Taking a Self-Paced CFP Education Course For Fun and… Personal Knowledge

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While pondering potential goals for the New Year, I ended up poking around Certified Financial Planner (CFP) Certification Education Programs. I have been toying with the idea of taking one of these courses off and on for years, which helps you fulfill the first two requirements of obtaining the CFP certification:

  • Education. Completion of CFP Board-approved coursework, and a bachelor’s degree in any discipline from an accredited college or university.
  • Exam. Pass the CFP® Exam, which is 6 hours long and consists of 170 multiple-choice questions covering a variety of topics.
  • Experience. Complete 6,000 hours of professional experience related to the financial planning process, or 4,000 hours of apprenticeship experience that meets additional requirements.
  • Ethics. Pass the Candidate Fitness and Standards Background Check.

I have no plans to pursue a career as a financial planner, as even helping my parents with their portfolio is stressful enough on it own. Accordingly, I don’t plan on completing the Experience requirement and thus won’t be able to obtain the actual CFP certification. So why bother spending thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of time?

  • I do plan on managing my own portfolio and financial situation (and portfolio of my parents) for the next few decades and beyond.
  • I know that I enjoy financial topics in general and am curious to fill any knowledge gaps that I have.
  • I’m curious about what the CFP board thinks is important and “correct”.
  • Hopefully I will find some useful information to share with you readers.
  • Even at a robo-advisor-like annual management fee of 0.30%, a $1 million portfolio would still cost $3,000 in fees each year. For someone who has accumulated a significant portfolio, it doesn’t seem completely reckless to spend $3,000 learning this stuff instead.

I read some reviews and comparisons, and somehow ended up on the website for the University of Georgia Self-Paced Online CFP® Program. This wasn’t the most well-known program, or the oldest program, but it seemed like a decent CFP Board-registered program and covered all the required topics at a relatively affordable cost of $3,250 (+$750 for optional textbooks). There are six courses and a capstone course where you develop an actual financial plan:

  • Fundamentals of Financial Planning
  • Insurance Planning
  • Investment Planning
  • Income Tax Planning
  • Retirement Planning
  • Estate Planning
  • Developing the Financial Plan

I filled out the form for a “free Demo”, and shortly thereafter received an e-mail offer for $700 off the “sticker” price. This offer has since expired, but I share this story for those seriously interested as you might also decide to express interest and see if you get an offer. The course itself appears to be run by a third-party called Greene Consulting, which runs the CFP courses for five different universities including UGA. (Yes, I checked them all, and they all list the same prices.)

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Note: I have no affiliation with this program besides being a paying customer. Oh yes, I forgot, I impulsively bought the program after receiving the discount offer. I had already “anchored” myself to paying the $3,250 and felt it was a good deal… I fell for the old infomercial trick! Still, if you compare prices for CFP courses (full core content, excluding textbooks), this was definitely the cheapest net price that I’ve found.

This self-paced program allows you up to 21 months to complete all of the courses. My plan is to complete one course per month starting this month (February), and so right now I’m only about halfway through the first course “Fundamentals of Financial Planning”. I did go ahead and purchase physical textbooks (I’m old-fashioned… and old), but I haven’t had to open them yet. They use the financial textbooks from Money Education, and I paid $750 through UGA for the complete set.

Note that many financial professionals decide to take an additional “exam cram course” with lots of practice questions that is solely focused on passing the CFP Exam. This adds roughly another $1,000 on top of the ~$925 to actually take the CFP Exam itself! I don’t know if all that extra cost will be worth being able to say “I passed the CFP Exam!” when I don’t need the CFP certification for career advancement purposes.

My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone, and has not been provided nor approved by any of the companies mentioned.

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Evidence-Based Doomsday Prepping and Personal Finance

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I dug into the longread Doomsday prepping for less crazy folk today. The title pretty much says it all – I prefer to call it “evidence-based doomsday prepping”.

Effective preparedness can be simple, but it has to be rooted in an honest and systematic review of the risks you are likely to face. Plenty of excited newcomers begin by shopping for ballistic vests and night vision goggles; they would be better served by grabbing a fire extinguisher, some bottled water, and then putting the rest of their money in a rainy-day fund.

