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Course Description
Understanding (and negotiating!) commission payments, royalties, taxes, interest rates, and much more requires a solid understanding of percentages. In this video, led by math lover and spreadsheet aficionado Joel Kwabi, you’ll get step-by-step instructions on how to easily calculate percentages in common situations encountered by many creatives. Empowerment and realistic expectations come from accurate equations; we’ll teach you how to calculate them.
This lesson consists of an 15-minute video and a 20-minute practice worksheet.
This lesson consists of an 15-minute video and a 20-minute practice worksheet.
Objectives
- Calculate percentages quickly and easily so you can foresee likely financial outcomes.
- Achieve a comfort level with quantitative calculation to increase empowerment and self-advocacy.
- Evaluate financial terms of commission and royalty contracts for accuracy and fairness.
• Convert a percentage to a decimal.
• Calculate markups, discounts, commissions, royalties, taxes, and net sales (among other percentage calculations).
• Ability to combine the above calculations in more complex scenarios.
Course Contents
YOUR INSTRUCTOR
Joel Kwabi
Math Teacher, Personal Finance Advocate
Joel Kwabi was born in Ghana and moved to the United States for college. After receiving a bachelor's degree in mathematics and working in finance, he obtained a masters degree in mathematics education in pursuit of his passion for teaching. For over a decade, he has taught math in the classrooms of Brooklyn. He is passionate about personal finance and helped lead a Financial Peace University course in his church community after an eye-opening experience paying off student debt and saving to buy a home. He currently lives on Long Island with his wife and two kids.
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Amy Whitaker
Author, Faculty Member at New York University
Holding an MFA and an MBA, Amy studies the friction between art and business and proposes new structures to support economic sustainability for artists. Her third book, Economics of Visual Arts, was published in the fall of 2021 with Cambridge University Press. Amy is also author of two other books, Museum Legs and Art Thinking. Serving on the arts administration faculty at NYU, Amy researches what would happen if artists retained equity in their work. Her work on fractional equity has appeared in Management Science (with Kraussl) in the "Fast Track" intended for "high-impact research that is of broad interest.”
Amy's work has been featured in The Guardian, Harpers, The Atlantic, the Financial Times, Artforum, and The Art Newspaper. Her early work with the artists' cooperative project Trade School was covered in the New York Times and The New Yorker. She speaks widely including at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Meaning Conference (Brighton, UK), and The Conference (Malmö, Sweden). She has taught at Williams College, the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of Visual Arts, and California College of the Arts, and is a past recipient of the Sarah Verdone Writing Award from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
Image © Shieva Rezvani

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