Children's Education Funds
reviews and complaints

Dec 09, 2023: After years of investing when received the money back I got total charges in the fee for 20% , so basically what government gives it goes straight into CEFI. Instead of passing the benefit, CEFI takes the advantage of people. The agents shows rosy pictures and while selling CEFI product said the all the charges will be returned. If you read the contract it says that it is discretionary by CEFI. Means if CEFI decides then they will not give you. My advice to new investors " STAY AWAY". Do your research and ask for what types of fees will be charged and how much percentage of total you invest and get it in writing. Ask question at the maturity how much you will invest and what will be the deduction in fees. Invest with big banks or other investing firm (e.g. Questarade). They charge minimal fees or some self investment plans do not even charge fees. Don't make the mistake which I made. Smart thing to do is learn from others mistake. Dec 13, 2023: Thank you CEFI for replying to my review and getting in touch via call and an email. On the call basically you defended your 20% fees on the deposit I made. Also making me feel stupid that I should have read the terms and condition, not believing what agent was telling me. I agree I should have done that and now I am sharing with others so, that please learn from my mistake. Also once you are in to get out you basically loose half of your money, so it is too late once you are in and get your statements.

. You're much better off investing with the bank. I really wish I had done my research beforehand. I feel like I'm chasing my money. My daughter had been in college for a year and a half and I still don't have my money!

Lack of support. Every call I've made, I have been answered with different answers every time making it extremely difficult to collect our investment. Always making excuses to defer or charge fees to the account due to error in their staff. Stay clear. It's not worth the headache or the money

You are better off investing your money in a bank than Children's Education Fund Inc. All I have to say is do your due diligence! After providing CEFI all the required documents to release my child's RESP payout I was told it will take 60 days to receive the funds. I told them I need my money ASAP and was told by the customer rep. to get a short term loan to pay my child's tuition fee! That right there was a red flag for me.

The fund is terrible to deal with. We have received correspondence from them saying they haven't received our maturity packages, when in fact they had been sent electronically as well as mailed copies. Now we have been advised that our EAP for 2019 has been forfeited! We have funds with our bank, it only takes sending them a certified copy of enrolment and our funds are released. I can not understand why CEFI makes obtaining our money so difficult!

Same problem as everybody else. They take your money, but a hassle to get it when it matures. they said they sent a letter in July to use it and/or withdraw it, but we did not get a letter. Now they impose all these restrictions. They also said because we did not return the letter you can only get the money you put in- none of the interest. ***.

Horrible Company. Charged late fees of $200 because they scanned all documents I sent to 1 contract when I sent documents for 2 different contracts, said proof of enrolment needed to be received by August and the University don't start until September, I asked how can a person do that, I was told I should have paid a fee of over$100 to defer the maturity date. ***.Just charged me $2400 more in "miscellaneous fees".

I have contributed $40 a month for 14 years for each of my children. Now that my son will be graduating high school this year, I have taken a closer look at the CEFI plan and now only realized just how poor of a program CEFI is. ***. The sales rep was like an ambulance chaser. He saw our birth announcement for our daughter over 14 years ago and used that to connect and sell us on a product that pays out less money than we contributed. The fees end up being about a third of the contribution amount. CEFI and the sales rep were very deceitful when selling there product to my wife and I. We were better off with G.I.C.s from the banks. STAY AWAY from this scholarship fund

We have too many complaints about CEF and their exorbitant and mysterious fees to list here, but the one I will mention is this:
As many before have mentioned, one of their methods is to target parents with new borns. They set the maturity date of your child's plan based on their birth month in the year of their anticipated graduation. So, any child born between January and June (~50% of their clients) will have a maturity date prior to their graduation. They charge $35.00 to defer the maturity date. We asked about the fact that the maturity date was prior to June the relevant year (we have three children/plans) but were told that it had to be that way. We were NOT told about the fee to defer the date.

They moved the maturation date so that we had to fight (and pay a fee) to get them to send us any money when our daughter started her course. This also happened to others who had invested their money with this company. There are fees upon fees. They would claim that the paperwork expired, not answer calls, not return calls, and have you send the paperwork back and forth to the College, asking for one change at a time, hoping the paperwork would expire. They withheld a portion of our daughter's money, stating that she would get the remaining portion if she took the optional 3rd year of her 2 year program. They even claimed to not have received a forms in time and told us we would have redo the paperwork until we were able to prove they had cashed our check for the fee they charged us to get our money.
Even when they DID send a cheque, there were additional fictitious fees taken from it. We had a financial advisor look at the paperwork and he had never seen such an obscure mess.