How Montreal Teens Are Learning Finance from TikTok—and Outsmarting the Banks

Yasmine Tremblay, a seventeen-year-old resident of Montreal’s Rosemont neighborhood, is better able to explain the distinction between an RRSP and a TFSA than most people twice her age. This was not taught to her in school. She never once brought up a tax-free savings account during the two weeks of supply and demand curves in her economics class.

On a Tuesday at 11 p.m., she discovered it while lying in bed and watching a six-minute TikTok video from a Toronto creator who explained everything using an analogy of a coffee cup. She shrugged and said, “It actually made sense,” as though it were the most commonplace thing in the world.

It’s not typical. Or it wasn’t meant to be, anyway. For many years, financial literacy in Canada followed a fairly predictable model: banks printed pamphlets, schools occasionally invited guest speakers, and parents passed on their own habits, whether positive or negative. The system was incredibly unequal, sluggish, and inconsistent. Children who grew up in households where money was discussed honestly had an advantage. Most of the others winged it.

A generation of teenagers in places like Montreal have discovered something better, or at least something quicker, more visual, and more truthful about what true financial anxiety feels like. This change has occurred quietly and rather quickly.

FinTok, the section of TikTok devoted to personal finance, is no longer a small experiment. The content under the hashtag #PersonalFinance alone has received over 4.4 billion views worldwide, ranging from straightforward budgeting tutorials to rather complex analyses of index funds and debt avalanche tactics. It’s an odd combination, with comedic sketches and cooking videos in between, but that’s part of the point. Teens in Montreal are more likely to stumble upon this content than actively seek it out.

A video about credit card interest rates can be inserted between a meme and a music clip by TikTok’s algorithm, which is genuinely unique in how it displays content outside of a user’s declared interests. You observe it. After that, you watch another. Then, at midnight, you comprehend the concept of compound interest.

There are two versions of this story: one that is completely upbeat and the other that contains actual warning indicators. It’s interesting because both are true at the same time. On the one hand, teens in Montreal, a city with a particularly high cost of living and an uncomfortable youth unemployment rate, are actually thinking about their financial futures in ways that earlier generations didn’t think about until their late twenties.

Before completing CEGEP, some of them are opening investment accounts. Some are asking their parents mortgage-related questions that they are unable to genuinely respond to. Regardless of how you measure it, that is amazing.

However, not all of the producers of these videos are qualified to offer the counsel they do. This is the point of complexity. Having a sizable TikTok following is not a qualification. Some seemingly authoritative accounts, with their polished thumbnails, assured delivery, and thousands of “this changed my life” comments, are actually run by enthusiastic amateurs who, at worst, covertly promote products for pay.

According to Jose Pinguelo, a financial advisor with over thirty years of experience, the first thing anyone who watches financial content online should ask is whether the creator is trying to sell them something or teach them something. It’s a helpful test. Furthermore, not all sixteen-year-olds have yet to fully internalize it.

Even so, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that this generation is managing money. Instead of being reflexive, their skepticism of banks feels earned. They inquire about fees. They make product comparisons. They seem to understand—possibly more viscerally than their parents did at the same age—that no one will provide them with financial security because they have grown up witnessing interest rates fluctuate and housing prices in Montreal rise to levels that feel abstract and almost hostile.

Dreams aren’t being sold by the most popular FinTok creators. They are talking about difficulties. Because the transparency seems uncommon, accounts that track debt repayment in real time, week by week, and show the actual numbers declining, garner a lot of engagement.

Financial literacy instruction is not consistently and significantly required in Quebec schools. Just 25% of high school students in Canada are assured of receiving any specialized financial education prior to graduation. The others are supposed to pick it up somewhere—from family, from experience, or from their early credit card mishaps. TikTok has entered that void in a somewhat disorganized manner. It’s not an ideal replacement for formal education. However, it is more easily accessible than a buried article on a credit union’s website.

In financial wellness circles, the term “money dysmorphia” has been used to describe the larger cultural anxiety that underlies all of this. It characterizes a skewed view of one’s own financial circumstances, such as feeling inadequate, broke, or behind schedule even when the numbers indicate otherwise. The condition is prevalent among Montreal’s younger generation, who grew up during a pandemic that disrupted the city’s economy and were exposed to carefully manicured lifestyles on social media.

Despite its shortcomings, FinTok might be doing something subtly beneficial here—not just imparting budgeting tips, but also normalizing the discussion of money anxiety. Teenagers are given permission to find the topic less embarrassing when creators are transparent about their own errors, debts, and confusion.

It remains to be seen if this eventually results in truly better financial outcomes. It’s still unclear if watching a TikTok about index funds when you’re seventeen makes you invest sensibly when you’re twenty-five, or if it just gives you a hazy sense of financial confidence that doesn’t quite hold up under actual pressure. That’s the sincere doubt that lies beneath everything.

However, Yasmine Tremblay already has a savings account, a rough budget that she updates on her phone, and a healthy dose of caution when it comes to people who guarantee returns. That’s not a bad start for seventeen.