Becoming a CFP® - 189

Welcome Money Buddies to this week's episode of Money Talk. This week we're talking about becoming a certified financial planner. I'm your host, Skylar Fleming, and let's get talking. I am really excited about today's episode because I'm pulling back the curtain on something that has totally changed the trajectory of my career and honestly my life. We're diving into my journey towards becoming a certified financial planner. What it took, why I did it, and everything I learned along the way back in early fall 2024, about 11 months ago, I was thinking about moving into the direction of financial planning and a subsequent career change into financial planning and away from marketing. My degree is in public relations and advertising, so this is gonna be a big deal since I would be moving away from something that I worked to get a degree in. Of course, public relations and marketing are very applicable in all sorts of aspects of business, so I wouldn't be leaving behind my knowledge entirely. But this would represent a switch from one career realm to another. Now, this got me very excited. I've been doing my podcast Money Talk since September of 2021, which is actually longer than my last job that I had in marketing. So you could tell I really enjoyed personal finance and I wasn't surprised by this inclination to change over to financial planning. I've helped clients here and there with financial coaching, which gave me a great taste of planning in the coaching world. So when I started to think about this career change, I was very intrigued. All of that is what we're going to be talking about in today's episode. I want to walk you through what it's been like for me as a career changer in working to become a certified financial planner. And if you've wondered what A CFP actually does, what goes into becoming one, or whether it might be the right path for you, even if you're just curious about how someone makes the career leap into financial planning. This episode is for you. I'm gonna get real with the highs, the lows, the late night studying, the major mindset shifts that I had to go through, and I'm recording this episode the day after taking my CFP exam. And guess what? I passed. I wrote that line before I actually took the exam because I wanted to instill in myself that I was going to be able to do it. I'm gonna detail more about what it took, but I actually passed. I was beyond excited to see the preliminary pass come up on my screen when I clicked submit. And now this means I'm a candidate for CFP certification. Though, I'm not a fully certified CFP professional yet, which requires some more experience hours that I'm working on earning. I'll walk you through in this episode all the different things that you need to think about when working to become A CFP for those who are interested. And no guest money buddy. Today it's all me and it's all about becoming a CFP. Before I jump in here, I wanted to give a huge, massive shout out to one of you listeners who texted me from Fargo, North Dakota. They said, I just listened to episode 173 with Eric Brotman. You are looking for examples of motivation. And I suggest going to visit nursing homes. My last job, I visited Medicaid quality and some really nice quality nursing homes. And now that's my motivation to not get left in Medicaid. So there you go. Thank you so much for texting me. There's an example of motivation maybe go look at where you might be if you didn't handle your financial situation well and that can really help motivate you to stay on track financially. And remember, you can text me with the link in the top of the show notes and if you want me to respond, please include your phone number or email address in the text message and I'd be happy to get back with you. But the money talking points for today's episode. R one, what is a certified financial planner and two, what are the requirements to become a certified financial planner? And three, when would someone work with a certified financial planner? With those money talking points in mind, let's get talking. Normally, this is where you would hear me come in with a guest and welcome our guest. But no guest on today's episode. This is gonna be a solo one. I'm looking to start doing some more solo episodes. To help give you my knowledge and help me learn it even more by teaching it to each of you. Let's start with the first money talking point today. What is A CFP? A CFP stands for certified financial planner Investopedia defines it as a formal recognition of expertise in financial planning, taxes, insurance, estate planning, and retirement savings. It's a broad knowledge set and we have to learn a ton in different areas. I'll dive more into what I had to learn as a CFP and in the education space throughout this episode. A CFP is someone who has a lot of knowledge in pretty much every area of your financial life, there are planners who can help you build a true financial plan, integrating all sorts of relevant elements of your personal and financial circumstances. What are the requirements to become A CFP? Well, I hope these requirements help you begin to trust and understand what A CFP has to go through and what they have to learn in order to become certified professionals and help you with their credentials. A CFP has to have a bachelor's degree and complete the financial planning education piece. With a certified program, you have to pass 170 question six hour long test. That's designed for someone with a few years of financial planning experience. They also require 6,000 hours of experience, and there is a strict ethics requirement that professionals have to uphold. So I hope this helps you understand that the CFP marks are no. Joke, they're something that everyone