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How will Xero and MYOB Training get me a job?

Re-leased-property management software integration image at Xero partner integration website - smart digital marketing

The most challenging question we receive when students need to upskill in how to use Xero and MYOB relates to getting work. The question of how our online bookkeeping courses will help students find work can be answered in different ways but the only real answer is that it will give you knowledge and practical skills using Xero and MYOB to do bookkeeping work and this increases your confidence.

Some students ask us if there is a guaranteed job after completing our bookkeeping courses and I am still surprised when I hear that question.

Bookkeeping Interns

The closest thing a bookkeeping course graduate will get after completing any course is an internship with an accounting or bookkeeping business. Some training companies that I have seen offer internships but the bookkeeping courses cost close to $10,000 – in other words you are paying for the ability to work for free for an accounting company.

What a Xero and MYOB course offers you is leverage. The ability to pay a small amount of money to get an advantage that can result in you earning much more money.

When you complete a Xero and MYOB Course combination with EzyLearn you get discounted membership to the Bookkeeping Academy where we create a digital profile to help you get discovered online by potential employers.

Leverage is how people make money in real estate.

What is Leverage?

In property investment leverage is the ability to borrow a large sum of money to buy an asset that you don’t have enough money to buy by yourself. The cost of borrowing that money is the interest that is charged every week or month and this is called the holding cost.

The main benefit of having debt when buying an investment property is that the debt stays constant even if the value of your property increases.

Here’s a scenario:

  1. You use your own savings of $100,000 to buy a property worth $1M
  2. You borrow the difference which is $900,000
  3. Your equity in this transaction is 10% and you are borrowing 90% of the value of that asset
  4. In 5 years that property is worth $1.5M
  5. During those 5 years you have been paying the interest to hold onto the asset
  6. If you have been paying interest only then your debt is still $900,000
  7. You now have $600,000 equity in that property
  8. Your equity in that property is now 60% as a percentage
  9. If you sold that property for $1.5M you have turned $100,000 into $600,000

What I haven’t factored into this scenario is all the other costs associated with property investment, including:

  1. You need a good job or 2 incomes to get the loan in the first place
  2. Income rates can increase and property prices can go down
  3. Rental income from the property usually helps pay the mortgage
  4. There are transaction costs like stamp duty,
  5. You’ll need to pay council rates and utilities costs
  6. You will need to pay agent fees if you use a real estate agent to sell the property
  7. You’ll need to pay capital gains tax on the profit from your sale

If you’ve followed this blog or completed one of our Xero and MYOB courses you would have come across some case studies around property investment. There are more articles and training content coming that relates to property investment so make sure you subscribe.

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Is now a good time to invest into a new property – in Newcastle?

Brand new house and land property packages with tax benefits at Forrestors Beach, Central Coast, Newcastle, Maitland, Cooranbong

I completed a Cert IV in Property Services a couple years ago and have a strong interest in real estate as an asset for investment.

There is a lot of talk currently about negative gearing and whatever happens, we will all be affected. It’s the “wind that blows” according to Jim Rohn, a great inspirational speaker.

One of the topics which comes up about negative gearing is whether it should be available for existing dwellings or only new house and land packages.

As a result, EzyLearn is creating a real-life case study covering the investment and tax benefits of investing in a new house and land package. There are certainly plenty of them going up in the Central Coast to Newcastle and Maitland area!

Real Estate as an Investment

I believe real estate is a terrific investment provided you don’t stretch yourself financially. It does fluctuate in the short term, but you have to think long term.

Certainly, the recent changes in the real estate market, with Sydney property prices dropping over 15 per cent, means that if you bought in the last 2 years your property is worth less than what you paid for it.

Less Equity, Same Debt

The problem with house prices going down is that this affects your equity. Equity is how much of the property YOU own. The banks DEBT stays the same and only reduces as you pay down your loan.

The problem with your equity decreasing won’t matter in the long term because house prices generally continue to increase, but it will be a problem if you need to refinance or can’t afford the repayments and need to sell.

Mortgage Insurance

It’s these situations that make lenders charge mortgage insurance. If you borrow more than 80% of the value of the property, you’re up for mortgage insurance.

