Prosper Canada has announced that 16 community organizations have been awarded a total of $1.1 million through the concluding round of its TD Financial Literacy Grant Fund.

The TD Financial Literacy Grant Fund is administered by Prosper Canada and supports organizations that deliver financial literacy programming to people living in low income and economically disadvantaged circumstances across the country. This is the final granting round of the Fund which will end, as scheduled, in December 2015.

You need money to fulfill your business, education, or real estate goals. The best option for each of these is a government grant. But sometimes you may either be waiting for grant money or find that you need to supplement the free government grant. What do you do? One of the next best choices is a low-interest or no-interest loan. Here’s why these are great deals for you.

Are you buying books, school supplies and clothing as you get ready to go back to school? Full-time post-secondary students in Canada can expect to pay about $15,000 on average to cover a year of expenses.

Fortunately, the government offers to assist with your post-secondary education costs. The federal government provides various income tax credits, loans and grants; and exempts scholarships from taxation. Provinces and territories also offer loans, tax credits, and tuition reimbursements.

Congratulations–you got a grant! Now is it a one-time grant, or is it renewable? And if it’s renewable, what do you have to do to receive the next round of funding? Each allotment of grant money has its own set of conditions. One of these addresses what happens when the funding period has elapsed. One of the possibilities is that it may be one-time funding, and that you aren’t eligible to reapply in future funding cycles.

Do you have a Registered Education Savings Plan (RESP) for your child? Remember the age 15 deadline if you have not yet opened an RESP for your child. If your child was born in 1999, this is the year to open an RESP and deposit $2,000 before Dec. 31. You will be rewarded with a $500 matching federal government grant for 2014.

For a newly opened RESP with a 15-year-old beneficiary, you must deposit at least $2,000 in 2014 to qualify for grants in 2015 and 2016. By making optimum catch-up RESP deposits of $5,000 in each of the following two years, you can earn up to $2,000 of federal grants.

If you do nothing in 2014, then in 2015, when your child turns 16, you’d be too late for a government grant for a first-time RESP deposit.

Learning a second language can be beneficial to you in a number of ways. There can be government grants to help you become bilingual or better, and knowing multiple languages can help you be better qualified for government grants or scholarships. There are plenty of advantages to knowing more than one language too. You may have the opportunity to study a new language at a college, in adult education classes, in community outreach programs, or other venues.

One of the key parts of a grant proposal is its budget. Some of my students have a little trouble knowing where to begin with it and knowing whether they have done it correctly. I have some ideas for you to make the process a little less intimidating.

First, here are some general rules. Be sure that your budget is:

One form of business funding is a guaranteed loan. Some people may misunderstand what the word “guaranteed” means in this context, though. It does not mean that there is a guarantee that the loan will be made, no matter what. What the word “guarantee” means here is that the loan is backed by government funding so that the lending institution will be fully or partially reimbursed if the loan is not repaid.

Canada and Alberta student loans require a paper application for the first year, but online in subsequent years. Photo: University of Alberta. $748 million in Canada and Alberta student loans and grants were given out in 2012, and even more is expected to be allocated this year.

The Needs Assessment is a crucial part of your grant proposal because that’s where you make the case that there’s a legitimate reason that you’re asking for grant money. As I often point out, grant money exists to bridge the gap between a need and a solution (or at least to lessen the need that exists). The job of the person writing the grant proposal is to explain that a need really does exist and provide evidence of it.

Most of us are animal lovers. According to polls, a little more than 70% of respondents describe themselves this way. We love our pets and want to see that they are well cared for. It’s no surprise, then, that there is a lot of grant money that is allocated for animal welfare. The majority of this comes from foundations and individuals and goes to animal organizations.

One of the popular uses of government funding is acquiring real estate. Many of my students have used government funding programs to buy their first home or upgrade their existing residence. Others still are real estate investors, either with some experience or just getting started. No matter whether you’re a novice or a seasoned investor, there are four basic principles of real estate that you can put to work to catapult your success

I get a lot of questions about government grant proposals, and I’ve reviewed a fair number of them. I’ve seen some instances where people want to make a grand political statement as part of their government grant request or making the basis of their funding request kind of a pushback against some public policy that they don’t agree with.

Students can stand eye-to-eye with a bearded dragon or write about a hamster’s habitat with help from a Pets in the Classroom grant from PetSmart, available now for the 2013 school year in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. Administered through the Pet Care Trust, the grant helps pre-kindergarten through eighth-grade teachers cover most of the cost of a classroom pet and start-up supplies.

Everyone wants to get the really big grants. However, if you focus exclusively on these, you may miss out on funding your project. A different approach is to seek several smaller grants, which are more commonly found and may have less competition. An effective way to do this is to divide your project into parts that function independently.

Government grants are often used as a tool of social engineering for governments to encourage or accelerate some desired outcome. In the case of neighborhoods that are geared to undergo a renewal and renaissance, government grants are a way to encourage growth and rebuilding. The trick, though, can be to get the process started.

We all know the feeling of coming thisclose to getting something, then finding out that we just barely missed out. This can be true with grant funding. Many grant programs are funded at a particular time of year, then end when all the funds are allocated. Others have a pre-determined funding cycle. If you miss this funding cycle, you end up having to wait until the next one, or if the program isn’t renewed, then you miss out altogether.

If you are a Canadian who is having difficulty repaying your student loan debt, there may be help for you in the form of a government grant program called the Repayment Assistance Plan. Here are some of the features the first stage of this debt assistance program: The repayment period is capped at 15 years (or 10 years if you are disabled);