who has them has worked very hard to get, and they don't take them lightly. Financial advice and financial planning with A CFP has some real professional expert weight to it. When should you work with A CFP? That's the third and final money talking point here. I think that people all over the financial spectrum can work with A CFP. There's some great pro bono programs out there that get people with minimal financial literacy or minimal financial assets in front of A CFP to help with things like cash flow planning and budgeting. But you can also work with them up to tax planning, investment management, and retirement planning. The scope is endless and there's gonna be a CFP out there for whatever you'd need to have done. There's so many various types and there's so many different. CFPs that have different niches or areas that they love to help, whether it's tax planning, learning how to budget, estate planning, you name it, there's gonna be a CFP in that area that can help you. And I think that's what's so great about it. If you have any financial questions or if you wanna get pointed in the right directions, send your questions my way. Odds are pretty high that I'm gonna be able to help you out, but even higher that I'm gonna be able to find you someone who can help you and your unique situation out. Please reach out if you have any budgeting questions. If you're curious about a financial area, I love to talk with anyone and everyone about money. Head over to Money Talk Show slash chat and schedule a free money talk today and we can get started. Let's get into the rest of this solo episode. I got a lot of research and a lot more information to provide to you here, let's dive into my story today and a little bit more about what I wanna share around becoming A CFP. So let's start off here with what led me to this point? What inspired me to get into financial planning I was inspired to get into financial planning, because I've always found personal finance very, very interesting. You've likely heard my story before of how I worked in a credit union. I found myself helping people with tricky financial situations when they didn't quite realize how they got themselves into it. That led me into financial coaching and teaching people how to budget and control their spending. Over the last year or so, I was wondering how I could get further into finance and get back into the financial sphere. That's what led me to look into financial planning and the CFP designation. So like I mentioned in the intro, in the fall of last year, I started looking into what it takes to become A CFP, and then I started looking at what A CFP does and learned a little bit more about a financial planner. And I've had some on the podcast I've interviewed, I was starting to ask them more about what they do in their job, and realized it's very broad you're able to do whatever you want in the financial planning space, and you're not limited to insurance sales or product sales. And I think that is what is really fantastic. So when I realized I wouldn't have to get strictly into insurance sales or that area, that's what really piqued my interest. A lot of my wife and i's financial journey has influenced this decision greatly, and I'll talk about that more in a few minutes here as well. So why would I choose CFP well, frankly, I chose CFP because it was one of the first things I. Looked into and I didn't look into much else. I sought it out and then I went for it and I chose CFP because you will often hear it referred to as the gold standard of financial planning designations. There's so much information that you learn from becoming A CFP that you can really help everybody in any financial situation after going through the education portion and studying for the exam, I'm astounded at how much stuff I know now that I had no idea about before. There's also a lot of various areas covered on my podcast or listened to on other podcasts that helped me begin to build my knowledge. But the CFP Education really helped me expand and broaden it and learn how to work with people with all of this knowledge that I now have. And I chose the Certified Financial Planner because it's a highly recognized and highly regarded certification. Within financial planning and the weight that that carries led me towards the designation. So how did my own journey influence this decision? Well over the last few years, my wife and I had begun doing a lot more financial planning on our own. I was very financially savvy and we were able to figure a lot of this out on our own. This helped me realize over the years how much I enjoyed integrating all these different aspects of our life into one plan. I realized that I had this skillset to organize and set up this plan to be efficient and well laid out. I realized that I could help other people in this same area be able to gain the benefit that my wife and I had seen from having a well laid out plan. And thankfully, my wife and I are in a very good financial situation right now. That made it possible to take time away from working to finish studying and preparing for the exam, which helped make this a whole lot easier. I'm extremely grateful to my wife for allowing me to make this career change because without her hard work and dedication to her career this just probably wouldn't have been possible, and the hard work that we've put in to build our own financial plan and make our own financial situation good. That's what made this transition possible. So I'd love to help people be in a position where they can do similar things in their life and have doors open to countless opportunities and not have money and finances hold them back, let's talk a little bit about what actually goes into earning and learning all that