The ability to borrow so much of a properties value is GREAT when property prices increase, because you only actually have a small amount of equity (which increases) but when prices go down it can be very stressful.

Depreciation and Negative Gearing

This is a hotly discussed topic right now but it mainly affects whether property investors should be able to claim negative gearing if they buy an existing dwelling.

This is not so much of an issue for new dwellings because governments generally want to encourage builders and developers to erect new homes to house the population.

Property Investment Course

EzyLearn is adding a new training course manual & workbook to our property investment course that is totally focused on the tax benefits of investing in a new property.

The great news for Sydney and Melbourne investors is that you can invest $450,000 to $600,000 and buy a completely new house and land package in the Central Coast to Newcastle area of NSW. This makes it much more affordable than the capital cities.

Read more about our property investment course

Featured image: Allam Builders and Developers’ new house in Forresters Beach Estate, Central Coast of New South Wales

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Announcement: Excel Course Spreadsheet Says Yes to Granny Flat Investment – Now Included

Granny flat manufactured home development for property investment

MAKING THE DECISION whether to take the risk and invest in anything is hard. However, when you put the information in an Excel spreadsheet, it soon becomes very clear whether it’s worth doing.

Once you decide it’s worth going ahead, you can use Microsoft Excel to create a Gantt Chart of the project to make sure it happens right as planned.

The EzyLearn COMPLETE Excel Beginners’ to Advanced Online Excel training courses include sample exercises files which will show you specifically and exactly how much you can borrow to invest in property (including a granny flat). Also included is a Gantt chart to help you with project management. Continue reading Announcement: Excel Course Spreadsheet Says Yes to Granny Flat Investment – Now Included

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Is Your Day Rate a Marketing or Business Strategy?

virion Digital Marketing Manager

I RECENTLY MET A PAINTER during a residential renovation I was involved with in Newcastle (an extremely valuable experience that will help us add to our property investment courses.)

We got talking about how he wins new clients and he said:

I advertise on social media that I’m available for $150 a day because no one can compete with it.

The price he chose is insanely cheap, and he knew other painters wouldn’t be able to compete with this as a day rate. However, there are downsides to this. Such a cheap day rate also means that he’ll be stretched financially and that he won’t be able to hire anyone else to do the work. He’ll need to be paid daily and likely can’t afford to provide any sort of credit (like 7 day terms etc).

Continue reading Is Your Day Rate a Marketing or Business Strategy?
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Announcement: Use NPV, IRR & Financial Functions in Excel to Invest in Property

Microsoft Excel Training Course can help you halve your mortgage

Microsoft Excel Training Course can help you halve your mortgageMicrosoft Excel: helping to forecast returns and manage investment property finances

I WENT THROUGH SEVERAL different spreadsheets (which are incorporated into our Microsoft Excel & Property Investment online training courses) when I had to calculate borrowing capacity and expected return for an investment property in Newcastle recently. Microsoft Excel is a great tool for managing your investment property portfolio finances and to help students understand financial literacy we recently created some new training content for our Advanced Microsoft Excel training courses, which covers common calculations that investors go through when they look at potential debt or equity investments in new startup businesses. 

Determine the NPV of a project

Net present value (NPV) is a core component of investment budgeting. It’s a comprehensive way to to calculate whether a proposed project (such as a home renovation) will add value to the investment or not. 

An NPV formula involves many financial concepts in the one formula:

  • cash flows,
  • the time value of money,
  • the discount rate over the duration of the project, and so on.

Any NPV greater than $0 represents a value-added project, with $0 representing your break-even point. A negative dollar figure suggests the project won’t add value or deliver any return on investment.  There are two ways to calculate NPV of an investment in Excel — by separating out the component cash flows and calculating each step individually, or by creating an NPV formula in Excel to do that for you. I can tell you from the Applied Finance degree I did with Kaplan that Excel makes it a LOT easier.

