“Loved the tool, it was instrumental in my L3 exam prep as it was for L1 and L2. You’re genuinely a life saver! I thankfully managed to go 3/3 in the CFA Program in the space of two years and the study planner was a big help in doing this.“
Tom Flahavan, CFA L3 candidate
“My first stop (after exam registration) was reading articles on your website and downloading the planner.”
Lydia Reeves: used planner for all CFA levels (and now CAIA!)
“Love the website content and the CFA study planner has become an absolute necessity for me! It helped me clear Level 1 in my first attempt by always keeping me on top of my study schedule.“
Reshma Menon, CFA L2 candidate
So you’ve decided to register for the CFA exams.
The natural next step is to consider if you would need additional prep materials. This depends largely on your study style and how you learn best – check out Offers section for exclusive 300 Hours readers discounts.
Once that’s done, the big question is “How do I plan my studies to pass the exams?”, or “Can I complete studying for the CFA exam in X months?”. The ‘problem’ with this question is that each individual should have their own optimal plan that suits their circumstances – there is no one-size-fits-all.
As we get these questions all the time, we’ve distilled our learnings and experience into a killer CFA study planner tool. Our personalized CFA study planner will help you:
Let’s dive in!
I have discussed this framework more informally in this article about balancing CFA exam studies and work, but I hope this guide will give you a concrete method to come up with a tailor-made plan.
We built our study planner with two guiding principles:
Minimal work needed, and maximizes your pass chances. Nothing else matters.
More than 60,000 readers have successfully used our planner. You can generate your own in less than a minute.
We will create a personalized CFA study planner for you with 3 core features:
With our online planner, you can check your study progress at any time, and see if you’re on track to complete all your studies before your CFA exam day.
The planner also monitors the remaining days left to your exam with your study plan and progress, alerting you if you are falling behind.
It also charts your study hours, showing your progress against past periods.
Our CFA study planner prioritizes exam performance – exam weighting is built into every assessment. Throughout your studies you will have a progress % showing how much of the exam you’ve covered, and how far ahead – or behind – you are.
The planner also considers exam weights, difficulty and progress to highlight topics that you should prioritize.
As you progress through your studies, reviewing topics and completing mock exams, marking your progress as ‘done’ in the planner actually contributes towards your sense of achievement and helps you maintain a more disciplined approach to your CFA exam studies.
Combining past candidate performance data and your study data, we can even attempt to predict your CFA exam performance.
Of course, this is just a prediction, and not a guarantee!
As you enter your mock exam scores, these are auto-benchmarked to show you if you are scoring well against historical candidates performance.
We have past candidates’ actual CFA results, so we can create a reliable benchmark to show you if you’re trending towards a pass, or you need to step it up.
This better informs you if your scores need improving, and helps reassure you if your scores are on a good trend.
What do you think? I hope you found this simple framework useful for your study planning, and that you now have your online planner to use. Share this with a friend who is revising for the CFA exams too!
Meanwhile, you may find these related articles of interest:
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View Comments
Nice
hey, great planner. But my progress % has been stuck at 88% for weeks now. I'm regularly logging mocks, I've completed and reviewed the whole syllabus and the mastery score is also above 70%. Is that a glitch?
May Study Planner for may 2024 just got deleted, what happened? Just lost all the information in it?
Hi Arthur, the technical issue we experienced has been resolved. Sorry for the heart attack, your access should have been restored!
Hello, for some reason I cannot open the planner provided with the link, nothing happens
My study planner has also had access denied - and the ones for Level 1 and 2 I used too! I have been using the planner for 6 months and have tons of notes on it - 300hours please can you restore access as soon as possible?
You should have access soon, if you haven't already. Sorry for the heart attack!
I also have the same issue! I had access denied and lost all my notes and progress. Please help 300hours!
Don't worry guys! I believe this technical issue has now resolved. :)
Hi Zee,
Will this planner be suitable for the August 2024 exam timeline and the 2024 curriculum for Level 1?
Downloaded the L3 Planner for Feb'24 - it seems the readings are in a different order than in the book - anyone else having the same issue?
The readings in the planner should follow the CFA Institute topic outlines: https://www.cfainstitute.org/-/media/documents/study-session/2024-l3-topics-combined.pdf
Hope that helps!
Hi, how much time it takes to send me my Study Planner? Thanks in advance!
Hi, so I tried to put the number of hours I intend to study per day but my estimated total study hours does not update. How can I fixed this? Where should I input my figures so I don't affect the formula?
Hi Charles! Usually this is because the exam date is entered with an incorrect year (e.g. 2022 instead of 2023). Alternatively if you can send me the link to your planner via email (zeeAT300hoursDOTcom) I can have a look.
Hi,
I just got the study planner and there's something wrong with it. I have chosen a date as the start date for my studies and it keeps showing one day ahead as the starting date!
I would appreciate it if you could help me fix this
Thanks,
Hadi
This is probably down to a time zone thing. You can set your study planner to your time zone at File > Settings > Time Zone. Hope that helps!
Hi, i think the link to download the study planner for level 1 might be down?
would you be able to email it me please?
Thanks!
Hi Sebastian, I just checked and the form seems to be working. Did you manage to get your study planner sorted?
Thank you