Help!

Well, I am a little late in keeping up with my once a week posting.  Life can do that to you.  This is the blog I was planning for last Friday and never got completed.

In the beginning, with the extensive use of the internet, I wondered if there would be a lot of websites or forums with people discussing or helping each other to prepare for and take the CPA exam.  I have done a little searching, but I have not come up with many websites that do this.  Maybe I haven't looked hard enough, or in the right places, but I am surprised by the lack of online discussion of preparation for the CPA exam.  I was able to find one place that seems to be the best so far. 
http://www.cpaexamclub.com/

There seems to be quite a bit of activity and camaraderie at this site.  Everyone seems to want to help as much as they can.  Leave me a comment if you are aware of any other websites that are as good as or better than the one mentioned above.

Last week involved studying units 6 and 7 in the Gleim course.  Unit 6 is internal controls and unit 7 goes into detail on the internal controls for the sales/receivables cycle.  Study unit 6 took me quite a while to get through, due to the length as well as me not putting in enough time.  Study unit 7 was quite a bit quicker.

As I posted last time, I thought I had figured out how to post the test stats in a better format without the beautiful desktop background.  Well, I did.

Looks better doesn't it.  Well, except for maybe some of the results.  My plan is to go through each study unit once and then hit the sections that I didn't do so well on really hard.  We'll see.  I think that I will be taking the test sometime in the July/August testing window.  Most likely mid to late July.  I think I better start spending more time studying.

But I also don't want to deprive you of my new desktop background courtesy of my dad.

Where Am I?

Since I decided to start this blog last week, I thought I should make a post about where I am currently, or at least at the time of my decision to do this.  As I mentioned before, I am using the Gleim CPA study course to hopefully be one of the less than 20% of people that pass all four sections on their first try.  I'm surprised that there are that many that pass their first time since they just announced the Q1 2011 pass fail rates -

AUD  -  43.88%
BEC  -  42.32%
FAR  -  42.43%
REG  -   41.28%

That doesn't make this task seem daunting at all does it?

So I decided that I should study for the Auditing portion of the exam first, since I figured it would be the most difficult for me and I could spend the most time preparing for it.  Not sure if that is the best course of action or not, but that's what I decided.  As I mentioned before, I received the study materials around the end of March.  Each test is split into 20 study units.  Each study unit is split up into subunits, around 4-7 per study unit.  I figured if I spent an hour or two studying each night, that I would be able to complete 1-2 study units a week.  So I should be on study unit 10 or so, right?  Well as of last week, I was only on study unit 4.  Of course, most of April I was trying to train for a half marathon and studying took a back seat.

Anyway, I took a screen shot of my to date test question results and saved it in a word document.  I have now figured out how to save it as a jpeg, so it will look better (I hope) the next time I post.

Do you enjoy the scenic background?  I have two monitors attached to this computer so you get to see my desktop background as well.  Hopefully this doesn't appear too small when it gets posted on the blog and you can see my results.  The blue lines represent testing sections.  After completing a testing section, I can review questions I missed or questions that I was unsure of and retake those questions.  Sometimes I just really don't have a grasp of the subject matter!

Who Am I?

Thought I should start this off with a little bit about myself.  I am married and have 4 children under the age of 7.  I graduated from high school in 1995.  During my time in high school, I took an accounting class that I enjoyed and decided that I should become accountant.  As far as school subjects, math was the only one that made sense to me.  I didn’t enjoy English, art, or history, and science just didn’t thrill me.  The fall after graduation, I went to Weber State University.  I took some classes to fill my general requirements in the fall and winter quarters.  After that, I went to South Africa for a couple years as missionary.  When I returned from South Africa, I went back to WSU with the intent of getting my bachelor’s degree in accounting.  While attending school, I also returned to work at a local fast food restaurant, The Burger Bar.  My plan was not to work fast food for the rest of my life and a short time later I began working as a teller at a local credit union.  I lasted there for about 6 months before, out of the blue, a friend of my father offered me a job as an inside sales rep at a brick company.  During this time, I attempted to be a full time student as well as a full time employee.  This didn’t always work.  I waffled as a full time, part time, and no time student.  During this time I also decided to get married, start a family, and purchase a home.  I finally graduated with BS in accounting from WSU in the summer 2007.  As Chris Farley tells David Spade in Black Sheep – “A lot of people go to school for 10 years.”  After my graduation, I found a job with a large corporation as an associate accountant.  I have since transferred over to cost accounting with the same company.  Sometime after my graduation, my wife thought that maybe it would be a good idea to further torture myself and go for a master’s degree and sit for the CPA exam.  Being busy with kids and work, we decided that the University of Phoenix online would be the best alternative for this.  I started in August of 2008 and finished my final class in February of 2010.  In my typical fashion of procrastination, I waited until 2011 to finally decide to sit down and study for the CPA exam.  My company purchased agreed to purchase CPA exam study materials.  I decided on the Gleim study materials.  I received them in March of 2011 and decided I would try to pass the auditing section first, since this is my least comfortable area.   I had been trying to train for a half marathon that was on Memorial Day, but my knees told me that they were not going to allow me to complete that goal.  So I have finally decided to stop the procrastination and really focus on my studies.  This blog is supposed to track and chart my progression and results as I study and take the test.  I don’t know if this will be a daily, weekly, or monthly blog, or if this first entry will be the last.  But here we are and we’ll see what happens from here!