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Forbes
11 hours ago
- Business
- Forbes
The Importance Of Financial Literacy In Wealth Building
Financial literacy is not just a valuable asset; it's a necessity for sustainable wealth building. Understanding how to budget, invest, and manage debt empowers Canadians to make informed decisions and secure their financial futures. Whether saving for a home, funding a child's education, or preparing for retirement, financial literacy is the cornerstone of financial stability and long-term growth. Building wealth is about understanding how to manage what you have wisely. What is Financial Literacy? Financial literacy involves understanding basic financial concepts such as saving, investing, credit, debt management, taxation, and retirement planning. According to the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada (FCAC), financial literacy includes the ability to make informed decisions about financial products and services and to plan for short- and long-term goals. With this knowledge, Canadians can better navigate everyday financial situations and avoid pitfalls. Why Financial Literacy Matters in Wealth Building Financial literacy is crucial to wealth building for several reasons: With the proper financial education and astute planning, Canadians will be more financially resilient to withstand economic downturns, inflation, or unexpected expenses. Real-Life Application and Generational Impact Financial literacy isn't just about theory; it's about practical application. A financially literate individual knows how to compare mortgage rates, evaluate investment funds, and choose insurance policies that fit their needs. They understand compound interest, credit scores, and the cost of borrowing. This knowledge leads to better day-to-day decisions and long-term financial planning. Moreover, financially literate individuals can pass their knowledge on to the next generation. Teaching children and teens about saving, budgeting, and investing early creates a culture of responsible financial behaviour. This generational transfer of financial wisdom can lead to long-term benefits for families and communities across the country. Practical Steps to Improve Financial Literacy Improving financial literacy starts with accessible education and intentional action. Here are ways to enhance your financial skills: Empowerment Through Financial Knowledge Financial literacy equips Canadians to handle financial challenges and build a secure future. It fosters confidence, resilience, and independence. With rising living costs, evolving job markets, and increasing personal debt, the ability to make wise financial decisions is more important than ever. Financial knowledge empowers individuals to pursue their goals, whether homeownership, travel, entrepreneurship, or retirement goals. It also enhances mental health by reducing anxiety associated with financial uncertainty. By investing in your financial education, you can make informed decisions that lead to long-term prosperity, intergenerational stability, and financial peace of mind. Financial literacy equips Canadians to handle financial challenges and build a secure future. It fosters confidence, resilience, and independence. With rising living costs, evolving job markets, and increasing personal debt, the ability to make wise financial decisions is more important than ever. Financial knowledge empowers individuals to pursue their goals, whether homeownership, travel, entrepreneurship, or retirement goals. It also enhances mental health by reducing anxiety associated with financial uncertainty. By investing in your financial education, you can make informed decisions that lead to long-term prosperity, intergenerational stability, and financial peace of mind.
Time Magazine
30-07-2025
- Health
- Time Magazine
How Bureaucracy and Budgets Shape American Medical Research
President Donald Trump's proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year has made drastic cuts to the National Institute of Health's (NIH) budget, sparking alarm among many. While the level of proposed cuts is unprecedented, calls for efficiency are nothing new. In fact, they echo decades-old efforts to make publicly funded science more accountable. What has gone largely unnoticed, however, is how these reforms reshaped how NIH research is managed—as well as the very definition of what counts as rigorous, worthwhile health research in the first place. Even as the NIH's budget soared over the past half-century, much of that growth came at a price: a narrowing of NIH's scientific imagination. Driven by bureaucratic reforms and the need to demonstrate fiscal responsibility, the agency gradually shifted away from large, community-based, longitudinal studies aimed at understanding what keeps people healthy. Instead, it prioritized smaller, faster studies with statistical significance and quantifiable data, but far less explanatory power about how to stay healthy. In the late 1950s, the NIH was beginning to expand its mission to address chronic ailments like heart disease and cancer. These growing health threats required a fundamentally different kind of science—slower, more complex, and deeply embedded in communities. Early NIH leaders, such as James Shannon, embraced this challenge with a bold vision: government-led, multi-site observational studies tracking large populations over decades. The Framingham Heart Study, launched in 1948, embodied this approach. It aimed to enroll over 5,000 healthy residents of Framingham, Mass., and follow them for at least 20 years to understand how lifestyle factors and social context shaped long-term health outcomes. Read More: RFK Jr. Says Ultra-Processed Foods Are 'Poison'—But