Accounting Elf

I expected this would be a slow summer, but it’s turned out to be quite busy! I’ve been spending time with friends, studying, working, and dancing a lot.

There is more excitement to come though, as I head off to San Francisco and Seattle next week. I’m going to get to visit ThomasYork LLP, and one of my oldest (possibly actually the oldest) friends. Along the way, hopefully I’ll get to meet up with a certain Jr. Deputy Accountant and . . . there were some other people who live around there.

I’ve never been to the west coast before. I expect it to shock and awe me. Please don’t disappoint!

So this progress report is almost a week late… I’ve been having too much fun and not studying enough! I had a dance workshop this weekend, and a family gathering Sunday, and I’ve been trying hard to get enough sleep this week, but not finding much time to study.

Luckily, Week 6 is actually LAST week, where I got quite a lot of hours in some days as I had downtime at work with nothing to do but stockholder’s equity multiple choice problems.

I officially have 4 more weeks before I take the FAR section of the CPA exam! I need to power through these last sections so I can start taking practice tests and reviewing weak areas (such as… accounting for treasury stock, and how to apply cost, equity, and fair value methods…)

I am down to my last 8 hours of Roger CPA Review videos! These 8 hours are over topics I’ve never touched on before though: Governmental Accounting, Consolidated Financial Statements, and Non-Profit accounting. I’m not sure how heavily tested these are in FAR, since my university is certainly aware of the topics on the CPA exam and tries to prepare their accounting students for it. I can’t help but think that if they were super-heavily tested, we would have covered them.

Then again, I will definitely get them in classes in my 5th year… So I’m waiting for Roger’s video to tell me how much I have to worry about these, and I’m also interested to see what it’s like to learn an entirely new topic from him. So far all of the sections I’ve studied are topics that I was taught in school and then subsequently forgot, such as EPS, dilutive securities, equity method of accounting for investments….

Just finished watching the Roger CPA Review video that covered deferred taxes. I learned this in my most recent accounting class, so it should be fresher than most material, but mostly my confusion over this area is the freshest memory I have of this topic.

Roger’s video made it sound a lot simpler than the hours we spent on it in class, and it feels a little unfamiliar, so I might have to dig up my notes and review deferred tax assets and deferred tax liabilities and all that good stuff.

Some of the terms Roger CPA Review uses are new to me, but it might be that I learned the same thing but with different labels for my accounts. I remember something about a contra-deferred-tax-asset or something come up. I need to review both sets of notes and compare to figure out what I already know and what I need to re-learn and what is new.

Anyway, bedtime now, happy studying (or not-studying, if you’ve already passed the CPA exam!)

Yesterday I finished bludgeoning my way through Stockholders’ Equity. The fact that it was one of the larger homework sections does not bode well, as I imagine this means I’ll have to know a lot of it for the FAR exam.

I didn’t quite get it when I learned it in school, and even after watching the Roger CPA Review videos, I didn’t absorb, say, the differences between par value methods and cost methods of accounting for treasury stock. What I DID absorb from Roger’s videos are helpful memory triggers like “cost in-cost out (until retired)” and “par in-par out.”

So I really didn’t figure out how to do it until I did the homework problems, but now that I have a better idea of which accounts are involved, etc, the memory trigger helps me remember how to start.

I’ll be interested to see how this section goes when I start taking practice tests. One of my CPA review books says that many students get through school just half-knowing the material, but for the CPA exam, and especially for the simulation questions you really have to KNOW the material.

If I have time (and I plan to) this is definitely one of the sections I need to go back and review the most, because write now I feel like I’m just making educated guesses most of the time about half the accounts involved in my journal entries!

This week I studied for about 12 hours. I felt like I started to get through the homework a bit quicker than average this week, because I knew how to do the questions, and didn’t have to spend as much time reading the answers to figure out how I should have answered the question.

So, Krupo asked me on my last Progress Report to “add value” by explaining more about the exam. So, here are some specifics about what topics I covered in the last week.

Topics in FAR

Right now I’m studying for FAR, (Financial Accounting and Reporting), which covers what I learned in 3 semesters of “intermediate accounting” classes, as well as some topics I will not cover until next year in the “advanced accounting” class that is part of my master’s program.

This week I covered accounting for and reporting intangible assets, bonds, leases, liabilities, receivables, and pensions. I still have to do the homework problems for liabilities, receivables, and pensions, but I have reviewed the topics.

