Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Chris, and for the next half-hour, I'm gonna show you
how to take charge of your money by tracking and making daily
decisions that will impact your overall spending. If you are anything like me, you probably have a running
tab of expenses in your head. Kind of know how much money
you spend in a month. But you are often
surprised when you see your credit card
statements come in and look in completely different
from what to expect it. You don't really know
where your money's going and that's
very frustrating. After much research
and try now apps like Mint and quick kid, I came up with my own process using spreadsheets
and statements. I discovered that
looking at my statements closely on a weekly
basis was more helpful than relying on apps that would automatically put my expenses
in their own categories. And those categories are not
always all that helpful. Additionally, the process
of actually enter, entering your own numbers into your spreadsheet will help you better submitted and
knowledge in your brain. After implementing this
process for a few weeks, you will know your
numbers by heart and you will not have to guess
anything during your month. In this class, you
will learn to organize your expenses into flexible
and fixed categories. You will create
your own categories based on how you
spend your money. You will develop
a weekly practice to monitor your spending. You will learn how much
money you spend monthly and nearly find ways to
optimize your spending. These might hope that after
you complete this class, you'll realize that you have more money than you
thought you did. That your expenses can be controlled if you weren't aware of where your
money's going. See you in class.
2. The project: Your project is to set up your money tracker and complete the first
week of tracking. You don't have to wait until the end of the month to start, begin now and get a
good feel for it. Chooser finance, they download the tracker workbook
from the Resources tab, edge or monthly expenses
and start a new month. When you're done check
tracking your first week. Simply go to Projects
and Resources tab. Click Create, Project. Share what you chose
as your finance day. And also share something
you learned in this class that you feel
is especially helpful. Completing this project
will give you the tools you need to easily track
your money every week. And that will make you aware
of where money's going and help you guide it to where
you actually wanted to go.
3. What is in your Money Tracker: Welcome to lesson number one. What's in your trucker? In this lesson, we'll
take a quick tour of the workbook will be
using in this course. We'll start with the first
step about this workbook. Here you will find
the description of each of the worksheets we have with some important
definitions and instructions. The next tab is the
net worth analysis. This analysis is a bonus lesson we'll do at the
end of the course. This is not our main focus, but I find this is
a very useful tool to anyone interested in growing
their wealth over time. Next, we have the
overall expenses tab. This is like the headquarters
of this tracker. All the information about
your expenses will live here. This will take the
most time to set up, but won't need to be
updated frequently. Next, we have the monthly
actual expenses tab. This tab is used to just
to view information. All the numbers on it will be automatically updated by
pulling data from the months. You will only need
to add your list of expenses here during the setup
and you'll be good to go. Finally, we have
the temperate tab. This is the base of
every single month. You will add your list
of expenses here. And at the beginning
of every month, you will duplicate this template and rename it to
the current month.
4. Overall Expenses - Fixed Expenses: Welcome to lesson number two. This is where we
will go into detail on the overall expenses tab. We will learn about
the different sections in it and how to update it. Before we get into the
nitty-gritty of things, Let's look at the words
expenses and budget. For the purposes of this course. Expenses mean any
bill or money spent. Budget means the money
allocated to be spent. Let's begin with the
anatomy of this worksheet. There are five parts to it. Fixed and flexible expenses, which are the list of bills you have targets monthly and yearly. Those are the totals
you are trying to stay close to
throughout the month. Totals by month, which is a report on what you're
actually spending every month. The running total for the year that you can compare
with your ear early target to see if you're on
track the totals by quarter. Now that you're familiar
with the different parts of the overall expenses
sheets, let's get to work. We'll begin with
our fixed expenses. The fixed expenses are any bills you absolutely have
to incur every month. That includes things like rent, cable phone, trash collection, memberships, bills that
don't change month to month, or bills that you
can't really control. For example, I put
electricity in this section, even though the cost varies month to month because
that's a bill, I have little control over. Some of these bills don't
get charged every month, and we should account for that. For example, my trash collection costs $68 every two months. In this case, I pay $68
every time I get built. I under $68 for the amount. I paid this only once in the
given month that I am built. So I entered one in
the frequency per month because I paid
this every two months, the frequency per year is six. After adding all these details, I'll see how much
trash collection costs me per month per year. Knowing that I can set aside
$34 every month to cover that particular bill and keep my budget even across months. Let's add another expense. How about rent? Let's say my rent
costs $1000 per month. I add 1000 and the amount I
pay rent once in a month. So I add one to the
frequency per month. I pay rent every single
month in a year, which gives me a frequency
per year of 12 times. Here you get to
see how much money you spent on rent in a year. Let's add one more expense. My car insurance. I get built twice a year
for my car insurance and every time they
build me, I pay 750. The month I pay for it. I paid only once because they
charged me twice a year. My frequency per year
is to looking at the totals will
give me an idea of how much money I
should be putting your side to cover this
bill when it does come. At the bottom of this section, you have a view of how
much money you can expect to spend in
any given month. And below, you can
see how much you can expect to spend in a year. That number is part
of your budget. Let's add a few more items here and move on to
the next section.
