TD Bank Responds About New Survey on Parents and Financial Literacy

If there’s one thing I like as a consumer and erstwhile marketing professional, it’s a responsive company. I posted yesterday about a survey sponsored by TD Bank that explored how parents teach their kids financial literacy, but clearly focused only on opposite-sex parents. This morning, I received the following e-mail from Jimmy Hernandez, a media relations officer at TD Bank. I repost it here with his permission:

Good morning Dana!

I wanted to reach out and thank you for posting your thoughts and comments about TD Bank’s new financial literacy survey. We feel financial literacy is a topic that MUST be addressed in every household in the U.S. in order to make sure our kids are financial fit once they become adults.

In regards to your comments as to why we didn’t include same-sex families in our poll, please note that this survey wasn’t put together to study different families, instead it was to study how genders teach their kids financial literacy skills. However, this is not our first poll on this subject and it probably won’t be our last. We feel you gave us a potential good idea for our next poll and studying how different families teach their kids financial literacy skills might be worth looking into. So I wanted to reach out and thank you for the suggestion.

Please feel free to contact us with any questions on this matter or anything else you think we may be able to help you with.

Cheers,

Jimmy Hernandez
TD Bank
856-397-5550

I appreciate the speedy response. I’d still argue that any survey purporting to study “how genders teach their kids financial literacy skills” should include the LGBT community, whose conceptions of gender sometimes vary—but I don’t believe it was TD Bank’s intention to slight the LGBT community. In that vein, I should also note that a senior vice president of TD Bank, Robert Pompey, was one of a number of business leaders to convene in San Francisco today under the auspices of Out & Equal, the LGBT workplace advocacy organization, to “strategize around issues of workplace equality.”