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.
Working with our graduates we’ve discovered that organisations are still looking for staff who can work remotely.
A quick look on Indeed (which seems to have more remote working jobs advertised) shows a wide range of jobs from Sales and Customer Service administration to Bookkeeping and Business Administration.
We receive lots of bookkeeping course enquiries from students who are changing careers and want to find bookkeeping work.
If you are new to bookkeeping you may be familiar with MYOB because it has been around for decades. As soon as you start looking at job ads you’ll hear about Xero because a lot of businesses are migrating away from MYOB to Xero.
So a common question is should I learn MYOB and then Xero?
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.
This might seem like an odd question and I don’t mean to cause any issues with painters. I was looking for a painter recently and was surprised at how much they charge. The most interesting comment was “I’m very good and I will do the work for $400 cash a day”.
Do the maths and that equates to $50 per hour for an 8 hour day. Are you worth that much?
I understand that it doesn’t just come down to an hourly rate but it still begs the question..
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.
The features that each of these companies provide is invaluable for businesses. We can’t do without most of them in some way and when they started you, like me, probably turned on all the features and opted into their “labs” to test out new features. Then things changed.
These companies are now mature and they command respect as market leaders. Their financials are also very healthy because they’ve managed to monopolise some aspect of their market. These are some of the things that has happened to me over the years, has this happened to you?
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.
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.
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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…
