Unlocking the Secrets to Financial Success: A Comprehensive Guide to Building Wealth

Hello and welcome to the complete personal expenses management course. My name is Saad Meray. I am a planning engineer and I will be your instructor for this course. In this course, I'm going to teach you how to efficiently record your expenses and based on the average expenses, you can determine your monthly and annual budget. After that, I will show you how you can follow up your expenses and monitor them on based on the budget you set. After applying what you will learn from this course, you will be able to do the following things. You can determine your estimated expenses and budget on monthly and annually basis. On monthly basis, you will track your expenses and compare them against the budget and you can check how much left to spend. You can compare your expenses against incomes. For each category of expenses, you will be able to find what exactly you spent, how your expenses distributed and how you did comparing to the budget. You will have an overall look at your expenses and the average amount you spent by category. You will also be able to track how was your expenses, incomes and savings through time. You will be able also to track your performance this year and based on your performance, you'll be able to see what is your estimated expenses at the end of the year. After we have everything set up, you can put a plan for the next 12 months or 24 months as you need. That is based on the budget you set and the estimated expenses and incomes you put. To do all the previous, you need a few tools. First, you need an application to record your expenses. In this course, we will use an app called Toshel Finance and later on I will explain why I chose this app. But also you can use another application like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets or any other software that serves the purpose. But you always should use the same template because we need it for the next step which is an analyze software. And here we will use one software only which is Microsoft Power BI. And for the most people who don't know what is Power BI, it is a software used to analyze data and show them through a variety of beautiful graphs and charts. Maybe Excel can do that but what extinguish Power BI is the speed and the ability to change data easily. You don't need to learn Power BI as I will provide a source file to it. But as an advice, I recommend if you learn Power BI for your benefit, I will put a link for a free course from Microsoft which I personally found very beneficial. So again, you don't need to learn any new application but all you need is dedication because if you want to get the most benefit from this course, you need to have the will to record your expenses and incomes which require a daily effort just a few minutes per day. That's all I have for the introduction. See you in the next chapter. To begin tracking your expenses, you need to record them first and you need to put them into categories. And to do that, there is a nice app called Toshel. There is also other apps like Mentor, Expenses Manager. But I found Toshel is the best app in this field after trying a few options. Anyhow, I will explain in the next lecture how to use Excel to record expenses or if you use another app, you can export data to Excel and continue. So what is Toshel? Toshel is an expenses management app that lets you record your expenses, put them into categories and also record your incomes. Most of Toshel features are free. You don't need to buy them unless you need to do some premium features like attaching photos to your records or managing multiple accounts. What makes Toshel so special is the cloud-saving features and that means everything is stored in Toshel servers. You can access your account from anywhere and using any device or platform, Android, iPhone or a web application. Let's set up the account. If you are using a PC, just go to Toshel.com or you can search for their app on Google Play Store or Apple Store. You will find it under the name of Toshel Finance. I will explain how you can set up the account on PC but same procedures can be applied on the mobile app. You need to go to Toshel.com. This is the Toshel Finance website. You can see the links of the apps here. Also, you can log in with Facebook or Google but we will sign up with email. Fill the first name, last name, email, repeat your email again, password, just click sign up. Here in step 2, you can find the options that you can get from Toshel Pro or but you can see also that Toshel Free makes all of these options available for free. What is important here is the export to CSV so we'll just continue with Toshel Free. Now, here is your Toshel account ready. On the left side, you can see the navigation menu. On the right side, you can see the list menu and here the add expenses button or add incomes or budget. Let's add something here and here there is an option to choose another currency if you want to add another currency or you use another currency and it will get the exchange rate from the current exchange rate for this currency. Let's go back to the original currency. Let's add something here. Add 20 as food and drinks. Where is food and drinks? It is here and the tags will be restaurants. Before clicking save here, you can edit the date or can add more options like description. Let's add something here and click save. You can also browse other months here. Click right or left and you can also change the accounts. Anyway, here is our account ready. If you want, you can go to the starting tabs but we will just check the expenses tab here. You can find the 20 that we put here. Click on edit categories. You can see here the default categories that Toshel provides for the new accounts. These