Exactly what Bob said. Tax planning is hard (and I'm an Enrolled Agent), Retirement planning is hard (so many plan types!), Estate planning is hard (lots of tax stuff here).
When working on my Enrolled Agent, I used a provider called Surgent. At the time, they basically only offered a question bank, but had a really high success rate. Their philosophy was that you don't need to read books to learn taxes, you just need to do tons of properly formatted questions to get it. The idea is that as you do questions and read their explanations, repetition will help with remembering and then things will make sense as to why the tax law works the way it does - basically going from memorization to understanding.
I am a math professor part time and it works the same way there. I tell my students to read the section and follow their examples, making sure to understand each step and why something was done. But the real learning happens doing the homework. Missing questions, figuring out why and what to do correctly, trying again, etc.
To extend that here, you really need to do questions repeatedly. I know I answered you in the other thread about reviewing and extend that here too. Even though you are working on the next course, take an hour once or twice a week to go into the Tax course and create a 20-30 question quiz from all sections. Your brain will think "this must be important so I should remember it" and you'll hopefully start remembering stuff long term.
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Aaron A. Anderson, CFP®, CFA, EA
Partner
DFS Advisors, LLC
Mooresville, NC
https://www.dfs-advisors.com980-444-0330
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Original Message:
Sent: 12-04-2021 13:30
From: Jonathan Chan
Subject: Tax Planning - study tips
Hello,
I just completed the Kaplan Tax Planning course and found it to be quite difficult. I just felt like there were so many concepts that I didn't fully grasp, and by the time I'm halfway through the next course, I'll have forgotten most of what I learned.
Would love to hear any tips or advice anyone has for nailing down these tougher topics.
Thanks.
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Jonathan Chan
Wealth Strategy Associate
UBS
(310)896-6964
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