All eyes will be on the announcement from the Reserve Bank Governor today to see what is happening with interest rates. If you are like most people your cashflow would have been affected in the years since Covid because of the increasing interest rates.
There has never been a more important time to master your household budget and spending than now and good knowledge of Microsoft Excel will give you these skills.
A mortgage for your home is a huge debt, particularly for those living in the swelling capital cities with soaring house prices. The pro and cons of buying your own house and living in it are:
You don’t pay capital gains tax on a property you live in, but
You can’t claim the interest component of your loan
The big problem with this is the interest charge – you can’t claim the cost of it yet it’s a massive component of each and every payment you make on your mortgage.
You’d need your house price to go up at least at the interest rate you are paying to make it a good investment – and right now you’d be doing fine (perhaps except in Perth now).
Bigger payments reduce the interest paid
Our Microsoft Excel Training Course now includes an Excel spreadsheet file that will help you see just how much money you’d save if you paid even a small amount off extra each month!
You can use the mortgage comparison file to compare two mortgages, make extra payments or even shorten the term of the loan to see how much you’d need to pay each month if you want to pay your mortgage off quicker.
There are several reasons to open this spreadsheet and start seeing the resulting figures to workout the best way to allocate the money you earn.
Interest rates are at record highs,
house prices ‘may’ be peaking,
some people say that Australian banks are so highly leveraged to the residential property market that they’ll need to hold more capital reserves.
Either way you look at it, why not use your Microsoft Excel skills and play with some calculations to see how much better off you could be if you are financially prudent now.
You can also use this Microsoft Excel file to do a stress test and see how much your mortgage would be if interest rates do go up as many people expect they will.
50% OFF the normal price for Microsoft Office courses
They say that Spring is the season to sell your home but is that the case this year?
Property buyers seem to be holding off leading up to Christmas in the expectation that the economy will be better in 2025. There is an expectation that interest rates will be coming down.
When I see this comment I wonder if it’s not just based on the fear some students have about learning by themselves.
They’re worried about what happens if they get stuck on something, what happens if they don’t understand the instructions and wanting to know that someone will be available to help them.
I started teaching students how to use computer software on a one to one basis and thought to myself,
“these people are all spending a lot of money to go through the same basic steps”.
The problem with a lot of courses is that they just dump you with information and then get you to answer some questions in an assessment or test – not EzyLearn, we guide you through learning journeys.
The purpose of a well designed course is to provide a series of steps for students to perform that gives them the knowledge and practical experience they need to learn.
We use a number of different tools and case studies and one of my favourites is the Jerry Lame “. He’s like many people that you’ll meet every day.
I’ve tried and tested hundreds of software programs over the last 25 years and I’ve noticed something very interesting in the last 12 months – they’ve gotten so complicated!
Email marketing is commonplace these days and you know it’s a money spinner when Intuit buy Mailchimp.
Email Marketing is complicated
The cost of email marketing software has gone up and up and up and all the software vendors are increasing their prices at the moment. I thought Xero was pushing it with their yearly price increase but Aweber is similar to Mailchimp and they recently increased one of their monthly packages from $10pm to $55pm – that’s OVER 500% increase.
I recall when we opened our first Sydney training centre how I took people through a needs analysis to determine what they knew and didn’t know. I could quickly see the difference between what people say and what they do.
We were doing most of the training for clients of Commonwealth Rehab Services when the Internet was in it’s infancy and lots of people were learning about how to send an email!
All I could think about what the financial formulas in our Excel Courses!
He is learning about Pythagorean theory and all I could think about is how to reduce my mortgage!
I’ve spoke to hundreds of people about real estate, land and building new homes in the last few months and the cost of living is such a major issue in most of our lives.
Most of these files come from the work that I have been involved with over several different businesses.
These Excel course practise files are all unlocked and open so you are also free to use them for your own personal use or business use. Some of the personal uses include calculating your mortgage repayments and figuring out how to reduce your mortgage faster.
There are also practise files to help with forecasting, managing a large contact database and visually showing what the numbers mean using useful charts.
Here is some other information you might not be aware of about our online Microsoft Excel courses:
Are you finding work quiet this time of year? We’ve just been handed down our budget and emails are starting to fly around showing what it means to us.
Its the time of year where we find out how well we’ve done financially. It’s the time of year where workers will see how much they can borrow to buy property in the 2025 financial year and where they need to cut back.
Most of this financial information will be worked out using Microsoft Excel.
Most people like to watch some videos about how to use Xero or Excel and then try to replicated it.
This works well when exercise files are provided to help you practice. This is particularly important when you get into the Intermediate Excel training where you learn skills like formatting and formulas.
Are you earning $50 per hour at the moment? If you aren’t it can seem almost impossible to believe that you could, particularly when you look at your boss and imagine yourself asking them for a pay rise.
I searched online to see who earns $50 per hour and most of the search results in Seek and Indeed showed up saying you have to be a doctor, pharmacist or HR Manager but bookkeepers earning this much regularly.
I recently wrote about the Internship opportunities for selected business and office administration training courses – this work can all be done online, remotely working from home.
One of the best things about running an online training business is that we can deliver our courses to the thousands of students who live in remote parts of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland and the rest of Australia!
Read on to discover how you can up-skill and learn how to become a remote working virtual assistant performing business and office administration work from your own home
After the ludicrous events of the Covid Pandemic this era of high interest rates is squeezing everyone! Interest rates, petrol prices, energy prices and food. Have I missed anything? No, that is everything we need to live these days and prices have gone up a ridiculous amount but do you know how much your costs have gone up by?
I’ve recently taken to Microsoft Excel to perform budget calculations that I haven’t thought much about for a long time.
The most rewarding conversations I have is with EzyLearn graduates who’ve completed our courses and then gone on to manage their finances better or get an accounts job. I’ve been speaking to a lot of EzyLearn students lately and there is a consistent theme in most conversations – “what on earth is going on with the price increases for everything“.
I thought that the Covid-19 era was going to be the most challenging period because of all the disruption to our normal lives. I’m not sure if you have discovered the same but one of the best results was that more people started working from home or negotiated partial work from home arrangements with their employer.
The real disruption of The Pandemic is that we are NOW all paying the price of it with inflation and interest rates!
When I operated training centres in Sydney most of the sales were made by phone. We’d advertise our course in the local paper, highlighting our phone number and encouraging students to call and enrol into a course. It was labour intensive and not that secure when you think that we were taking down students credit card details over the phone.
Then we introduced learning on demand where students could learn any topic they wanted during our opening hours and we introduced our first online form to take enrolments – the results were miraculous. We’ve subsequently made many changes to that form since then.
We didn’t have to be in the office to take enrolments, students could enrol whenever they were ready and we had a central database of all our students and the courses they enrolled into. Best still, this information was all emailed automatically into our Customer Service software system. You can now learn these skills in the Microsoft Forms Course.
If you have enrolled into a course with EzyLearn be sure to check out these FREE student inclusions.
We’re creating and updating our online courses every month and we’re listening to feedback from students to understand what they need. We’re even paying EzyLearn graduates for their expertise in the work they do. If you want to see how you can earn money using your expertise check out the LIFELONG Learning Hub in the Learning Site or reach out to our support team.
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Xero is a great bookkeeping program for tradies who are on the go and using their phones (or a tablet) all the time. From receipts scanning to creating quotes and invoices, receiving payments and keeping track of project costs.
bookkeepercourse.com.au/produ…