That He Won't Ban Them Over the next decade, the NIH became the de facto institution for carrying out this sort of bold population-based investigation into health and disease. But as the 1960s progressed, this vision for the NIH ran afoul of a growing government-wide push for budgetary control. Reforms like Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution and Zero-Base Budgeting demanded that all federal agencies and initiatives define outcomes in advance and justify expenses with quantifiable projections. Large-scale observational studies—by their very nature, exploratory, slow, and expensive—were easy targets for government watchdogs obsessed with efficiency. For example, the Wooldridge Committee, a task force appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson's Office of Science and Technology to review the federal research enterprise, sharply criticized the NIH in 1965 for failing to provide adequate oversight of its biggest studies The committee warned that scientific freedom could no longer excuse a lack of fiscal discipline. The NIH responded, not by defending the long arc of discovery required for understanding the causes of chronic disease, but by adapting. Researchers were asked to project statistical returns on investment. Studies were re-evaluated not just for scientific merit, but for how likely they were to generate measurable results within a budget cycle. Framingham, once a flagship of public health research, was deemed too open-ended. By 1970, it had lost its privileged status and instead had to compete for grants like any university-based project. This shift marked an institutional pivot away from NIH-led, community-grounded studies and towards a more manageable model of research. During this time, the NIH also shelved several other large, prospective population-based studies of health and disease, including the Diet-Heart Study—an ambitious effort to definitively test the role of high-fat diets in causing heart disease. In their place, a new framework for investigating chronic diseases emerged, one built around smaller, investigator-initiated grants awarded to outside researchers. These grants, and the peer-review process that governed their approval, increasingly relied on the tools of biostatistics to demonstrate methodological rigor and fiscal discipline. From an administrative perspective, these outside projects were easier to justify: they were shorter in duration, cleaner in design, and more narrowly focused. Politically, they were appealing too—distributed across universities in different congressional districts, they helped spread NIH funding across the country. By encouraging investigators to design studies with tightly defined objectives, measurable outcomes, and clear statistical models, the NIH was able to present its growing budget as aligned with the broader federal push for transparency and accountability. In effect, the agency avoided deeper scrutiny by embedding oversight expectations into the very structure of scientific inquiry. By doing so, it created the conditions for its outside grant program to flourish. Yet, this shift also produced a subtle, but profound, change in the kinds of questions NIH research was designed to answer. Rather than pursuing the fundamental causes of health and disease, the types of population-based investigations that received NIH grants looked at discrete, isolated lifestyle factors and their relative impact on specific conditions — what have come to be known as risk factor epidemiology. In the case of heart disease, this involved studies on the impact of certain foods on conditions commonly associated with heart disease, especially high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and elevated body mass index. And while these types of investigations yielded a flood of peer-reviewed publications and some effective interventions at the individual level, they also left crucial questions unanswered. After decades of risk factor research, for example, we still do not fully understand the causes of heart disease—or how best to prevent it. Read More: NIH Budget Cuts Are the 'Apocalypse of American Science,' Experts Say In the decades since, many investigators and commentators have criticized the dominance of 'risk factor epidemiology.' Critics include Gary Taubes, a science journalist known for his writing on nutrition science and the history of dietary guidelines, and John Ioannidis, a Stanford researcher who has long argued that most epidemiological studies of nutrition are limited in scope and contradictory. They and others contend that risk factor–driven research has led to public health guidance built on fragile associations and patterns in data that do not reflect causality. These critics often point to the decades-long emphasis on reducing dietary fat to lower cholesterol and prevent heart disease as problematic. This advice led many Americans to adopt low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets—a diet that is now linked to obesity, diabetes, and ironically, heart disease. Today, many health experts and institutions have reversed course, encouraging the consumption of healthy fats and warning against excess sugar and refined carbohydrates. The result has been public confusion, eroded trust in nutrition science, and a generation of health advice that, in retrospect, may have done more harm than good. These studies have flourished since the 1970s not because they promised definitive answers on how to stay healthy, but because they appeared to offer a clear return on investment. Their study designs were statistically rigorous and focused on narrowly defined variables and outcome measures, which enabled these projects to routinely yield statistically significant