How to Successfully Study for the CFA Exam as a Parent

Recently passed Level I w/ a 1-year old at home and I cannot overemphasize two points mentioned above: a supportive spouse is critical, and study first thing in the morning! You have to be completely forthcoming with your spouse (and it helps if he/she also understands the brutality of the pass rate), otherwise he/she will be blindsided by how much studying you actually end up doing. As for the time to study, I realize not everyone is a morning person, but I would roll out of bed at 5, drink a pot of coffee, and get a solid 1.5/2 hrs of studying in before anyone else in the house was awake. Unbelievable productivity!

Another one to add – let go of the habit of needing to study for a ‘solid’ period of time before you’re convinced it’s effective. I used to be one of those people that needed a large, long block of time to get anything productive done. What an impossible luxury when you have kids!

I very effectively squeezed in anything from 15 minutes to an hour of study every early morning before my baby woke up and a similar amount right after his bedtime. It all adds up!

If you’re new to babies, and your baby is new, it can also be tempting to think of solutions along the lines of ‘when my baby gets over difficult phase X, then I’ll be able to study properly’. Get rid of that thinking. Kids have difficult periods all the time, embrace the chaos and study through it all.

As difficult as it can be to balance parenting and studying, children are a constant reminder that there is more to life than the exam. This is not to say that being a parent should come at the exclusion of writing the exam, but it is helpful to maintain a broader perspective. It is easy to fall into the trap of seeing the exam as the be-all-and-end-all, which is unlikely to improve the likelihood of passing.