Call him Captain Finance: Fighting back against personal debt
Professor takes up challenge to make students financially literate, for free
“There’s an insane amount of … personal debt…. I’ve seen a lot of my friends lose their shirts and I wanted to help them.” Dr. John Fiset
Think of him as a superhero fighting the evil of financial illiteracy, a protector for those struggling to make ends meet.
Dr. John Fiset, a business professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland, first came to the Rock three years ago from Concordia University in Montreal where he completed his doctoral thesis in management.
Now, he’s out to peel back the mystery of personal financial matters with an online course that’s going to be completely free at Memorial University starting this autumn.
“There’s an insane amount of … personal debt,” says Fiset. “I’ve seen a lot of my friends lose their shirts and I wanted to help them.”
With a $2,300 grant from the university, Fiset is using his superpower as an educator to develop a financial literacy course with about seven modules that will give anyone a better grasp of personal finances.
Financial illiteracy is a well-established societal problem in North America. A paper entitled Financial Literacy Among the Young: Evidence and Implications for Consumer Policy and written for The Wharton School in the United States shows the challenge was there as far back as a decade ago.
“We found that financial literacy was severely lacking among young adults,” the authors of that paper wrote then. “Only 27 per cent of young adults know about inflation and risk diversification and can do simple interest rate calculations.”
There are other financial literacy courses in Canada, of course, including some that are online.
Athabascu University has one, a three-credit course, but it would cost $820 for the average Atlantic Canadian to take it online, assuming they’re not senior citizens. And that price doesn’t include a $115 general application fee. Total cost: $935.
In Ontario, Mcmaster University also offers an online personal finance course. It counts for three credits and such courses at Mcmaster typically cost about $1,080. The University of Calgary’s 15-hour Foundations of Personal Financial Management course costs $325.
But making people who are struggling with their finances pay just to learn how to manage their money doesn’t sit well with Fiset. He wants to give people a break. “I wanted to not charge because this is a need, a right, and to put this in an ivory tower and charge people and make them go into debt for this is not something I believe in.”
The financial literacy course at Memorial University will be a noncredit program.
The goal is to give people the tools to avoid getting into financial trouble.
Among all the Atlantic Canadian provinces, Newfoundland and Labrador was the only one to see an uptick in consumer insolvencies for the year that closed at the end of March, according to figures from the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy Canada.
A consumer insolvency is when an individual – as opposed to a business - files a consumer proposal to stave off creditors or declares bankruptcy.
Although the number of personal bankruptcies on the Rock dropped by 11.6 per cent, consumer proposals skyrocketed, going up by 32.6 per cent during that 12-month period. The result was a five-per cent bump in consumer insolvencies in that province during that year.
Elsewhere in the region, things were looking up at the end of March. Consumer insolvencies on Prince Edward Island dropped by 12.1 per cent, with both the number of such bankruptcies and consumer proposals falling by about the same percentage each.
In Nova Scotia, the number of consumer insolvencies dropped 6.5 per cent during that year, fueled mainly by an 11.2-per cent drop in these bankruptcies even as the number of consumer proposals rose slightly, by four per cent. New Brunswick saw only a 3.5-per cent drop in consumer insolvencies during that time period as a 19.7-per cent rise in consumer proposals almost cancelled out a 16.4-per cent drop in personal bankruptcies.
Despite the latest drop in consumer insolvencies, though, Ottawa’s figures still show almost 13,890 personal bankruptcies and consumer proposals were filed in Atlantic Canada during the year that ended at the end of March.
At Memorial University, Fiset wants to equip people with the know-how they need to avoid these financial pitfalls and get the most out of life.
“There will be videos and activities where you can apply your knowledge in an interactive way,” he says.
That financial literacy course, which is still being developed by the 33-year-old university professor, does not yet even have a name. The plan is to roll it out this fall with undergrads at Memorial University. Then, in six months or so, Fiset wants to check to see what those students have retained of the course material and how they’re applying it in their day-to-day lives.
“I will pilot it with 100 people and see how it goes and then roll it out to other universities (in Atlantic Canada),” he says. “If it goes well, I would like to bring it down to the high schools.”
Among the topics to be covered in the course will be how to use credit cards, budgeting, negotiating loans, retirement planning, personal investments, the magic of compound interest and, yes, personal income taxes.
“It’s shocking how many people can’t do their own taxes when it only takes about 10 minutes,” says Fiset.
Teaching people how to manage their household expenses is something that’s sorely needed, he says.
“The biggest gap in people’s knowledge by far is budgeting, spending $2 for every $1 you make, or just swiping a credit card to pay for things,” says Fiset.
Although he’s adamant about avoiding sponsorships from financial institutions and any possible perception of compromise of academic integrity with regards to the course, the university professor is hoping to develop partnerships with other educational institutions to promote financial literacy in Atlantic Canada.
“That would be my dream,” he says. “To have it for all the Atlantic universities.”