of Investing’ that “talks about behavioural biases and helping investors understand how biases and emotions can play into our decisions and ways to mitigate the risks,” Fleming says.

Consider the relaunch among your most trusted guides for personal finance information among the plethora of resources available online to Canadians to bolster money know-how. Indeed, never before have we had so much information at our fingertips for just about anything, let alone financial knowledge.

Of course, therein lies a challenge too.

Sites like GetSmarterAboutMoney.ca and the MoneySmartManitoba.ca — run by the Manitoba Financial Services Agency — are truly trustworthy resources of unbiased information about investing and money management. But the internet is unsurprisingly a diverse pool of financial literacy from the good to the downright dodgy.

“If the main objective is to sell you something, that advice is likely to be lopsided,” says Enoch Omololu, Winnipeg-based founder and author of SavvyNewCanadians.com, a personal finance website for newcomers (but also a good resource for any Canadian).

He frequently points newcomer friends to MoneySmartManitoba.ca, as well as other free resources like those from the federal government, including Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) with detailed tax information about RRSPs and TFSAs. Another is the website of the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada (FCAC), offering a wide range of information from saving to credit cards.

Blogs are also worth digging into, like SavvyNewCanadians.com. Another is MyOwnAdvisor.ca, run by Mark Seed, an Ottawa-based do-it-yourself investor who strives to create a $1-million portfolio that generates tax-efficient dividend income.

“After some 15 years of sharing how I invest, … what’s working or not, I continue to be my own advisor because it’s a labour or love,” says Seed, who like Omololu, runs his blog as a hobby while working full-time in an unrelated field.

Seed notes sites like GetSmarterAboutMoney.ca are excellent for Canadians of all money backgrounds because of its abundance of tools and calculators. That includes a fund fee calculator that shows the impact of management expenses fees on investment returns over the long-term.

Of course, the world of web-based information extends so much further than it once did even a decade ago.

Social media is more dominant than ever, encompassing the spectrum of good and suspect information, Omololu says.

TikTok can be interesting, he adds, but “the financial information is just so short that it often doesn’t deliver a lot of value.”

In general, the challenge for all financial information — but more so with social media, which is notorious for misinformation — is understanding what’s good and what “is cloaked as free financial advice” but is selling products or worse, he says.

In turn, Omololu recommends figuring out who is creating the information, what’s their background and whether they’re qualified to offer advice.

Even if they’re not industry professionals as many bloggers aren’t, it doesn’t mean it’s not a useful resource.

Reddit, for example, can be an interesting deep-dive for Canadians seeking a variety of views on personal finance, he adds.

Subreddits like r/CanadianInvestor and r/PersonalFinanceCanada can offer a diversity of opinions with discussions about withdrawing from the TFSA for a downpayment on a home to exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that hedge Canadian currency risk.

“It doesn’t have to be true, right or wrong; it’s just people voicing their opinions.” And that can have value for Canadians who have built up a foundation of financial literacy and are seeking to validate or challenge their own ideas, he says.

So, while the online world is sometimes a cesspool of bad information, it can also serve a good guide to learn about finance, starting with sites like the revamped GetSmarterAboutMoney.ca to blogs like MyOwnAdvisor.ca and SavvyNewCanadians.com created by Canadians, who have a genuine interest personal finance.

Indeed, their authors’ curiosity has served them well, and their inquisitive nature can potentially help others too.

“If I can continue to pay it forward to others, and they can apply something (they learn from me) to their own situation, that’s great,” Seed says.