Mastering the budget is essential to meeting your financial goals. Become a professional at managing your personal finances by first throwing away the notebook paper and adopting an excel-based budget. Excel offers unmatched benefits compared to paper-based budgeting methods. This course will illustrate how to completely build a budget from scratch, walking through all steps this entails. To enhance the illustrations, the lectures involve the use of a real-world example, which can be found in an attached source document.

Lecture 1 provides the necessary background knowledge. That is, describing what a budget is, what its purpose is, and providing an outline for the course to come.

Lecture 2 introduces the concept of organizing income and expenses by specific categories designed to optimize and simplify the budgeting process.

Lecture 3 illustrates how to build a personal budget template.

Lecture 4 illustrates how to connect the template with your list of expenses, thus creating data that can further be analyzed.

In lecture 5, a budget plan is established by first analyzing the data excel provided in the numerical and graphical representations.

The final lecture summarizes what we have learned in this course, highlighting the benefits to excel based budgeting.

The learning objectives of this course include knowing how to organize your personal income and expenses by category, know how to construct a working budget that is linked to your organized list of income and expenses, know how to analyze, and prepare a budget plan where needed, aimed at meeting your personal financial goals.