5. Overall Expenses - Flexible Expenses : In this section, we will
list our flexible expenses. These are the
expenses that we have at least some control over, things like groceries, restaurants,
entertainment, clothing. In my case, I also
include medical, enroll all other occasional
purchases into miscellaneous. In this template
already included the miscellaneous and
medical categories. If they don't work for you, ignore them for now
and I'll show you how to remove them
in a later lesson. Let's start listing some
of our flexible expenses. Right below medical
and miscellaneous. I'm going to add groceries, wine, lunch, entertainment
and clothing. Now let's figure out
how much money we spend on average on
these categories. To do that, look at
your statements from the past three months
and find those items. I'm looking at my groceries and I see that in the past
three months I spent $430 in month 1400 and
months 2350 a month three. I will add those up and
divide them by three. And that will give me
the average of 394. I'm going to round
that up to 400. That means I spend on average $400 in groceries every month. However, I go grocery
shopping every week. A month has four weeks, which means I spend about
a $100 every time I go. This number can fluctuate a lot, especially if we have
house guests or parties. But for the most part, 400 is my target. I like to give myself challenges
to keep it under that, like taking advantage
of promotions. Now by more than what
it is in my list. We're just going
through frozen foods we already have at home. Even if I do this
challenge once a month, it is enough to help me stay
on target or even below it. Another expense I like to put in the flexible section is wine. When I started
tracking my money, I rolled whining to groceries. But as it turns out, wine adds up very quickly. I did an analysis on how
much we were spending on wine and was shocked
to fix that. I created a category and
started looking closely at it. I discovered that we were
buying expensive wines every week and we were buying too many
bottles all at once. These exercise helped us become
more aware of wine prices and also helped us find cheaper ones that were
also very good wines. After a month or so, I had a wine target and I knew how many bottles we needed
to buy when we did buy wine. We now typically buy bottles that costs
around ten to $15. And if we hit our target, we can't buy any more bottles. They're month. After you're done
filling out this part, take a look at your totals. Become aware of how much
money you typically spend in a month and in a year with
your flexible expenses. And think about ways that
you can make it better.
6. Finishing up the Overall Expenses Sheet: After the expenses
are all filled in, you can look at your
monthly target, your yearly target lines. Right here. You should have an idea if you're
spending too much, you can compare this number to your income and figure out if you need to adjust anything. This is the moment
to get to really think about your
spending habits. Maybe you will discover
items that you are spending money on that
you didn't even know. You forgotten subscriptions in the extra credit cards requiring annuity that you don't even use. By going through this process, I was able to cancel a few credit cards
and keep only two. That gives me the most benefits. I also canceled a
few memberships for things that I forgot
it was paying four. Take your time and take a real close look
at your expenses. Ask yourself, is this
item really necessary? Is there a way I can reduce
this particular expense? At the bottom of this step, you'll see a list of
months showing you the amount spent
and the difference. This difference is calculated
from your monthly target. When you need to know how
you're doing in a given month, look back on this tab, find your month and
see how much money you have left to
hit your target. Green means you
are within Target. Red means you have surpassed it. There's also space for notes. Sometimes you spend
more than a month because of unexpected expenses. Like for example, if
fried replacement or a broken window
or a car repair. That's when you add
a note explaining why your target was surpassed. To balance that out, you can try to adjust the
next few months. You'll also be able to look at your yearly total in the difference from
the yearly target. Your quarterly expenses
will also be updated here. This is good to have
if you think in terms of quarters in a year. One last thing about
this worksheet, if you need more expenses line, right-click on a row
like this, select Copy, then right-click again and
select Insert copied cells. By adding rows like this, you'll be able to keep
the formulas in place. If you don't want to use
the miscellaneous category, simply right-click
the row and delete. Remember, you will need to
repeat this deletion on your monthly expenses
tab in your template.