How Studying Went

I struggled with bonds when I initially tried a few homework problems, although I have always felt fairly comfortable with bonds. After watching Roger CPA’s review video for bonds, I managed to make it through the bond homework problems with very few errors. I think an important factor in this improvement is becoming familiar with how the questions are written and the best way to approach them on the CPA exam versus how I would approach this problem in a regular class.

We’ll see how the pension questions go when I start on those. I had a very good grounding in them in Intermediate Accounting 3, but before watching the CPA review video, I probably couldn’t have remembered enough to make it through a single question. The review covers just the right amount of the topic so I think I’ll remember the steps to account for a pension when I get started on those problems.

I was doing great on my new, expanded study hours, until I switched my work hours around this week! I am now working 3 full days a week instead of 5 part-days. It works out to the same amount of work per week, but I get to save on gas.

My sleep patterns were not prepared for me waking up early though, and losing out on sleep absolutely destroys my ability to sit down and study, although I have some free time in the evenings I could be filling.

These three days have made me realize I should pay more attention to how much I sleep, even if I don’t have to get up for work. It could explain why some days I can sit down and focus on CPA review for 3 hours, and other days I can’t get past 15 minutes!

I’ve been studying for the CPA exam for a month now! It feels like I’ve barely started, but I’ve been picking up the pace.

My big accomplishment for week four was bringing my average hours studied per day (for the total time) up to 1 hour. It was really bad when it was below that! If I study 3 hours a day for the next 28 days, I can bring that average up to 2 hours a day.

Estimating Study Time Needed before CPA Exam

I have watched 6 hours of Roger CPA videos, so I have about 24 hours of video left. So far I’ve spent about 2.5 hours doing homework problems for every hour of “class.”

I estimate I have about 84 hours of “learning” still to get through. This part of the process involves watching the Roger CPA Review videos, plus going through the “homework” problems. In this stage, as I do each problem, I check the answer and read the explanation for how to do it. This is part of “learning” because reading the explanations teaches me how to do the problem properly.

After that stage, I still need to:

• Review all this information, because I definitely don’t have it down very well yet for the parts I’ve already completed the homework problems for.
• Practice the simulation problems
• Drill-go through practice tests and get up to speed.

I’m not sure how long the next parts will take me, but I have about 25 or so days left before I take the exam, so studying for only 2 hours a day from now on will just barely get me through the learning stage. Therefore, I’ll be studying a lot more hours a day from now on.

FAR seems to be the longest section to study for, judging by the fact that Roger has more video hours for this section than any other. At least for the next section I take I’ll know earlier how many hours of study I need to budget for!

I think these very short update posts are going to become more and more common on AccountingElf!

I spent 3.5 hours on CPA exam studying today. That’s the most I’ve done in one day so far, but after doing some calculations regarding how much time I need to do the first run through of practice problems, I think this amount of time studying is going to have to become my normal routine until July 29th!

I mentioned previously that one of the ways I’m motivating myself to study is to “pay” myself per hour for the exam. For each hour I study, I set some money aside for a new laptop. Since I’m hoping to be able to buy this at the end of the month, I really need to step up the hours!

I have so much I’ve been wanting to get together to post on here (apart from the CPA exam stuff) that I just haven’t had the time to put together! I’m going to carve out some time to put serious work into one of those ideas in the next two days though, and I’m excited about it!

Krupo from A Counting School suggested that I get a CPA exam study buddy to get through the exam with. I don’t seem to know anyone who is at the same stage as me just now, but I’m not sure if that’s necessary. We could take different parts and then compare notes so the other one will be more prepared than we were.

How does one go about finding a CPA exam study buddy anyway? Perhaps I could post an advertisement on Craigslist??

I managed to pick up the studying pace a bit this week. Roger CPA Review has really helped me study more, and I feel like I’m getting more out of the time I spend studying.

My first week, my average hours studied per day was a little under 1 hour a day. After the second week that dropped to under 3/4 of an hour, but it’s back up to just under an hour this week. I’m going to keep working on it, and my goal for next week is to have that way up!

The online CPA review I’m using is a series of videos of Roger teaching classes. So this past week, I watched the first section of videos on FAR. It was about four hours of “class time” covering the basic definitions and accounting for marketable securities and a little bit about derivatives.

Then I went through the first section of homework questions. I watched the first four videos before I got the accompanying Roger review book, which explains which homework problems to do, so I didn’t realize there was assigned homework after each hour-long video. I have finished the required homework from the first hour of “class” but still need to work on the homework assignments for the other 3 “hours” I have completed so far.