The American College of Financial Services Review

In this blog post, I’ll give The American College of Financial Services Review for how I thought the University did getting me the credits towards my CFP credential, and how I finished all 7 courses in under one year, really only half giving an effort into the program. This was a decently challenging program, and it starts off a bit deceitful in how easy it is, only for the last handful of courses to get progressively harder. The 7 classes required to get the CFP credential are below:

Financial Planning- This one is extremely easy, especially since you just need a C to pass the class and move on. There’s a few papers, some assignment quizzes that add up to 30% of your grade, and you can take these as many times as you want. This leaves you with only needing something like a 60% on the exam to pass the class, which should be super easy on this course since it’s just definitions.

Tax Planning – Tax planning SUCKED, but not as much as the future sections. The quizzes and tests were brutal, the writing and discussion board portions of the classes were not too bad, and the actual material made virtually no sense, I basically squeezed this one out by the skin of my teeth, this is coming from someone en route to be a CPA right now.

Insurance Planning – Insurance Planning was challenging but actually somewhat interesting, which is funny because typically people say that Insurance is boring as hell. This one was 100% reading with virtually no math, which for me at least made it significantly easier.

Retirement Planning – Retirement planning actually I found to be the hardest section of them all, with Estate Planning coming in as a very close second. Retirement planning goes into vivid detail on what happens on the back end of your pension and 401K plans, and it is boring as heck but useful administratively.

Investment Planning – Given I had a Finance degree by trade, this one was not bad. By no means easy, but a lot of it was review of things like the CAPM formula or Standard Deviation and Variances.

Estate Planning – Estate planning was bad, but it took me about a month of 3 to 4 hours daily. It definitely did not have the same type of pain involved that say studying for the FAR section of the CPA exam has so far, where I’m literally procrastinating and hesitant to start studying. Very difficult and you feel like you’re almost in law school prepping to be an estate planning attorney while you’re taking this class.

Final Capstone Course, Building a Financial Plan – This one was more just annoying than anything. There is this gigantic Financial Planning portion of the class where you have to make a mock plan, and you constantly have to schedule mock calls, very frustrating and it just seems to drag on. Feels great once you get this credit though and are done with all the CFP classes and become eligible to take the exam, or to tack on one more and finish the CHFC designation.

The American College of Financial Services Review, My Take and Opinion As a Whole

Overall, it was a much better use of my time than sitting there watching Netflix or doing nothing, but I probably would’ve been better off financially over the long term by spending all this time writing an additional 1000 blog posts for my website. But alas, what’s done is done, and I’ll tack that CHFC onto my resume to always leave a key under the mat for Wealth Management. It’s almost like an insurance policy for $40 a month or so to maintain the designation. I definitely feel that I got a good Financial Planning education out of it, and I find that I can talk about Finance in an extremely educated manner after going through the education. In fact right now my degrees and designations section of my resume is about to look like this:

CHFC

CPA

MAcc – Masters of Accountancy

BA in Finance

BA in Accounting

BA in Financial Planning from the American College of Financial Services

Notary

SIE

Series 7

Series 66

I definitely gave up a lot of dates and a lot of time spent with women to get these 10 finance designations. Not sure if I would recommend going this far in getting designations, but hey I’ll take the cash flow opportunities from the above any day of the week!

Here’s When I Would Recommend Getting Your CFP, and When I Would Not Recommend Getting Your CFP

I would recommend getting it if you are working in Wealth Management and you’d like a resume boost, or if you are in Accounting even and are looking for a resume boost. It will definitely help your interview chances, will give you something to talk about in meetings. It’ll also just increase your overall employment chances and help you to manage your own capital, whether it’s for your business, your mortgage, or your personal finances.

Final Thoughts On The American College of Financial Services Review, My Overall Take

And there you have it. CFP candidates need comment! Let me know what your experience has been so far and if you feel it was worth it for you. And as always, be sure to read on or subscribe to our blog for additional details and information.

Cheers!

*Inflation Hedging.com

Sources:

https://www.bankrate.com/banking/cds/cd-rates/

https://money.cnn.com/data/markets/

https://www.wgu.edu/

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