Not having a Social Insurance Number (SIN) and not filing taxes may represent challenges to access government programs and supports such as the Canada Education Savings Grant (CESG) and the Canada Learning Bond (CLB). Limited data availability has prevented a full assessment of the extent of these...

This webinar shares results on Statistics Canada research on barriers to uptake for the Canada Learning Bond (CLB). Specifically, this research examines whether tax filing or Social Insurance Number (SIN) access are greater barriers to accessing the CLB. Read the slides which accompany this...

Introduced in 1998, the Canadian Education Savings Program (CESP) was designed as an incentive to encourage education savings for the post-secondary education of a child. The program is centred on Registered Education Savings Plans (RESPs), where savings accumulate tax-free until withdrawn, to pay...

Georgia has long struggled to rein in payday lenders, but even ambitious regulations can’t always stop the predatory practice. This is a brief article written for The New Yorker...

This is a case study of "The Johnsons," a family studied as part of the U.S. Financial Diaries project. The Johnsons have significant challenges keeping their family afloat. Despite multiple sources of income, which include education aid, their income is volatile and irregular. Their expenses also...

This report aims to move beyond the empirically unsubstantiated “individual effort leads to economic success” paradigm, which focuses on purported racial differences with regards to effort in school and work. We illustrate that educational attainment, employment, and income cannot explain the...

When money is tight, consumers often pay bills in a way that makes the problem worse, with late fees, penalties, and higher interest rates. Research shows that consumers have many reasons for their actions. To gain insight into why it’s so hard for consumers to organize and manage their financial...

Consumers have told us that they sometimes find common financial rules of thumb—like “spend no more than 30% of your take-home pay on your wants”—hard to apply to their own circumstances. Don’t feel discouraged, you can decide on your own personal rule to live by that works for your...

Consumers have told us that they sometimes find common financial rules of thumb—like “check your credit report once a year”—hard to apply to their own circumstances. Don’t feel discouraged, you can decide on your own personal rule to live by that works for your financial situation. Use...

Consumers have told us that they sometimes find common financial rules of thumb—like “save 10% of your income”—hard to apply to their own circumstances. Don’t feel discouraged, you can decide on your own personal rule to live by that works for your financial situation. Putting away...

Americans experience tremendous income volatility, and that volatility is on the rise. Income volatility matters because it is hard to manage. The typical household faces a shortfall in the financial buffer necessary to weather this volatility. Moreover, the decline in real wages since 2009 for all...

In a well-off country like Canada, it’s hard to believe that poverty exists. But one in 10 Canadians are poor, and 1.5 million women in Canada live on a low income. Certain groups of women are more likely to be poor than others, and many systemic barriers stand in the way of their financial...

A highlight of some of the findings reported in this briefing: Disposable income declined for most households in the fourth quarter of 2020, with the largest losses for the lowest-income earners (-10.2%). Compensation of employees—of which wages and salaries make up the largest share—was...

This report examines how diary participants achieve the financial wellbeing that they have. The evidence we found is that low-income people work very hard to manage their finances. They endeavor to control their finances so that, as one participant said, their finances don’t control them. They...

Canada is a prosperous country, yet in 2015 roughly 1 in 8 Canadians lived in poverty. The vision of Opportunity for All – Canada's First Poverty Reduction Strategy is a Canada without poverty, because we all suffer when our fellow citizens are left behind. We are all in this together, from...

This research report identifies behaviourally informed ways that government, regulators, employers, and financial institutions can encourage retirement planning. Thirty different initiatives and tactics that could be implemented by a variety of stakeholders to encourage retirement planning are...

The engagement of Canadians with lived experiences of poverty in government consultations on poverty reduction is critical. But as hard as governments work to try to include people living in poverty as full participating members in their consultation processes, there are many barriers that continue...

About half of households are considered financially fragile, which means they’re not sure they could come up with $2,000 in 30 days if they had to. Lack of emergency savings is common. It affects about half of households that earn $25,000 to $75,000 a year, and about a quarter of households that...

Many consumers live paycheck-to-paycheck. Bills and financial notices arrive by mail and e-mail at different times of the day and month. Consumers typically don’t act on them immediately. Research shows that consumers have many reasons for their actions. To gain insight into why it’s so hard...

TOcore is a three-year inter-divisional initiative, led by City Planning. The purpose of the Study is to ensure growth positively contributes to Toronto’s Downtown as a great place to live, work, learn, play and invest. It will do so by determining: a) how future growth will be accommodated,...

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, there are 20 million youth ages 16 to 24 participating in the American workforce, many of them in municipal workforce and employment programs. While some of these local programs offer financial education workshops, many young workforce program participants...

This is a household profile of a participant in the U.S. Financial Diaries project. Mike Smith, a single man in his mid-50s, lives in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house in Kentucky, in a small town near the Ohio River. Even though his resources are limited, he manages to save by strictly controlling...

Toronto is facing a big problem. As access to opportunity is increasingly out of reach for too many that live here, the reputation of “Toronto the Good” is being compromised. Because of the concentration of poverty, declining job quality and rising income inequality, we are seeing that Toronto...

In a country as wealthy as Canada, close to a million people need food banks just to make ends meet each month. Why have we not seen any significant change to this situation after so many years, and after so much has been written about hunger? HungerCount 2014 uncovers the hard data on food bank...