[…] I also found that to come up with a rational threat model, we need to think of “risk” as a product of both the probability and the consequences of a given event. By that metric, stubbed toes and zombie outbreaks are equally uninteresting; one of them has nearly zero significance, the other, nearly zero odds.

Strangely enough, my favorite part might have been the section on getting in shape and losing weight, as it very closely matched my own experiences and opinions on the topic. But since this is my money blog, I’ll talk about the personal finance aspects. If you’re going to build a resilient lifestyle, you’ll need some assets and figure out how to protect them.

Good ole’ emergency fund. The most likely “disaster” you’ll face is probably unemployment. Forget retiring at age 30, you’re just trying to survive having no income (or a severe cut) for 6 months. If you can figure out how to build a stash of 6 months of living expenses, you’ll already be way ahead of most people and have a rough blueprint for eventual financial freedom anyway.

Cash. You should be prepared to not have access to banks or ATMs for a short period of time. It could be a huge systemic crisis, or you might simply have a bad case of identity theft. Cash is still mighty handy for anything other than an extremely severe event – although it might be good to smaller bills.

For short-term survival, simple solutions work best: just keep about 2-4 weeks’ worth of cash somewhere at hand; have enough money on you to get you back home when traveling, too. Of course, be mindful of the risk of burglary, so if you’re keeping the funds at home, pick an unobvious location for the stash; more about that soon.

Break-ins are difficult to prevent, especially in suburban single-family homes with secluded backyards and street-level windows and doors; tall fences and window bars can work, but they are expensive and tend to draw the ire of your neighbors. The most cost-effective solution may be to keep your windows and doors closed when away, but beyond that, just optimize for hassle-free outcomes. You can leave some less important goodies in plain sight – say, some cheap jewelry, a modest amount of cash, and a beat-up phone – and put all the real valuables in a much less obvious or less accessible spot. A heavy safe will usually do; diversion safes fashioned into books, cans or clocks are pretty cool, too – if you trust yourself not to accidentally throw them away.

Banking. The author suggests splitting your money between two unrelated banks. This practice could easily extend to your brokerage accounts.

As for the remainder of your money, I suggest splitting it across two largely unrelated financial institutions with different risk profiles – say, a big national bank and a local credit union.

Gold. Before you follow the safety box suggestion, know that banks aren’t responsible if they lose the contents of safe deposit boxes. Serious preppers recommend paying for a reputable, international vault to store your gold – I imagine it to be dug deep into the mountains of Switzerland – but as noted that is expensive and reserved for those with a high net worth.

Because of its very high value-to-volume ratio, physical gold is stored and moved around very easily, but keeping substantial amounts at home can be ill-advised; theft is a very real risk, and most insurance policies will not adequately cover the loss. Safe deposit boxes at a local bank, available for around $20 a year, are usually a better alternative – although they come with some trade-offs; for example, the access to deposit boxes was restricted by the government during the Greek debt crisis in 2015. Non-bank storage services do not have that problem, but cost quite a bit more.

Bitcoin. Cryptocurrencies aren’t discussed at all, but they are meant to be independent of governments. If you put your keys into a hardware wallet, this is another store of value that could have an infinite “value-to-volume ratio” and possibly easier to move than gold or cash. Will Bitcoin be more or less valuable in a crisis? I don’t know. The answer also might change over time.

Stuff. Yes, yes, guns and ammo. But for the most likely scenarios the best thing you could have done was to take a bit of your money buy some everyday stuff: keeping your gas tank half full, keeping a full propane tank, packing a simple Go Bag with clothes/first aid kit/energy bars/extra prescription medicine, a few crates of water, and so forth. Fire extinguishers, fire ladders, smoke and CO detectors in every room could be the best money you ever spent. You might also throw in a will and an advanced health directive.

Insurance. I was surprised that there wasn’t a more detailed discussion of insurance. If we’re talking real-world life-altering disasters, either getting hit by a car or hitting someone else with your car has got to be one of the more likely ones. Do you have adequate health insurance? disability insurance? auto (liability) insurance? homeowners? flood? earthquake/hurricane add-on? Don’t forget these 11 reasons to buy an umbrella liability insurance policy.