results for the questions they were designed to answer. That gave policymakers and funders the impression that public dollars were driving scientific progress, even as it provided few answers to the biggest scientific questions. Ironically, it was the promotion of this particular style of research—narrow in scope, statistically precise, and managerially friendly—that helped the NIH expand its budget and reach. But the accumulation of these rigorous, but smaller-in-scope, findings rarely translated into an applicable understanding of the complex, long-term, and interconnected forces that truly shape health. Today, as the NIH again faces oversight and budget pressures, the American scientific establishment has a chance to course-correct. The current administration has emphasized health promotion and the importance of diet. But if those goals are to be more than talking points, President Trump, Congress, and the NIH must be willing to invest in the kind of science that can actually reveal what keeps us well. That means returning to community-based, long-term observational studies—even if they are expensive, even if they take decades, and even if they do not fit neatly into the bureaucratic logic of annual performance metrics. Sejal Patel-Tolksdorf is a health policy analyst and former chief research historian at the National Institutes of Health. Her work focuses on the politics and policy of American health research. Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
Daily Record
29-07-2025
- Business
- Daily Record
North Ayrshire Council to hold funding drop-in sessions
Information on seeking funding opportunities has been released. Community groups are being invited to take part in sessions aimed at exploring how they could secure funding support from North Ayrshire Council. A wide range of funding is available to enable organisations to develop or expand their facilities. North Ayrshire Council's Connected Communities team are inviting individuals and community organisations to an upcoming series of information drop-in sessions ahead of the next cycle of the council's Participatory Budgeting Fund (PB). The sessions have been set up across our six localities support communities to: Find out about participatory budgeting Learn about how it works here in North Ayrshire Hear from other groups and organisations who have benefited locally Find out about the eligibility criteria Discuss projects and initiatives that could benefit but haven't applied before This is also an opportunity to meet with other groups who are already working alongside Locality teams - part of the North Ayrshire Community Planning Partnership - to identify priorities and empower communities, increase capacity and improve facilities to achieve local community ambitions. More than 190 community groups and projects have been successful in receiving their share of North Ayrshire's £171,377 PB funding since last November. With applications opening in August, the next round of Participatory Budgeting (PB) is just around the corner. This cycle a total sum of £204,159 funding will be made available and for the first time, the funding also includes a Community Wealth Building Fund element of £30,000. The funding this year will be part of three funding pots: Locality PB: Health and Wellbeing, Building Community Spirit, Cost of Living, Green Projects Youth PB: Green Projects, Health and Wellbeing, Young People's Voice and Rights, Equality and Diversity and Cost of Living Community Wealth Building Fund: Community Ownership, Enterprising Communities and Local Innovation Participatory Budgeting is based on an ethos of 'it's your money, you decide'. It is a type of citizen participation where local people are involved in the process of deciding how public money - in this case the council's PB budget - is best spent. The drop-in sessions and locations are as follows: Millport DA Hall, Thursday, August 7, 5-7pm Arran Ormidale Sports Pavilion, Brodick, Monday, August 11, 11am-1pm Skelmorlie Community Centre, Monday, August 11, 6-8pm West Kilbride Community Centre, Tuesday, August 12, 6-8pm Largs Library, Wednesday, August 13, 6-8pm Kilwinning Library, Thursday, August 14, 6-8pm Towerlands Community Centre, Wednesday, August 20, 11am-1pm Ardrossan Civic Centre, Wednesday, August 20, 7-9pm Bridgend Community Centre, Kilbirnie, Thursday, August 21, 10:30am-12:30pm Beith Community Centre, Thursday, August 21, 2-4pm Dalry Community Centre, Thursday, August 21, 7-9pm Marymass Family Zone, Irvine Moor, Saturday, August 23, noon - 3pm You can also find the dates on the Shaping North Ayrshire website. For more information, contact participatorybudgeting@ Councillor Alan Hill, Cabinet Member of Communities, Housing and Islands said groups should grab the opportunity to find out more about how they can be supported. He said: 'Our residents know better than anyone else which projects will be the most beneficial to them in their local communities, so it is only fair that they have a direct say on how money is spent. 'Participatory Budgeting does just this, however we are very aware that there will be local community groups and organisations out there who haven't had the chance to benefit just yet and it is so important to us that we make sure that no one is left behind. 'Everyone is welcome – we particularly encourage people who have never been involved in participatory budgeting before to come along and find out more. 'The aim of the upcoming sessions are to engage with as many local people as we can from across our localities so that they too can get involved in the next participatory budgeting cycle, as we work together with residents and the groups supporting our communities to build a thriving North Ayrshire for all.'