you have to do to pass the test. I'm talking about the education, studying and exam prep portion of becoming a CFP. One thing that I'd recommend is the Boston Institute of Finance, Biff, all the way. Their education interview programs are topnotch. Biff F is the best and I would highly recommend them to anybody. Their review program has been incredibly helpful for helping me prepare for the exam. I also learned an absolute ton from their education program. It really helped drive it home. And for me it was a huge deal that it was all self-paced. I'm very good at learning on my own and setting a schedule for myself, but they also have live programs that you can go along with a cohort of people. But for me, self-paced and on demand is the way to go. Now, I do wanna share how much time I spent in all of these different areas, I tracked all of this from the very beginning because I wanted to be able to look back and say, how much time did this take me to earn? The CFP designation. So let's go through it and I'm gonna share more about this on LinkedIn, so if you wanna see more detailed and pictures and stuff like that, check me out on LinkedIn and you can see more of it there. The CFP education portion, I spent 139 hours, 59 minutes and five seconds on the CFP education portion of learning everything, and that was a lot of learning. Now, a couple other things. I am shocked by this number, but the BIFF review or the reviewing and preparing for the exam. I actually spend more time than I did in the education portion. I spent 152 hours and 14 minutes in the Biff Review material. I spent 38 hours and 24 minutes with CFP General exam review, and that was kind of materials from other places like reading the code of standards and ethics of conduct, things like that. And now I spent seven hours and 55 minutes on CFP practice exams. I did two practice exams from the CFP board and then one Biff review practice exam. So in total to work towards passing the CFP exam, I spent a total of 338 hours, 32 minutes and nine seconds, which is kind of crazy now to look back and see that specific amount of time. I spent a long time over the last 11 months or so, really honing this in. And if you look at the chart. You see it ramp up and keep getting higher as April, may and June. And now July came on of how much I was studying. I spent 62 hours in the month of June alone studying for the CFP exam. What strategies worked for me, one thing that I found super helpful towards building my stamina for the six hour exam was. Many exam question type sessions where I would take topics from all the different areas and do about 75 to a hundred questions in one sitting. I called these mini exams and the Biff review question Bank made these super easy to do, I would take screenshots of every single question as I submitted it so that I would be able to save the correct answer, and that allowed me to do this extremely helpful tip, verbalizing the review session of each question that I got wrong. I would use a tool called Voice Notes, or you could use voice memos to record an audio review of each and every question, especially the ones you got wrong, and then I could use that to ask myself later where I needed to study, or just the fact of explaining it to myself. Auditorially helped tremendously. I could not recommend this enough when you go through these question sessions. Make sure you're saving the ones you get wrong, and then review it to yourself out loud, because the only way you learn is by getting things wrong and making mistakes. I also used an app called Freeform to make study boards where I would write down everything that I knew about a topic that I was struggling with, through the question banks, I realized I just wasn't getting it, and that helped me get those points back on questions that were maybe a little bit weak. And then leading up to the test, I was reviewing those study boards, just reading over them because I had already spent a month or two writing all these things down. The most important tip for me was having a consistent and set schedule to study on. I would write down on my whiteboard every single week what I was gonna study for every single day of that week. And that helped me stick to a consistent schedule and build up the repetition needed to build up the stamina for the exam and truly understand all of the material. And of course, it wasn't perfect. Days would shift, arrows would be drawn to move items to a different day. Something would come up and that's okay. The idea was the fact that I had it all wrote down. I knew what I wanted to do for the week and if it needed to carry over to another week, I had a section on my whiteboard for that. I was very detailed and outlined in exactly what I wanted to study each day, I kind of found myself in regular routines from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM depending on what week I was in of my study program. But having everything written down in terms of what I needed to study for that day allowed me to find the time. And of course this was a big help for me. I left my last job that I'm career changing from. And thankfully we're in a financial situation that that's possible. I left that job about a month and a half before my exam to really give me time to study so that I didn't have to worry about working a job and trying to balance this ramping study that I needed to do. So if you're a career changer and that's possible, I think that's a phenomenal tip, is really spending a lot of time and a lot of focus time on just preparing for the exam. Of course, it wasn't all rainbows and sunshine. There was plenty of challenges along the way. Now let's have some real talk about my struggles, the learning mentality I had to get back into it. When I started