Bottom line. There are many simple things that you can do to make your life more resilient that doesn’t involve building your own underground bunker, and many of it meshes with basic personal finance advice. Here’s a nice ending line to keep things in perspective:

In the end, ladders, cars, and space heaters are a much greater threat to your well-being than a gun-toting robber or an army of zombie marauders could ever be.

My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone, and has not been provided nor approved by any of the companies mentioned.

MyMoneyBlog.com is also a member of the Amazon Associate Program, and if you click through to Amazon and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.


Chart: Will Your Kids Earn a Higher Income Than You?

My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone.

Parents want their children to have a better life than their own. We want our kids to eat more healthily, accumulate more knowledge, enjoy closer relationships, live longer, and – if we’re honest – make more money. However, the academic paper The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940 by Chetty et al. shows us that earning more money than your parents has gone from nearly a sure thing to no better than a 50/50 coin flip. Via WSJ Daily Shot.

Here is a chart where each line shows the percentage of children born in the indicated year that earned more than their parents, as a function of their parent’s income percentile.

Every decade, the numbers get consistently worse. In terms of overall percentages:

  • For children born in 1940, over 90% grew up to earn more than their parents.
  • For children born in 1980, only 50% grew up to earn more than their parents.

What does that mean? Even if you as parents today earn an above-average income, there is no guarantee that your kids will grow up to earn more than you on an inflation-adjusted basis. In fact, if the trend holds, the odds are that they will end up earning less.

Very few parents have the kind of wealth that guarantees financial security for their offspring. This creates increasing stress about gifted programs, private schools, magnet schools, sports teams, test prep, and any other opportunities that can give them an edge.

We took our kids to a local pumpkin patch this weekend, and in between choosing your own pumpkin and feeding farm animals, our oldest started complaining about not having $5 lemonade. This reminded me of a simple rule:

Happiness equals reality minus expectations.

My kids should not expect to have a certain lifestyle. I hope (!) to teach them gratitude for the many advantages that they have been given, a strong work ethic for obtaining what they want to achieve, and tempered expectations of what makes a good life (not just money). Now, how do I pull that off?

My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone, and has not been provided nor approved by any of the companies mentioned.

MyMoneyBlog.com is also a member of the Amazon Associate Program, and if you click through to Amazon and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.


Five Wishes: A Living Will That Goes Beyond Just Prolong / Do Not Prolong Life

My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone.

People don’t like talking about money. That’s why I started this site. You know what people like talking about even less? Death.

My wife and I have already filled out a generic advanced health directive, but I recently ran across something that seems better. Five Wishes helps you document how exactly you wish to be treated if you get seriously ill in an approachable, holistic manner. In addition to choosing a healthcare proxy and filling out an advanced healthcare directive, it also guides you beyond that. Do you want people to pray for you? Do you want people to talk to you, even if you are unconscious? Do you want to die at home if possible? How do you envision your funeral?

  • Wish 1: The Person I Want to Make Care Decisions for Me When I Can’t.
  • Wish 2: The Kind of Medical Treatment I Want or Don’t Want.
  • Wish 3: How Comfortable I Want to Be.
  • Wish 4: How I Want People to Treat Me.
  • Wish 5: What I Want My Loved Ones to Know.

You can easily find “free” advanced healthcare directives online, but a lot of them pretty much come down to a checkbox of “prolong life no matter what” or “do not prolong life”. The best way to understand how Five Wishes is different is to read through this sample document [PDF].

In 42 states, Five Wishes meets the legal requirements for an advance directive. In the remaining 8 states (Alabama, Indiana, Kansas, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, and Utah), you will need to fill out some specific additional forms or mandatory notices to make it legal. Often it’s just an official form you have to attach.

There is a nominal fee of $5 for both the paper and online versions. Five Wishes was created by someone who worked in a hospice and realized that there are a lot of common questions to which your loved ones must often guess the answer. Why not answer them now? It is an enormous gift to both yourself and to them.

My Money Blog has partnered with CardRatings and may receive a commission from card issuers. Some or all of the card offers that appear on this site are from advertisers and may impact how and where card products appear on the site. MyMoneyBlog.com does not include all card companies or all available card offers. All opinions expressed are the author’s alone, and has not been provided nor approved by any of the companies mentioned.

MyMoneyBlog.com is also a member of the Amazon Associate Program, and if you click through to Amazon and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Thank you for your support.