7. Monthly Actual Expense & Template Setup: Now that we're done listing our expenses in the
overall expenses sheet, we can move on to the next part. In this lesson. We will set up the monthly actual
expenses and template. This is going to be very easy. Let's start with the monthly
actual expenses sheet. We will copy the
fixed expenses list by selecting your list, then right-clicking
it, and then copy. Move to the monthly
actual expenses sheet. Select cell A6,
right-click and paste. Next, we'll repeat the process with the flexible expenses. Select your flexible expenses,
right-click and copy. Move to the monthly
actual expenses and paste immediately under your
last fixed expense. Now, we can check if there are any duplicates
and remove them. In my case, I have medical and miscellaneous listed twice. I have to do is select the
entire row they are on. Right-click and delete. At this point, we have a consolidated list of
all of our expenses. We are ready to set
up the template. But first let's take
a quick look at it. You will see that
the Miscellaneous a medical are already there. We're going to
ignore them for now. If you are not using
these categories, I'll show you how to remove them after we're done
setting this up. Let's go back to monthly
actual expenses and copy the consolidated
list of expenses. Select the list,
right-click and copy. Now go to the template sheet, select cell A7, right underneath this blue cell,
right-click and paste. Now we look for duplicates. I see miscellaneous
and medical again. I just need to select that row and
right-click and delete. If you're not using the medical and
miscellaneous category, you can just ignore them
and leave them blank. But if you prefer, you may
delete those rows. We're done. Our money tracker
is ready for work. This initial setup is the most time-consuming
part of the entire process, but you won't have to do this
again for a very long time. In the future, you probably
add items, remove items, and update values, but I expect those updates
will be small ones. I haven't really had to change my list of expenses that
much since I started. I've been doing this for
four or five years now. Maybe I updated costs and
remove one or two expenses.
8. Monthly Actual Expenses: In this lesson,
we'll be looking at the monthly actual
expenses worksheet. This worksheet will be pulling
data from your months and reporting totals by
category and by month. On column a, you have a list of expenses followed by a column
for each month of the year, then the grand total
and the average. There's a row for your
month totals showing you how much was spent
in a given month. This totals will be
updated automatically as data from the month sheets get
pulled into these columns. This report to be particularly helpful at the end of the year when you get to see which categories can be
adjusted for the next year. If there are any categories
that needs to be averaged, you can take the number
from the average column. That's all there is
to this worksheet. Once it's set up, you won't
have to do anything else aside from consulting it for information from time to time.
9. The Template: In this lesson, we'll be taking a closer look
at the template. When we added the list of
expenses in lesson three. The numbers in your left in budget column should
have been populated. This column is looking
at the data that exists in the overall
expenses sheet. It links the name
of the expense on this sheet with the expense
in the overall expenses, impose the value you have in
your total per month column. I edit the miscellaneous and medical here by default because these two categories
have been very useful to me in the
past few years. For example, when it's
time to file my taxes, I go into my medical
line and I can see if there are any items
that I can deduct there. Before creating the system, I had to look back at my statements one-by-one
and sometimes I couldn't find all of them
that prevented me from deducting as much as
possible from my taxes. Miscellaneous has also been
extremely helpful when you're identifying where
I'm spending random money. This is the most flexible
of the categories. This is where a
lot of things that I only occasionally
spend money on, if I notice I'm spending
too much money on lunches, for example, I can adjust that by avoiding eating at
restaurants for a week. By paying attention to
this category I can keep within my budget
or even under it. I hope you'll find
it useful too.
