“I need to buy a house. Right now is the time to buy my own place.” 

This is what a buddy has been telling me lately. This guy is convinced that he has to buy a house. All that he’s talking about is buying a place and having his own home. He’s so in love with the idea of being a homeowner that he doesn’t really think about much else. He forgets the fact that is job is unstable and that he has little savings. He’s not afraid of the debt. He just wants to own a home to tell people that he owns a home.

So I got into a debate with him, as any good friend would do. I looked past the normal expenses and problems with buying a place.

What are expenses that you should be expecting as a homeowner that you might not expect?

Landscaping.

Landscaping isn’t easy or cheap. You need to always stay on top of your lawn. From the basic grass cutting in the summer to shovelling the snow in the winter. This will cost you time and money.

If you enjoy sleeping in or relaxing, you won’t be too happy with Mother Nature when the snow storms hit and you’re stuck scraping ice off your window.

You’ll also be in for a surprise when you see how much it costs to buy a new lawn mower or just to replace shovels. This is money that you wouldn’t have to spend if you were renting an apartment or living in a condo.

Furniture.

What will you put in your home? Where will people sit or sleep over?

We all overlook furniture because we figure that we can always buy something for cheap or get second-hand items off friends. That’s not the case. In reality, the second you see that extra bedroom, you’re going to want to spruce it up.

Is a couch cheap? Not really. You could easily spend thousands of dollars to fix a place up and furnish it nicely.

Home maintenance.

What about the equipment that makes your home function? Your furnace could break down. A window could break. Anything could break.

Guess what? You’re on the hook for everything. That’s tons of money that you need to spend just to maintain your home. Are you ready for that?

What do you think your expenses will be like? I bet that expenses you never imagined could creep up on you.

What’s the point of all of this? I just want you to sit down, run the numbers, calculate how much you need to buy a home, and then save some more on top of that. You need to have a nice cushion when you buy a home because you don’t want to put your life savings into your mortgage and then have nothing left for anything else.

Do you finally want to save money? Are you ready to amp up your savings account? I want this to be the year that you start saving more money.

2013 is here and I don’t believe in resolutions. There’s no time for that. I would rather take real action to see real results. I’ve learned over the years that a few small moves today can really benefit you in the future. The beauty is that you don’t have to be super-educated or break your back to see some serious savings.

How can you save money before breakfast tomorrow morning? How can you take a few minutes to amp up your savings?

Create automated savings.

Have you set your savings yet? I don’t like to think about budgeting money and putting my money away. I want to just set it and forget it. I want life to be simplified. I don’t want to think about money non stop. A few years ago, I filled out a form with my employer. It allowed them to take $50 from my paychecks. This was the best idea ever because I’ve managed to passively saving over a thousand dollars every single year. Not bad for no effort.

Cut a subscription.

How many monthly subscriptions do you have? Whenever I want to get serious about my savings, I look over my fixed expenses to see what can be cut. I often find a subscription or something that can be cut out. Then I go after it. This will take you a few minutes maximum. You’ll now be saving more money without much effort at all. Will you get rid of that iTunes account?

Put something up for sell.

Look around your room. Do you see too much crap? Did you know that you can easily sell this stuff for money? You can go on eBay to get rid of some junk and get paid in the process. You’ll have much more space in your home and you’ll have more cash in that good old savings account. A win-win situation if you asked me.

Find a paying gig.

Are you not making enough money? You can put up an ad on Kijiji to see if someone is willing to pay you for your services. What are you good at? What can you teach others? A paying gig will help you make money for the time being. This beats saving money on daily coffees. Once you find your first paying client, you can leverage this to find even more clients and more revenue.

How will you save money before breakfast? As fun as it is to go through Facebook or Twitter to see the newest jokes, you can really benefit from taking a few minutes to do something interesting.

One of the tricky challenges in using excel is dealing with different text formats. I’ve discussed dates in the past but hours can also prove to be very tricky. Why? Basically, excel can understand all of these:

09:30
03:30 PM
03.50

What is cannot do though is guess which format you (or the end user) is using. I was asked to create a wage calculator that would be able to manage all formats. There are no easy ways to do this simply because excel cannot guess what the user is actually thinking.. Of course, I could look for “AM” or “PM” and do something when I find those, but it does remain difficult to deal with. Much easier is to make it very clear to the end user how you’d like him to enter the data.

Let’s take a simple wage calculator where the user has to enter the hours that he worked in order to for me to know how much I owe him. You can see a screenshot here:

In this case, I made it very clear that I expected him to enter the hour in one cell and the minutes in another. That makes it much easier for me to manage the data. I then can simply use a nested if condition to determine the actual time:

=A5+B5/60+IF(AND(C5=”pm”,A5<>12),12,0)

Why? First of all, I deter,ine the time by adding the hours to minutes/60. I also want to add 12 hours if it is “pm”.

I did pretty much the same thing to determine the end hour:

=D5+E5/60+IF(AND(F5=”pm”,D5<>12),12,0)

Then, I can simply substract one from another right? Almost.. but what if the user worked from 6pm (or 18:00) to 3am? Then you would get a negative number. Instead, I simply look and add 24 hours if that is the case:

=IF(H5-G5<0,H5-G5+24,H5-G5) After that, it becomes fairly straight forward, as you can see:

You can also download the spreadsheet

Vlookup functions are difficult to understand initially and while they become very powerful once you do fully understand how to use them, I can tell you from the dozens of requests that I get every month that the concept remains very difficult to understand. Microsoft is trying to make life easier for users by changing the concept again. Here is the direct quote from CFO’s excel 2013 preview:

Relationships instead of VLOOKUP. If you add your worksheets to the pedestrian “Data Model” feature, you can use the Relationships icon to define that CustID in your million row transaction worksheet is related to CustNumber in your customer worksheet. Now, without doing millions of VLOOKUPs, you can create pivot tables from the data on both worksheets. Whether you’re sick of people who feel superior because they can do VLOOKUP, or someone who does VLOOKUP in their sleep, no one can argue that creating a relationship in 3 clicks is faster than waiting for a million VLOOKUPs to recalculate.

This might work although it will simply make other parts more difficult. I’m assuming that having the right column headers will become very important as Excel 2013 will try to guess how data interacts with each other. It will certainly be very interesting to see. I’m curious, do you expect to upgrade to Excel 2013 as soon as possible? I will certainly start moving soon although I do use cloud computing a lot more than I did just a few months ago so it will only impact my more complex spreadsheets. If ever you’d like to access a preview version, you can try going here.