categories you can change. You can delete or you can add two. Let's go to sports. If you don't have any sports category, you can just click on edit then delete. Let's add some category here. For example, if you have a babysitter category, save and it's here. Let's check the incomes tab and here you have the same option. Add income or edit categories. Here you can find grants, loans, and salary also and in the same way you can add a salary. For example, 1000 as salary. Save and here is everything you need to know. You can add these options also from the mobile app on Android or iPhone. It is pretty similar and I think it is easy to add on this application. Here you can change the month you are working on backward and forward or you can click on the month name to see the custom time span. Let's put 2018 or 17 or you can go back to the financial month which is January 18 now. Here you can view the expenses by date or by category and that's all you need to know. In this lecture, we will try to record expenses with Excel. If you don't like Toshel or if you are using another app for recording your expenses, you can export them to Excel using the next template you can see here. This template is the one we will use in our course. This template is the same template you can export from Toshel or if you have any other app, you have to modify your expenses to look like this. This template is a pretty simple, just the date, the account which is cash or the default account for Toshel, the category food and drinks or tags like what we put in the example, the expense amount should be here or the income amount should be here if it is an income, currency and the main currency. This is if you are using a currency different from the main currency, you can have two options here and this number here will be the same number that you would as expenses or incomes. I will attach this template to the resources of this lecture so you can download it and if you would like, you can just record your expenses with Excel. After recording your data, let's say for a month or a few months, you will have something like this. If you are using Toshel, you can find a bunch of expenses that you have and also incomes for each month that you are recording for and if you are using Excel, you can find the expenses and incomes as a list based on the same template we provided before. Set up the Power BI. You need to download Microsoft Power BI to continue with this course. You need to download Power BI and it is provided free from Microsoft on this link. So if you go to this link here, you can find the Power BI. Just click on download Microsoft Power BI for desktop. There is also apps for Android or Windows Store or iPhone. Click on download. After you downloaded the Power BI, it will ask you to sign in to your account. This is just for shared work if you are working with somebody else but you don't necessarily need to do that so just click on the cancel and also you need to download the source file that you need to use here and I uploaded this file on Dropbox. You can find it on this shortener. Now after you have enough data to export from Toshel, let's see how you can export data from there. On the left side, you can see export and reports. Click on it and you can find the export page. Here you want to export expenses and incomes and make sure that it is clicked on all time because you need all data you can get. Then click on the CSV. Notice here that the CSV is a free option. If you want to export to other formats, it is for the pro version but all you need is only the CSV file. So after you click the CSV, you will get export file.csv as a result. Now go to the resources file you downloaded before and unzip it and you will find three two folders and one file here. Copy the export file CSV that you got from Toshel and paste it inside this folder here. The Toshel exported file and replace the file there. After you pasted the export file from Toshel, now it is the time to run the Power BI. Click on the expenses management file. It needs some time to start the Power BI. Now we are here. Just hide these sidebars if you don't like and here is the file that you need to use for follow up the overall report. Here is the reports and here is the data and here is the relationships. Click on the data for the first time if you have some problems. This is the tables that we are using. In some cases, these tables will not be loaded successfully and I think this will happen for you in the first time because I use different path for each one of these tables and this path doesn't apply for everyone. So for doing that, let's fix that. Click on the edit queries to fix the errors here and we need to fix the data source. So click on data source settings. These tables are not working correctly. Just click on the data source settings and here you have to make sure that these files on the correct path is on your computer on the same folder that you are unzipped before. So just click on change source and make sure that this is the same path of the file that you exported before. Database file and the other file is the torsion export file. So change source and then if you want to click on browse and choose the file that you exported from torsion. So this is the path. Just copy the path of the torsion exported file and change the path only. Don't change the file name because it is important to be the same name or you can change it from here. And change it from the original file. So click ok here. The other one will make the same procedure. Copy the path and correct it here. Now ok. Close. Save and apply. Now we are here again. Click on reports. This is the overall report will be correctly made. Monthly report. But the only thing that we need to set up now is the budget. So let's see how we can do that.