10. Starting the month: In this lesson, we will add a new month and enter our
expenses for the week. The first thing we
need to do is to decide on a day of the week, we will block out time
to update the tracker. I decided that Friday morning
is the best time for me. Since the trekkers all setup, it will take a most 30
minutes to update it. Depending on the
week, you can spend as little as five minutes adding information
to the tracker. Let's imagine this is the
first week in January. I'm ready to start adding
my expenses to the tracker. I'll start a new month sheet. In this case, I will
right-click the tab name, select Move or Copy, check the box, create a copy, and scroll down the options
and choose Move to end. This way, the months will be in chronological order
and easy to find. Once I have a copy of the
template, I will rename it. Right-click the tab name
and type in the new month, in this case, January. The January worksheet is ready and I can
start adding to it. We will only add new information on the columns D and above. Columns a, B, and C are reserved for the formulas
and list of expenses. At this point, they
are all filled in and will need to be updated. Well, we need to access our online credit cards and bank accounts to look
at the recent activity. In my case, I have only two credit cards
that are used for everything in a checking account that I use to pay my bills. I'd like to start with my
most used credit card. I log into my account to see
the most recent purchases. I look at the dates and find anything that was charged
within the last seven days. The first week in January was
a low expense one for me. I spent only $55 in
groceries this week. I went to Michael's for some
supplies and spent $30. And this goes straight into
my miscellaneous category. We bought two bottles of
wine and that cost is $24. My gym membership was charged this week, was my electricity. When I have logged all of the purchases charged
to this credit card, I move on to the next one
and do the same process. I look at charges
that occurred within the last seven days and log them in the
appropriate place. Leslie, I log into my bank
account and see what was automatically paid
and any checks that were cached within
the last seven days. Just note that credit card
payments don't need to be logged since the
individual purchases are already being
registered in your tracker. Once you have added all the
numbers for the week here, take a look at the
column left in budget. How are you doing
so far this month? You over budgeting any
of your categories? Are you under budget anywhere and have wiggle room to
save more this month? Answered these questions at
the end of every session. And this will make you aware
of where your money needs to go and where you may need
to cut down your spending.
11. Starting a new year : In this bonus lesson, I'm going to show you
what to do at the end of the year after you have
completed your entire workbook. There are two
methods to do this, and I'm going to show
you the first one, which is to save your
workbook with a new name. In this case, I'm just going
to put in the new year, which is going to be 2023. And then I'm going to save it. The next step is to remove
the individual month sheets. You can just select
all of them together. And then right-click it. Select to delete. All those pages are
gonna be deleted. By doing that, the
pages are the sheets that take data from each one of these monthly sheets
will be reset. After you delete them. Your monthly actual expenses
are going to be zeroed out. There's not gonna be
any data left here. The same is going
to be happening to your overall expenses sheets at the bottom where you have
your quarterly data, everything's gonna
be zeroed out. We do not have to worry about the net worth analysis sheet because that's something
you just keep adding onto. And it's nice to have it for
the entire, for a long time. One last step you're going
to have to do is to update your overall monthly
actual expenses and template as needed. So let's have a quick review. For method one. You're going to save a
workbook with a new name, delete individual month sheets from January through December, and update your overall expenses monthly actual expenses
and template as needed. Now I'm going to show
you my preferred method of starting a new year. We're going to save our workbook with a new
name like we did before. In this case, I'm going
to call it 2023 Save. And when that's done, I'm going to go into my overall expenses sheet and I'm gonna make a copy of it. Right-click on that sheet. Movie or Copy. Create copy, and you
can put it anywhere. Click Okay, and then replace or rename this sheet
with the previous year. In this case, it's gonna
be overall expenses 2022. After that's done,
I'm going to select the entire sheet and copy
and paste as values. This will ensure that
we have no formulas left in the overall
expenses for last year. We're going to have to
repeat the same process with a monthly actual expenses. We're going to make a
copy of this worksheet. We're going to rename it. We're going to select all of it, copy and paste as values
based, basis special values. And now all the
formulas are gone. We only have numbers here. And that's going to
be useful when you're comparing the current
here with the best year. And the final step. Well, actually not
the final step, but the next step
is to remove all of our monthly sheets like we
did for the other method. You select them all
right-click, Delete. Then you will be able to see that the other sheets that took information from
our monthly sheets are going to be empty. Now for the last step is to add any new information you might need in your overall
expenses and other sheets. So let's say I decided
to subscribe to Netflix. So I'm going to enter it
here in my flexible expenses because Netflix is
something I can just stop using, right? I don't know how much it costs. I think I'm going to say costs
twenty-five dollars maybe. Then next, I have to go into the mouth the actual expenses
and add Netflix to it. And the template. The very bottom, I put a
Netflix and it didn't work. Something went wrong here. What is it spelled Netflix. That's fixed that
and there we go. Our workbook is ready
to start a new year. So we're going to save your
workbook with a new name, create a copy of the
overall expenses and rename it with
the previous year. Like overall expenses 2022, selected the entire sheet, copy and paste as values so
you get rid of the formulas. Then repeat the steps 23 for
monthly actual expenses. And finally delete
individual monthly sheets from January to December.
