 Personal finance practice problem using Excel. Mutual fund, commission load, front end load. Prepare to get financially fit by practicing personal finance. Here we are in our Excel worksheet. If you don't have access to it, that's okay because we'll basically build this from a blank sheet. But if you do have access, three tabs down below. Example, practice blank. Example, in essence, answer key. Let's look at it now. Information on the left calculation's on the right. We're gonna be imagining where we are investing in a mutual fund and considering the fees related to it, focusing in here on the commission or front end load. The second tab, it's gonna have some pre-formatted sales so you could work the practice problem with less Excel formatting. The third tab, a blank tab, where we will do more of the Excel formatting. If you don't have any of this, that's okay. You can open up a new worksheet and I would lay down the baseline formatting first and then add the data on the left. Lay down the baseline formatting. I could do that by selecting the entire triangle up top which will select the entire worksheet with the triangle, I should say, and then you could right click on it. I usually go down to formatting the sales on the selected area. I go to the currency tab in the numbers group and for negative numbers, red and bracketed, remove the dollar sign and remove the decibels. That's my starting point. I'm not gonna hit okay because I already have this. I'm just gonna X out of it. Then add your data on the left-hand side, adjust in the sales as necessary. For example, making this into a percent and adding a couple of decimals with the percent decimals, making a skinny C column, then we're good to go. So remember that a mutual fund represents us investing in like a pool of investments along with other individuals the fund manager then is gonna be responsible for allocating those investments in accordance with the rules of the mutual fund. Now, of course, because we're investing in a mutual fund that's gonna need to be managed, there will be some kind of fees related to it. The question then is gonna be, well, what are those fees? How can I calculate what those fees will be? How can I reduce the fees related to it? So note that you might have a fee when you're purchasing the fund which might be the front end load or the commission. You might be able to reduce or remove that fee by basically not needing to go through a broker, go directly to the fund itself. But so you wanna be careful of that fee and then you might have fees that are gonna be basically the management fees that might be able to say yearly fees and then you can have back-end fees when you sell the fund. So you wanna be conscious of the different kind of fees that could be involved when you are comparing and contrasting, investing in different types of assets and different types of mutual funds, for example. So we're gonna say here that we have the investment of the 60,000 and we're gonna assume that there's a commission or a front-end load of the 6.2%, which again, you wanna be kind of wary of and be cognizant of whether or not there's that front-end load and whether or not you can eliminate or reduce the front-end load if you're investing in different types of vehicles such as different types of mutual funds. So to calculate it, of course, fairly straightforward, if it's a front-end load, we could just say it's the commission that we're gonna be paying. It's gonna be a one-time fee instead of a recurring fee typically. So if I make this a little bit larger on column D, we'll just make this black and white home tab font group, making this black and white and then we're gonna go into the investment amount. So we're investing, this is how much we're investing, not how much is in the assets of the mutual fund. So we're gonna be putting in the 60,000. We have the load percent, I will call it, which is gonna be equal to the 6.2%. We're simply gonna make that a percent up top, home tab number group, percent to find it. I also need a decimal. So I'm gonna add a couple here just to add two because that's what I like to do. And then I'm gonna go to the home tab font group and underline it and that's gonna be our commission or front and load fee you could call it, right? Whatever the fancy name you're gonna call it. It's gonna be the 60,000 times the 6.2 and that might be there if you had say a commission, you can add a couple of decimals if there's gonna be pennies, there are none involved here. And so again, so then we'll talk a little bit more about calculations of other fees. You also might have the management of the fees you would expect then because the fund manager is gonna have to manage the fund which could depend in terms of how much that fee would be on whether it's actively managed or whether it's an index or passively managed, for example, is the other one you wanna keep an eye on when you're comparing and you're contrasting. So let's go up top and make this home tab font group and make this blue as we usually do. If you don't have that blue, you can go down to the more colors down below. When I go to the color wheel on the left hand side, I'm gonna pick that blue right there. You can do whatever you wanna do. That's what I do. I'm gonna say okay. And then I'm gonna go up top home tab font group borders, put some borders around it and there we have it.