Get Your Money Right

On October 28,2006 I attended the Get Your Money Right symposium that was put on by the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network. The symposium took place at the Ryerson University , Toronto, Ontario. This show was monumental for a variety of reasons.

1. Topics included money management , understanding your credit, networking and building for the future.

2. The Toronto, Hip-Hop scene is now being recognized by large institutions eg. Chrysler Financial which was one of the sponsor.

3. The Toronto, Hip-Hop seen is now been recognized by the top players in top players from the US

B.E.T , Russell Simmons and Dr Benjamin Chavis.

Also in attendance were Melissa Ford, Kardinal Official, Saukrates and Lil X.

The main agenda was educating the youth about money credit management. The Canada Credit Council provided an excellent workbook which can be downloaded from the website http://www.hsan.org/ .

Credit and money management is not currently part of the high school curriculum, and the attendance by youth at this event was overwhelming. I hope that those who participated will take the knowledge they captured and apply it to their situation and also teach friends who were not able to attend.

It is interesting, high school is about developing boys and girls of today to become men and women of tomorrow and there isn’t more emphasis on this topic of credit and money management.

I would like to put this out the educators and the decision makers of our education system, that it is time for us to visit or revisit this idea of creating a compulsory money management course for the high school system. Not every student will be able to pursue education beyond the high school level. Not every student will have an adult in their life who could teach him or her to develop and manage finances, yet it is critically important that everyone young and old understand how to get their money right.