I recently signed up for free access to the Canadian Financial Summit. After listening to a few of the talks, I thought it would be interesting to write up my thoughts on it for others to find.
Disclaimer: This is just a quick, surface level review. Just my first impressions and thoughts on a few of the talks I watched. I didn’t listen to every talk from this year’s summit and I don’t have the “All Access Pass”. I also haven’t received anything in exchange for this review and I don’t have a personal connection to anyone involved in the summit (although I have read, listened to and watched a lot of their other content).
About the Summit
The summit is a multi-day virtual conference. Essentially it’s a collection of video talks (mostly interview style) that are released over three days. With the free pass you get links to the videos each day and can watch them for up to 48 hours afterwards. To get lifetime unlimited access to all videos you have to pay for an “All Access Pass”. The All Access Pass also offers up some bonus content as well as podcast versions of all the sessions. The summit is organized by Kyle Prevost from Million Dollar Journey. Fun fact – Million Dollar Journey was one of the first personal finance blogs I started reading.
The Speakers
The speakers are a real “who’s who” of the Canadian personal finance world. There are industry media veterans like Rob Carrick, Jonathan Chevreau and Preet Banarjee, There are financial industry professionals galore. And there are plenty of recognizable bloggers, podcasters, Youtubers and authors.
I have seen or heard content from pretty much all of the speakers in the past and generally have been able to find something interesting from each of them. Particularly when you’re listening to “regular people” talk about their personal finance experience, their approaches and stories don’t always resonate directly with your own plans. But they are all good communicators and it is interesting to hear the different perspectives.
In terms of a cross-section of speakers in the Canadian personal finance I give the summit an A+.
The Talks
It would take you hours and hours to go through all the talks. I watched/listened to a couple each day. One thing I found is that listening was perfectly fine for most of them. So these are as much podcasts as they are videos. In fact, if I had to summarize the whole summit I would describe it as a curated set of videos/podcasts along the same lines as what you may find in publicly available sources. Many of the speakers have their own platforms and/or have been on each other’s platforms. So you could find similar content elsewhere with enough digging. The value of the summit from my view is that it’s well curated and all in one place.
This means that as someone who voraciously consumes Canadian personal finance content, I didn’t find there was a lot new for me. All the videos I watched/listened to were well done and good content. But I can’t say I learned much new information or insight.
I did particularly enjoy a couple of talks:
On one end of the spectrum was The Best European Winter Escapes for Canadian Snowbirds featuring Stephanie and Gillian of Our Freedom Years. This talk was about their personal experience traveling to Europe in off-season months as a financially independent couple. I don’t know yet if this is something we’ll want to do when we’re retired but it sounds like fun. They did a good job explaining both pros and cons of this kind of travel. I find it generally quite interesting to hear how other people spend their time and money once they’ve achieved financial freedom. For me, this kind of talk is very representative of what you can get out of the summit in terms of personal stories from non-industry professionals.
At another end of the spectrum, I quite liked What Good Financial Planning Should Look Like & Can You Trust the Numbers? featuring Jason Heath from Objective Financial Partners. As a pretty serious DIYer, I am personally quite interested in seeing how professionals approach financial planning and what I can learn from them. I didn’t really learn a lot new from this talk but Jason did a good job explaining how professionals approach planning and I particularly liked how he leaned heavily on the CFP Projection Assumption Guidelines. If you’re not familiar with these guidelines this video is a good introduction about why they are important and why professionals use them. So while not necessarily a lot of new information to me, I did appreciate hearing a professional’s view on this topic.
So given all of this, I have to split my rating a few ways:
In terms of sheer quantity of information: A+. There is quite simply a ton of good content.
In terms of quality of information: A if you’re more of a beginner/intermediate in the personal finance world, B if you’re already more of an advanced consumer of personal finance content.
General Experience
Signing up was easy. The emails with links all came on schedule. The links all worked. Streaming the videos worked fine. I could quibble about how the pages with the talks were organized and other minor things like that, but nothing that was a big deal. All-in-all it seems very well organized and professionally run. So A+ on the general experience!
Recommendation
Overall there is a lot to recommend the summit. It’s good content with good speakers and well organized. If you just want to check it out, the free pass gives you plenty of time to listen to a few talks.
If I was just starting out in learning about Canadian personal finance, I would be very tempted by the All Access Pass. Even where I am now it’s a little tempting just because I also get entertainment value out of consuming this type of content.
So all together I give the Canadian Financial Summit a solid A rating.