you want to make your 2024 budget but you don't know where to start let me help you I am not your financial advisor I'm here to help you shape your Excel and learn the basics of budgeting so you can see if you can buy a new car at the end of the year or maybe not what's up guys I'm Dave I'm a CPA and let's dive deep into Excel my best friend Chad GPT will help us to do our budget so we go into Chad GPT and then we will ask him a few question first of all the prompt will be hello I want to make my 2024 budget I have little to no knowledge in Microsoft Excel I would require your help basically we want chat GPT to give us an Excel template so we start from there and we don't start from scratch so we make sure we don't forget anything and we have a solid template so I want I require you with your help generate a simple budgeting template for 2024 and press enter and then chat GPT is giving me all of this here is the first result of what chat GPT gives me and I will ask him I want a more detailed budget template also please include up to December 2024 and more income categories and more expenses categories and see let's see what it gives me here we go it now gives me 12 colums I will ask Chad DPT can you give me this information into a table format so I can copy paste it to Microsoft Excel click enter now that chat GPT gave me my budget template all I have to do is click on copy code here at the top then go to excel go into the cell A1 let's make it a little bit bigger for you guys and then crl V here we go we have our data straight up in a format like this okay we are going to lead here in cell B7 the sum that chpd put and in B22 as well we are going to double click here between the A and B so we see everything what I want to do first is actually add a column between column A and B I'm going to insert here and I'm going to add a few rows at the top I'm going to put my annual salary here salary and I'm going to put income buffer and expense buffer okay and you're going to understand so I put 100% for the income buffer and 100 100% for the expense buffer and my annual salary let's put 50,000 okay I have a salary of $50,000 after that you will only have to change the salary if salary changed during the year so I added a column between column A and B and we're going to call it monthly dollar okay and we're going to make this a little bit bigger we can delete this row here and here we go so we have a monthly salary there is 12 month I take my 50,000 and I divide it by 12 here we go and let's say we have 2,000 of freelance income and a th000 of investment return and 500 of other income I will do equal sum here and then I will take all my income sources and I will take the lower right corner of the cell and I drag it to the end there boom here we go okay for our expense here we don't have to type the number again or we don't have to copy paste all we do is just equal and then we go select the cell B7 and then we press on F4 through three times until the dollar signs is before the letter and then we drag our formula down and then we drag our formula to the right and then if we want to put the currency we just press on control Shift 4 to put some dollar signs and let's make it a little bit cleaner and here we go okay going to put dollars everywhere boom once again perfect this way this is how we shape our budget and if our salary changes during the year let's say we have 60,000 as you can see it puts 5,000 everywhere so you don't have to change all the cell just one cell here at the top I will hit contrl Z to go back and then I put it in yellow here is my salary so now we have our income that is almost done and what I want to do I will do the sum of all of this here boom here we go and we're going to make the budget a little bit nicer hit contrl B and then put this in black and then put the text in white here we go we have a super great income and actually I want to make my totals in bold contrl P once again and I'm going to put it in blue okay so this way my totals are all blue and it looks a little bit cleaner so now I know during the year that I earned $92,000 so that's 50,000 plus 42k freelance income investment returns or other income okay and then we have our expense what I can do is use chat GPT to see if I forgot any expense okay I will just take these expense here I will hit contrl C and I'll go back to chat gbt and ask him hello I have these expenses in my budget Dot and then we copy paste do you think I miss any other expenses question mark and then he will tell me some answer here you go your list covers many common expense here are some additional expense categories you might want to consider depending on your situation so you have taxes you have professional development you have pet care so oh let's say I forgot to budget my vacation super important right to stay healthy so I'm just going to go here click on total expense right click insert a row and then put vacation there it's the same deal I won't do it again but as you can see you go here you put the monthly your monthly rent is $2,000 and then you go there F4 three times and here we go now I filled all my expense and H what I can do actually is to calculate my total expense for the months actually what I want to do is put the expense in negative number so now I have my income in blue and my expense in red negative means cash flow negative means a disbursement of money and income is a positive Revenue so it is positive so it is blue so we have our net income here that is going to be calculated so we take sell b11 plus total expense we do a plus because it's a minus in here so it gives the net income I drag my formula and I can see that for the year I have a positive income of $177,600 uh be careful because you don't have have your income taxes in this so this might be super wrong you don't earn $50,000 you earn $50,000 times 60% if you pay 40% of income taxes you can Factor this in your budget you just add this here and you put income taxes and then you select your salary press F4 to lock the sales times Min -.4 if it's 40% let's say and then you divide divided by 12 here you go you have your income taxes and here you go what I would suggest is always put a higher income taxes percentage so you make sure you have buffers in your budget okay I'm I'm going to delete this income taxes line here we go now that we have our income and our expenses all set up in our budget template it's time to adjust with some parameters you remember at the top I had the income buffer and expense buffer so what I want to do here is to play with these parameters to know okay how long do I have with my budget like how can I stretch it if I lose my job if I lose some income streams if I have more expense what's going on so what we're going to do is we are actually going to add the income buffer in my income here so we do times B2 and then we lock the cell with F4 and then we just apply it everywhere in my income equal and there we go equal 1,000 and there we go equal 500 and times 100% so now what you can see is I have a 92k income but what happen if I go at 80% of my income we have coid that comes up and we lose 20% of our revenues then here all of a sudden we have 74k Revenue in instead of 92k but what happens if I have a salary increase if it's 121 here we go so we can play with the budget and see where we stands basically we do the same with the expense I'm not going to do it here let's say our rent cost now 100 20% as you can see my rent cost me 24,000 but now we have increase of 20% next year might be a lot here we go we have 29k and my Excel budget Just Adjust by itself super simple going to put this back 100% so you do the same for all the expense and then it's time to calculate our cash flow and what is our cash balance okay so I go back at the top I add cash at start and that's actually your bank statement amount that you put there okay so let's say I have 25,000 in my bank statement pretty pretty rich right I put this in green and and here we go so what we do here is we do the cash at start cash at end so here we select our cash at start and we put it there here we go equal and then the cash at the end is the cash at start plus the net income of the month and here we go the cash at start of the next month of the month of February actually is our cash at the end of the previous month and here we go and then we can just drag our formula to the right grab those two and drag it to the right as well and we can see that we have 42,000 here at the end of December but what happens if I have my income that goes to 50% and my expense that stay the same actually you can see that I have minus 3,400 at the end of December so I don't have any more money you know so that's how the budget works and what I'll do actually is I will do conditional formatting on the net income line okay so what I'll do is I'll do a conditional formatting if the sell is greater than zero I will put it in green and if it's lower than zero I will put it in Red so as you can see if I make money it's going to be green if I lose money it's going to be red so we're going to put back our income at 100% boom it's green if I put back my income at 50 50% boom it's red I lose money so now you have a budget that makes some kind of sense just a quick sheet to manage your finance and you can actually play with these numbers here and go month by month if you want to be more precise peace [Music]