Determine the IRR of your investments

The Internal Rate of Return (IRR) is a metric used to measure the profitability of a potential investment. IRR is a discount rate that makes the net present value (NPV) of all cash flows from a particular project equal to zero. IRR calculations rely on the same formula components that NPV does. In general, the higher a project’s IRR, the more desirable it is to undertake. You can also use IRR to rank multiple prospective projects you may be considering for an investment property, assuming the costs are equal among each project. The one with the highest IRR would be considered the one that should be undertaken first. If this all sounds a little complicated you may never need to worry about it but rest assured the companies in your superannuation fund who work hard on making money every year will be using these regularly. 

New Excel 2016 training course content for Lifelong learning

We’ve updated our Microsoft Excel course content to the latest version of Excel, but we also include all versions of Excel software in our training courses. When you enrol in Excel 2016, you’ll also get access to the content for Excel 2013, 2010, 2007 and even 2003 if you need it. Because we create our own course content, training workbooks, exercise files and videos, we can (and do) update them regularly. We’ve also just updated our Xero training courses to the latest version of the Xero software.

When you enrol for lifetime course access, you get free access to all of these versions forever. You’ll learn how to use Excel to manage your investment property finances in our latest Goal Seek, Data Consolidation and Solver advanced Microsoft Excel training courses. Visit our website for more information or to enrol.

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Excel Spreadsheet Skills Overestimated & Needing Analysis

EzyLearn Online Courses logo - Microsoft Excel 2016 training & support

Excel Course Needs Analysis Checklist Waste of TimeNeeds Analysis a Waste of Time

IN LARGER COMPANIES a Needs Analysis can be a powerful tool for delving into a problem and coming up with a solution.

However, when it comes to Microsoft Excel Training, asking students to complete a needs analysis can be a complete waste of time.

Why? Because most students overestimate their skills — not because they’re being dishonest, but because they will have come across many terms before and, because they can use certain jargon in conversation, they tend to think they know how to do the associated skill.

Sometimes a needs analysis is also irrelevant because many people are unaware of all the wonderful things Excel and other programs can do.

When we put our training courses online, we realised that instead of wasting time doing needs analyses — which aren’t accurate most of the time, anyway — we could bundle all of our courses together and cover every skill level, for one low price.

Typical Excel Intermediate Course Scenario

As a Microsoft Excel Intermediate Trainer, one of the most awkward moments I remember when doing face-to-face training was when I started going through one of the very first exercises with a new group of students, only to realise that 40% of the people in the room had no idea what I was talking about.

It’s worse in a face-to-face group training environment because everyone else in the group will now be disadvantaged. When we used to conduct these classroom style Excel classes, we would ask people to go through and supplement their lack of knowledge by reading the Excel Beginners workbooks.

Online Excel courses are even better — you can get everyone to start from scratch and they can all be on the same page.

Bundling all pf our Excel courses together means businesses can save many hours of needs analysis and hundreds of dollars, by enrolling staff in our Excel training courses.

Besides, most students report that, even though they might do our training courses for the intermediate or advanced modules, they learned lots of skills from the beginner courses, too.

Everyone Learns Something in an Excel Beginners Course

Granny flat manufactured home development for property investmentBasic / Beginners’ Excel courses take students through the different tasks that are possible with spreadsheets, introduce commonly used terms and set the foundation for more advanced features, covered in the intermediate and advanced courses.

If you’re subscribed to this blog, then you’ll know that EzyLearn use to operate physical training centres before we moved all of our content online in 2006. In those early days, we did a lot of needs analysis for the Commonwealth Rehabilitation Service (now called Disability Employment Services).

Through this organisation we received Workcover students, who needed to brush up on their Excel skills before returning to work, and who often they had to change careers from physical work to more office type jobs.

Many students enrol in our courses only requiring a beginners’ level of training but proceed to the advanced modules by choice. This is because our online courses are built in a logical progression from basic to more advanced, building constantly on the new skills taught. Students also find that the Excel course content helps them in their everyday tasks and work, no matter what their field.

Thinking of investing in property? “Wannabe property investors” will find our Excel courses very helpful because they contain exercises to help you:

  • Maintain a household budget
  • Determine how much you can borrow
  • Potential returns from property investment

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Stop wasting time, and start learning for less. Visit our website for more information about Microsoft Excel training courses and to enrol.

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