12. Bonus Lesson: Tracking your Networth: In this bonus lesson, we'll look at a simple way to
keep track of your wealth. Looking at this information
will help you know where you're at in
your money goals. What is net worth? You probably already have
an idea of what it means. But to put it simply, your net worth is the difference between what you own
and what you owe. Your wealth consists
of what's left after you subtract your debt
from what you have. There are two key words
used in this analysis. Assets and liabilities. Assets comprise of
any money you have. For example,
retirement accounts, savings, investments, checking. You could also include
property alone, but for the purposes
of this class, we'll keep it simple
and only include cash. Liabilities are your debt. And that includes any kind of loan you're currently paying. For example, a student loan
or a car loan or a mortgage. Let's look at the sheet you
will add information to. There's a column for
assets where you drew accounts followed
by their value. At the bottom, we have the
total for your assets. Next, we have the
liabilities column. This is where you add all
your debt and their value. Let's begin by
adding our assets. I have a savings account, retirement account,
checking account, and an investment account. My liabilities are
my student loan, my car loan, my mortgage. Now let's imagine it's our
first finance, the UniProt. I will look at the current value of each of these accounts, starting with my assets. Currently I have 10
thousand in my savings, I have 50 thousand in my IRA. I have 3 thousand
in my checking. I have 7 thousand invested. You just need to take the
current balance you have for each of these accounts and
add them to the spreadsheet, then you will automatically
have your total updated. Right now I have 70 k in assets. Now let's add our liabilities. I currently have 5 thousand
left in my student loan, 12 thousand in my car loan, in 150 thousand
lifting my mortgage. This brings me to a total
debt, a 167 thousand. That value is bigger
than my total assets. At the moment I have
a negative net worth. That means I owe
more than I own. The red in that sow indicates that you have a
negative discrepancy. When you start tracking
your net-worth, it is best to keep it simple. Adding too much to either column will make it harder
for you to track. And it's not really
necessary to give you the big picture of
your net worth. Since this is a course for
beginners, keeping it simple, we'll set you up
for success as you develop the habit of
tracking or money.
13. Final thoughts & Tips: Congratulations on
completing this class. Money is such an important
tool in our lives that we have to be able
to take great care of it. To me, it wasn't until about five years ago that
I really sat down to figure out why I felt I never had enough money
to do what I wanted. It was a long process that
required lots of thinking, lots of digging in Indiana, it was totally worth it. I came up with a process
that makes makes tracking my money a lot easier
than you used to be. By doing this weekly process, I was able to create
an emergency fund, set aside money for fun things and really good enough
my spending habits. Now I have a real
hard time taking something off the shelf
just because it's cute. Sees the money tracking
processes weekly. I'm always aware of where my monthly budget
is at the moment, I feel more abundant
even though I have the same income and saying
expenses as before. Before you go, I have for
final tips to share with you. One, consider reducing
the number of credit cards you have
to no more than two. If you were places
to look at to track your money will make the
process a lot easier. It's the same goes
with bank accounts. To give yourself challenges
for each week or each month. For example, we might
House in January, we call it non spend jewelry. That's a really great
practice after an expensive. And the other year, we stick to our
minimum and avoid anything that we can from
the flexible expenses. Three, auto matrix savings. Even if all you can afford right now is $10 or even a dollar, putting money aside
automatically adds up. And you don't have to risk forgetting to do
that every month. Eventually, you will
increase in this money. The money you're putting aside
will get bigger because if figure out other ways
that you can save money. But start now, even if you don't have a lot of money
that you can put aside. Finally, if you have children, talk to them about money and how to take
great care of it. My nine-year-old has already
developed a habit of knowing exactly how much
money she has in her wallet. And she also budgets for
things that she wants. She created this minimum
amount that she's going to always have in her wallet and
if she gets to that amount, she stops his spending. I think that's a great habit to develop when
you were a child. I hope the scores has gotten you excited about optimizing
your finances. In a few weeks of practice, you will have a new attitude
towards your money life. You will feel more
abundant and in-control. Thank you for watching my class and I'll see you next time.
Cris Kober, Artist + Bookkeeper
