| By :
Molly Wider
According to the Canadian Federation of Students, Ottawa's Canada Student Loans Program is now owed more than $13.5 billion in outstanding student loan debt. The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions says that one in every five, or 20 per cent of students with a loan, will default by eventually becoming unable to repay their instalments. On average, students are now graduating $37,000 in debt. These statistics alone should be enough to inspire post-secondary saving, which is where the Investor Education Fund is of great value. It's a non-profit website set up for parents and students to help with savings and education options. It has been created to help sort out the best time to start saving, as well as how much to save and how much debt is safe to carry. Tom Hazma, the president of the Investor Education Fund says the website, "Tries to address the issue head-on. One of the biggest changes that has happened in the financial part of our world in the last 20 years [is that] people didn't have lines of credit readily available 20 years ago." He also adds that, "In the last decade in particular, the readiness of people to have credit-card debt is something that is just growing, and this website hopefully shows people what the impact of those decisions are." Hazma also points out that the days of earning your tuition over the period of a summer's worth of employment are long gone. "Suddenly the game has changed. Costs have gone up, and as a result, people are having to make different types of decisions than they had in the past." An eye-opening find by Statistics Canada discovered that students between the ages of 20 and 45, who borrow for their tuition fees, were less likely to own a home or have investments or savings in comparison to students who do not have to borrow for their education. Noah Stewart, the national deputy chairman of the Federation of Students notes, "In most cases, what students need is more money in terms of bursaries and student financial aid and lower costs. We need to lower tuition fees across the board." "In today's economy, a university education is a prerequisite. Seventy per cent of new jobs being created require a college or university degree. If we have a system that's so unfair that it's shutting people out of what they require [in order to find] work, we have a problem," Steward adds. In the current economic world, it is a fact that better jobs are being given to better qualified candidates, and those usually are the people who have been through school. Saving for post-secondary should be a priority on every potential student's list, as well as on the 'to-do' list of their parents. If a mound of monthly bills is preventing you from finding a few extra dollars each month to contribute to a savings plan, you may want to consider a consolidation loan. If standard financial institutions are not an option due to bad credit, there are private lenders for whom credit histories are virtually irrelevant to the lending process.
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