the education program, I had been outta college for at least three years. I had to turn back on a study mindset, which was really tricky at first, but thankfully if you commit to it, you can flip that mindset back on. If you're trying to change careers and learn all of this stuff later in life. It's a completely different mindset, it's an awesome mindset to be in where you're just absorbing and taking in information. What helped with my mental readiness? Sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, and more sleep. I could easily tell when I did not get enough sleep. One question at a time was the motto that I kept telling myself. That was a huge piece for my mental readiness. I had to realize that I had to work up to the point where I was gonna be able to pass. It was very overwhelming at the beginning with how much stuff I had to learn, and I realized I had to take it step by step, and it was gonna take time. Repetition was also extremely helpful for understanding the context fully. Now, did I ever doubt myself, if you're thinking about becoming a certified financial planner and you're right at the beginning of the process and you're saying, wow, can I do this? Yeah, I said that same thing to myself. Of course, I doubted myself. There were several times where I thought about stopping and just taking the loss on the education program. You can ask my wife. There was plenty of times where I heavily doubted if I was gonna be able to pass the test in the end, and guess what? I passed. I even doubted myself before I began because of the 6,000 hour experience that's needed. I found the most helpful thing to do when I doubted myself was to just stop and take a break. Breaks are a huge helping point, and don't be afraid to take breaks, pause and reset your mindset. What was the most difficult part? Well, the most difficult part for me was getting through a series of incorrect or misunderstandings on the question banks. For example, a series of incorrect answers in a row would decimate my mentality, and I mean decimate. I would be so upset, so learning to persevere when I didn't know a couple questions in a row. That was a huge deal. Or if I struggled with a couple pages in a row of material, that was the hardest part for me learning to break through that mud I got stuck in and breaking through that helped me tremendously. And one of the things that I learned that also helped is that incorrect answers are an opportunity to learn. If you're not getting things wrong, then what else are you gonna learn? One of the things that I thankfully picked upon pretty quickly and hammered into my head was the fact that incorrect answers are learning opportunities. To me, it would be scarier to go into the exam getting 95% or a hundred percent on every practice exam up to that point because you don't really know what you don't know. Missing questions is a valuable opportunity to learn and without missed questions you wouldn't know where you can improve. This helped me change my mindset a lot and made me a lot more excited for missed questions than decimated, like I described a minute ago. This also helped me be more willing to review and study things that I got wrong, one question at a time. That's what I had to keep telling myself. It became a motto for me. Because if I tried to do too much, I'd get hung up and frustrated. If I tried to speed through a series of questions, I would get frustrated if I tried to do two or three at a time. Or if I'm thinking about too many things at one time, I'd get'em all wrong. I am done for if I tried to do that. So beyond just the exam, I think I need to apply this to my entire life and do just one thing at a time and stop trying to juggle. So many different balls all at once, next, I wanna teach you all about what do CFPs learn about? What do they know? The education areas are professional conduct and regulation, general principles of financial planning, risk management, and insurance planning, investment planning, tax planning, retirement savings and income planning, estate planning. Some psychology of financial planning and financial plan development. There's a lot of stuff wrapped up in all of those areas and a lot of them crossover, I'm extremely thankful to the amount of knowledge that I now have in the financial planning realm. The knowledge is broad and will help guide people in the right direction. I truly believe that I can help everyone with a financial question, whether it's answering it for them or pointing them in the right direction. I know that there's so much more now that I know than I did a year ago because of the education and review program that I underwent. So what topic was the hardest for me heading into the CFP exam? What was I worried about the most? And that was tax planning. A lot of information about tax planning I feel is just pulled out of a hat and made up. So it's a lot of memorization in my opinion, and it's a little bit tricky to understand the nuances of it and the purpose behind it, especially when it comes to the limits and phase out ranges I joked with one of my friends who's studying to become a CPA that it feels like some of the numbers applied to financial planning in terms of tax stuff. R just pulled out of a hat and he agreed. They're just mixed up random. It's like they typed into Chad GPT, give me a random number between 150,000 and 200,000, and they said that's the phase out limit. So in my opinion, tax planning was one of the hardest areas for me to wrap my mind around. But by the end of my studying and reviewing, tax planning was one of my stronger areas. And that's because I worked hard. Reviewed hard, and put in a lot of effort to learn from my mistakes as I went on. So let's talk about the exam experience. I want to