budgeting – M.L. Humphrey

Back To School Sale

Since the world is still on fire and many people are dealing with back to school craziness, I thought I’d do what I could and put a bunch of school-friendly titles on sale for a couple weeks. Each of the below titles is on sale for $2.99 USD.

Click on any of the images below to be taken to a Books2Read page for that title that has all the stores listed. (If you’re already set up with them you’ll go straight to your chosen store.) Or you can use any of the store pages on the right-hand side here and get to the books that way.

Excel Essentials

Word Essentials

PowerPoint Essentials

Access Essentials

Data Principles & Budgeting

Keep in mind this is only for the ebook versions, but all of these titles also have paperback versions and most have hardcover versions as well that are, I think, reasonably priced.

And some of these are very good deals indeed, because I was being lazy so I priced everything at $2.99 which means that Access for Beginners, for example, which is usually $7.99 is on sale for the same price as Excel for Beginners, which is normally $4.99. (USD. But equivalent discounts in your local currency.)

Enjoy.

Reading is My Refuge

My last two years at Stanford were two of the hardest years of my life. I had decided to triple major–which included a major I didn’t even start until my junior year–and I was also working more than full time to pay for room and board. So 19 or 20 units each quarter plus 50 hours of work a week. Oh, and I was commuting from Sunnyvale my junior year so add in a real drive each day as well.

It may seem strange, but what got me through it was reading. Mostly fiction books, but some non-fiction too. (That was when Guns, Germs, and Steel came out and I absolutely loved that book.) That first finals week I think I read three fantasy novels while studying for and taking all of my exams.

I was lucky to work in a bookstore and so have free access to books. (It was a company program, I wasn’t cheating in any way.) But even if I hadn’t, I would’ve worked an extra hour a week to be able to buy books, they were that important to me.

Which is why yesterday I dropped the ebook prices on about a dozen different titles. Since I know there are people like me out there who are desperately in need of a distraction right now, I thought I’d help out a bit.

We’re all going to need to get away and disconnect to make it through this. For some that will be video games or TV shows or movies. For others it will be books.

So…If you’re a book person, here’s what I’ve put on sale. It’s a very eclectic mix as you’ll see. Hopefully there’s something in there for everyone:

Just click on the image to be taken to the Books2Read page which should have links for all retailers. Or you can just go to your favorite retailer and look the titles up. All except for Erelia are available everywhere and most libraries should also be able to get them.

Non-Fiction ($2.99 USD each)

Excel for Beginners: A guide to Microsoft Excel for those who need to master the basics.

Budgeting for Beginners: A book that will teach you how to figure out where you are financially, judge what that means, and give tips for how to improve. Especially helpful right now for those who are finding themselves without a steady paycheck, because it covers how to approach irregular income like that. (Also available in audio as the Juggling Your Finances Starter Kit.)

Quick & Easy Cooking for One: Exactly what it says. A guide to cooking for yourself for the absolute beginner. More concept-based than step-by-step, but it does include recipes.

Writing for Beginners: An overview of what a beginning writer should know to get started. Includes discussions of point of view, tense, as well as agents and publishing paths. (Also available in audio under the title The Beginning Writer’s Guide to What You Should Know.)

Don’t Be a Douchebag: Online Dating Advice I Wish Men Would Take: A snarky guide to online dating for men who aren’t doing so well at it. (Also available in audio. Some retailers may have a different cover.)

Fiction:

The Rider’s Revenge Trilogy: ($4.99 USD) A feminist YA fantasy adventure trilogy about a young girl who sets out to avenge her father and finds herself caught up in much bigger issues.

Erelia: (Available on Amazon Only, $2.99 USD and in KU) A dystopian utopia. Life seems perfect on the surface, but the reader sees just what horrible actions create that perfection. Also has a pandemic subplot. (I had unpublished this one just because I thought it needed a sequel and I wasn’t sure when I’d write that sequel, so be forewarned.)

A Dead Man and Doggie Delights: (99 cents) First in what will soon be a six-book cozy mystery series set in the Colorado mountains. For lovers of Newfoundland dogs, Colorado, and quirky characters who like a little murder on the side. (Book 2, A Crazy Cat Lady and Canine Crunchies is also reduced to $2.99 USD.)

Something Worth Having ($2.99 USD): Contemporary romance bordering on women’s fiction. About a woman facing a breast cancer diagnosis who goes on a road trip with a man she is absolutely not allowed to fall in love with. (A related but standalone title, Something Gained, is also just $2.99 right now.

Excel for Budgeting is Live

File this one under why I should never read my emails. Haha. Just kidding, this was one I’d been thinking of writing for a while but just hadn’t written yet. So that email someone sent a couple months ago asking how to apply Excel to budgeting was just a good reminder that I wanted to get this done.

Over the last ten years of self-employment I’ve developed an Excel workbook I use to juggle my finances. Because one of the biggest challenges of self-employment is cash flow. I can make $25K in one month and then nothing for three. So I have to always be monitoring where I am in terms of cash to pay my bills. And I have to know where I can look to get cash to pay my bills if there isn’t a big paycheck coming and there isn’t enough in the bank account.

So over the years I’ve developed a focus on my short-term liquid net worth and also on haircutting my assets. (Much like a broker-dealer is required to haircut their securities portfolio when they value their holdings.) Because a 401(k) is great and all, but it doesn’t do you any good if you can’t pay your bills today.

In Budgeting for Beginners I talked about all of this and how to judge where you are financially and take steps to improve upon that. But what I didn’t include there was the Excel workbook I use to track all of this. And it’s not exactly intuitive how you’d create something like this.

I now have one nice little worksheet I can print off that shows my next three months of cash flows, my assets and liabilities, my available credit, and my short-term and long-term net worth. But when I look at my trackers from ten years ago they are nothing like what I now have.

(I think I missed my calling as some sort of data nerd. But, oh well.)

So anyway, that’s what Excel for Budgeting is. It walks through how to create this workbook for tracking your finances. It’s what I use and (knock wood) I’ve somehow managed to stumble along for close to a decade now with uncertain income and making extreme life choices. I do think you should know Excel before you try to use it, but there are step-by-step instructions in there for how to create everything if you want to give it a try anyway.

(And, as a weird added bonus, if you’re like I once was and split time between two countries so have to deal with payments in multiple currencies, I covered that, too. Because, why not?)

Now maybe I’ll be turning to writing some fiction. Maybe. As long as I don’t walk my dog or check my emails before I start the next project.