Juan: What?! Narwhals are real?
I always thought they were imaginary, like unicorns. [Phone rings] Oh, hold on.
Hey, Justin! Long time no talk!
Justin: Hey, Juan, um, are you busy?
Juan: Uh, no, not much. I'm just eating dinner. What's up?
Justin: Okay, I messed up. I spent all my money on props last week, and now my car broke down... I-I
don't think I can afford this repair. Could you lend me some money?
Juan: Justin, I told you you need to manage your money better! Are you sure you can't afford it?
Justin: Yeah, I am totally broke. I even tried giving them this signed baseball
that I found on the side of the road, but like, they said they don't barter there?
Juan: Alright, I'll lend you the money. But instead of charging you interest,
I am teaching you better money habits. You need a budget!
Justin: That was a few years ago, but uh, it's still fresh in my mind. Juan taught me so much
about good money management, and I've never had to borrow money from anybody ever again. In fact,
I've saved so much money since then that I've started to invest some of it.
It all comes down to keeping a highly detailed budget,
or a financial plan that attempts to keep your income higher than your expenses.
Now, that sounds simple. But considering there's so many different kinds of income
and so many different kinds of expenses, it can get pretty darn complicated.
But lucky for you, you've got me to teach you everything that I learned all those years ago.
In this unit, you're going to learn
all about the fundamentals of budgeting.
In the first part of the unit, we're going to learn one of the very best tools for budgeting:
spreadsheets. By the end of this part, you'll know all the different parts of a spreadsheet,
how to automate calculations using formulas and functions,
as well as some of the most important functions when it comes to budgeting. And, as a bonus,
a lot of cool jobs will ask you for spreadsheet skills, so not only will this help you with your
budgeting, but it will make you more employable, meaning you might get some extra money to budget.
Once you've mastered your spreadsheet skills, we're going to learn about some methods for
budgeting itself. First, we'll learn how to identify two important kinds of expenses:
fixed and variable expenses. Then, we'll learn a budgeting method that some people swear by,
the 50-30-20 rule, as well as a stricter, more careful approach to budgeting, envelope budgeting.
After that, in the final section of the unit, we're going to learn about some resources that
can help you with your budgeting. First, we'll learn how to read financial statements, which
tell you what's going on in your accounts. There's also plenty of online resources that can help you
with budgeting, with plenty of cool features too, so we'll learn about some of those. By the end of
this unit, you will have mastered the fundamentals of budgeting — but only the fundamentals.
There's still a lot I get to teach you in this course, and as we go through it, we're going to
keep making additions and changes to your budget. Eventually, it will look just as good as mine...
or maybe even as good as Juan's. I don't know about that,
though. He's been doing this for years, and- [Phone rings] Sorry.
Would you look at that!
Hey, we were just talking about you!
No, only good things, I promise. Hey, remember when you taught me how to budget
money all those years ago? Well, now I get to do it for someone else! Isn't that cool?