share what the exam was like for me. It was a rollercoaster. There were a few moments where I could feel that my brain was tired because my mind would start racing and I had to calm down and slow it down. There were several moments where I wasn't sure if I was gonna pass, and there were a couple other moments where I was like, that question was the easiest thing I've ever had to answer. It was a rollercoaster. I was up and down the whole time. I lost track of time. I didn't really know what time it was in the outside world. I was so focused on the exam and on my timer and I worked through it at a good pace. I used my extra time to go back to questions that were. Trickier, and here's something silly. I completely forgot how to do the weighted average rate of return. And I had two questions in a row about it. So that was fun, and that really threw my mentality for a rollercoaster up and down the whole time. And then right at the end, I'm getting ready to finish and boom, you have to do a survey. Of course. Right at the end, it could have gone either way. I was ready to see either option and I read that it passed and I nearly cried in the testing center. I nearly started tearing up from excitement. I didn't know what to think. I was in disbelief the entire two hour drive home from the testing center. It was such a crazy experience. Definitely one of the hardest exams I have ever taken in my life, just for the sheer mental ability that it takes to get through that long and that challenging of an exam. So what's my advice for others at this point on the other side of the exam where all I need to work through is the experience hours? If you're really interested in personal finance, I would absolutely say to look into the CFP, even if you are interested in early retirement or maybe you're already retired, taking a CFP education program may not be a bad idea. So that you know how to build your own financial plan. I've also heard that there's a lot of potential for older financial planners to retire soon. So if you're younger and interested in financial planning, this could be a great opportunity for you. What do I wish I had known before I got started? Well, I wish I had known the timeframe that I needed to consider for the education program and the review program. I started my very first course on October 7th. 2024 and took the exam July 15th, 2025. So. I hope that helps give you an estimated time range. I do think I was pretty fast, and did it in a shorter than average timeframe, thankfully, I had been in the financial realm for many years under my own self study with my podcast, and listening to other podcasts, I would recommend that people should get started in finance before trying for the CFP education and certification. How can you know if this is the right career path? Well, there's a great program called the Externship. I'm doing it right now and you can sign up for it next summer. There's a lot of groups out there for potential financial planners, like Measure Twice Money with Cody Garrett, who we've had on the show before. It could give you the ability to see some firsthand financial planning experience, and these programs are great and allow you to gain some experience towards your. CFP certification. Ask a lot of questions. I wish I would've asked more questions. It wouldn't have changed my mind, but it would've helped me know a lot more going into it. Talk to other CFP professionals. Talk to me. Reach out to others that have CFP next to their name on LinkedIn. Get their advice. I found that the vast majority of them are super willing and excited to help and see other people become A CFP. So how can you get started in this career? Try starting your own podcast or blog to learn about personal finance and write down what you want to teach other people so that you learn it twice. Consider financial coaching to get started. Financial coaching can be a simpler approach to helping people with their budgeting, spending, and cash flow needs. Then you can begin to add more financial planning to your repertoire and make yourself more educated and even better to help people with their personal finances. But that does it for what I was gonna talk about today, about becoming A CFP. I am overwhelmed, enthralled, excited, all the good emotions about passing the CFP exam, and thank you for sticking with me through this deep dive into my CFP journey. Whether you're thinking about pursuing the designation yourself, or trying to find a trustworthy financial professional to help you. In your plan for the future, I hope this gave you a better understanding of what a certified financial planner is and the heart grit and dedication it takes to become one. I'm incredibly grateful for the opportunity to have taken this path and even more excited about using what I've learned to help others. If you've got any questions about A CFP or the financial planning process, or your own financial planning journey, reach out. I'd love to support you however I can. You can email me and I'd love to get to know a lot more of you listening. But thank you for listening to today's episode. The best way to stay up to date and connected with All Things Money Talk is to subscribe to the podcast and sign up for my email list. Head over to Money talk.show and submit your name and email right there on the homepage. You can also use the contact page on my website to send me any questions you might have, be sure to check out the show notes for great ways that you can connect and work with me. And remember, the best way to learn from today's episode is to go and have a money talk about today's topic with a fellow money buddy. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Money Talk. I'm your host, Skylar Fleming. Have a great week.