From Immigrant to Financial Entrepreneur: How Eduek Brooks is Empowering Canadian Women

Eduek Brooks, Founder of Two Sides of a Dime

In 2018, Eduek Brooks was drowning in over $40,000 in consumer debt. Overwhelmed but resolved, she knew she had to get serious about managing her finances. However, about two weeks after deciding to clear the debt, she was laid off from her full-time job. “That was the biggest push that I needed,” she said. “Getting laid off, being $47,000 in debt, not having any savings and, as an immigrant, I didn’t have any family, I didn’t have anyone where I could say hey I’m kind of broke can I crash on your couch for a few months until I get ahead.” She began documenting her journey out of debt on Instagram, posting anonymously at first. However, when she saw how much traction those posts received and how many women began sharing similar stories, Eduek says her eyes opened to see the need for more women like her – Black, immigrant women – in the financial space. She began sharing educational content, her passion to help women get out of debt resulting in an increasing number of speaking gigs and financial education workshops.

According to TransUnion, Canadian consumer credit reached a new high earlier this year and newcomers to Canada played a key role. The number of immigrants who opened a credit account for the first time jumped 46 per cent from 2022 to 2023 – up from just 5 per cent in 2021. This mass of new credit users – about 470,000 immigrants over the past year – accounted for nearly $3.5 billion in debt. Having moved to Canada from Nigeria to complete a master's degree in Engineering, Eduek herself had no experience with the financial system in her new home. “I know even as I came to Canada, coming from a very cash-based system and moving here where everything is credit-based, I didn’t understand how the credit system worked.” Eduek’s experience isn’t dissimilar to what other aspiring entrepreneurs face once they immigrate to Canada. Through the Black Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub (BEKH) National Quantitative Survey, BEKH aims to capture those experiences, hoping to better tell the story of Black entrepreneurs and their enterprises. This new insight will help spotlight gaps in the system and advance Black entrepreneurship for Canadians and newcomers alike.

Armed with personal experience and financial insight, Eduek is now a Financial Educator, the founder of Two Sides of a Dime, where she empowers Canadian women to build wealth. She says her journey into entrepreneurship wasn’t intentional but her decision to help women is. Eduek says it’s about more than just telling women to skip out on buying their morning coffee so they can put that money towards a down payment – the kind of advice that never made sense to her. “The way finances are shared to women in particular, I feel that it’s usually infantilized where women are told to stop shopping, or that they’re bad with money because they don’t know how to spend it as opposed to how they can create wealth, how can they build a business. I felt this was something that was lacking.”

While she never imagined her journey from Nigeria to Canada would look like this, Eduek’s personal experience and budgeting prowess are serving her well. By the time she quit her full-time job to become a full-time entrepreneur, all her debt was cleared and she had eight months of living expenses put away in an emergency fund. With her financial backup plan in place, there was only one lesson left to learn. “Learning how to fail! It was one of the biggest fears I had as an entrepreneur starting out but now I’ve learned I cannot let that hold me back. Now, I embrace it.”

With the arrival of tax season, Eduek says a Black entrepreneur's best friend should be their accountant – a good accountant, she stresses. “This past tax season I heard so many women saying they just got audited and learned they owed $30,000 in taxes because – surprise, surprise – my accountant did something,” she said. Review everything your accountant does, Eduek advises, with a focus on ensuring their tax-saving measures are actually in compliance with Revenue Canada. Taxes aren’t her wheelhouse, so she takes her advice in soaking up as much knowledge as she can from those who know more than her. “No matter who is working for you, no one is going to care more about your money than you,” she says. “You need to know what your money is doing.” As for her future as an entrepreneur, Eduek wants to become the #1 platform for financial resources in Canada but she’s on the fence about scaling. “Sometimes I think about scaling and managing people and it terrifies me!” she says. In the meantime, she dreams of having a company where a team of financial educators and coaches will help women across Canada build wealth and achieve their financial goals.