Yahoo
26-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
I Asked ChatGPT How Much the Average Middle-Class Retiree Spends Monthly at Age 75: Here's What It Said
Retirement spending statistics are often valuable to consider, whether one is comparing and contrasting said figures with their budgetary situation as retirees or plotting a comfortable path to enjoy one's golden years. Read More: Find Out: ChatGPT is growing in popularity as an artificial intelligence (AI) research tool as well as a personal finance tipster, so it may be valuable to consult its take on exactly how much a middle-class retiree might be expected to spend when they reach age 75. Here's what it said — though, as always, it's best to take generative AI data with a pinch of salt. Using Fed and BLS Data as a Baseline ChatGPT gestured toward data from the Federal Reserve of St. Louis (FRED) and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) as its primary sources. However, on first glance, while the module did cite BLS table 1300 as an accurate source, it did not correctly identify $53,481 as the mean annual expenditure for Americans aged 75 and older (instead providing a much lower figure of $36,673) in 2022 survey data terms. Once course-corrected, however, ChatGPT provided the following breakdown of expenditures, inflation-adjusted for 2025. Housing: $29,145 Food: $7,249 Healthcare: $9,694 Transportation: $5,390 Entertainment: $2,696 Cash contributions (donations, gifts, alimony or child support): $3,851 Apparel and services: $1,219 Personal insurance: $963 Miscellaneous: $3,977 That amounts to a projected total of $64,184 in annual expenses for middle-class retirees in this age group in 2025. What the future holds is uncertain, and these figures may be less than concrete, but they do provide a general guideline as to what one can expect reality to look like. Discover Next: Key Expense Insights for Retirees Age 75 and Older A few notable pieces of insight that the LLM issued as part of a category breakdown included the fact that housing was, by far, the largest expense — 'even in mortgage-free households' — due to property taxes, maintenance, utilities and insurance. Healthcare did tick upward versus other age groups, logically, but was perhaps less than anticipated due to Medicare coverage. Cash contributions reflected a strong pattern of generosity and gifting within this age cohort, and transportation remained expensive (including gas, insurance and repairs) even though older Americans reported less driving frequency. More From GOBankingRates 3 Luxury SUVs That Will Have Massive Price Drops in Summer 2025 4 Housing Markets That Have Plummeted in Value Over the Past 5 Years Mark Cuban Says Trump's Executive Order To Lower Medication Costs Has a 'Real Shot' -- Here's Why This article originally appeared on I Asked ChatGPT How Much the Average Middle-Class Retiree Spends Monthly at Age 75: Here's What It Said
Yahoo
26-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
I Asked ChatGPT How Much the Average Middle-Class Retiree Spends Monthly at Age 75: Here's What It Said
Retirement spending statistics are often valuable to consider, whether one is comparing and contrasting said figures with their budgetary situation as retirees or plotting a comfortable path to enjoy one's golden years. Read More: Find Out: ChatGPT is growing in popularity as an artificial intelligence (AI) research tool as well as a personal finance tipster, so it may be valuable to consult its take on exactly how much a middle-class retiree might be expected to spend when they reach age 75. Here's what it said — though, as always, it's best to take generative AI data with a pinch of salt. Using Fed and BLS Data as a Baseline ChatGPT gestured toward data from the Federal Reserve of St. Louis (FRED) and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) as its primary sources. However, on first glance, while the module did cite BLS table 1300 as an accurate source, it did not correctly identify $53,481 as the mean annual expenditure for Americans aged 75 and older (instead providing a much lower figure of $36,673) in 2022 survey data terms. Once course-corrected, however, ChatGPT provided the following breakdown of expenditures, inflation-adjusted for 2025. Housing: $29,145 Food: $7,249 Healthcare: $9,694 Transportation: $5,390 Entertainment: $2,696 Cash contributions (donations, gifts, alimony or child support): $3,851 Apparel and services: $1,219 Personal insurance: $963 Miscellaneous: $3,977 That amounts to a projected total of $64,184 in annual expenses for middle-class retirees in this age group in 2025. What the future holds is uncertain, and these figures may be less than concrete, but they do provide a general guideline as to what one can expect reality to look like. Discover Next: Key Expense Insights for Retirees Age 75 and Older A few notable pieces of insight that the LLM issued as part of a category breakdown included the fact that housing was, by far, the largest expense — 'even in mortgage-free households' — due to property taxes, maintenance, utilities and insurance. Healthcare did tick upward versus other age groups, logically, but was perhaps less than anticipated due to Medicare coverage. Cash contributions reflected a strong pattern of generosity and gifting within this age cohort, and transportation remained expensive (including gas, insurance and repairs) even though older Americans reported less driving frequency. More From GOBankingRates 3 Luxury SUVs That Will Have Massive Price Drops in Summer 2025 I'm a Retired Boomer: 6 Bills I Canceled This Year That Were a Waste of Money Are You Rich or Middle Class? 8 Ways To Tell That Go Beyond Your Paycheck This article originally appeared on I Asked ChatGPT How Much the Average Middle-Class Retiree Spends Monthly at Age 75: Here's What It Said Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
