CPA Continuing Professional Education (CPE) Credit To Be Offered On Advisor4Advisors Webinars; A Valuable New CPE Resource For CPA Financial Planners And CPA/PFSs Hot

We’re hoping to enable CPAs to receive professional education credit on replays of webinars as well as live sessions. We’ll let you know if we can make that happen.

A4A has provided weekly professional education webinars to financial advisors since October 10, 2008. At the time, the financial crisis was a runaway train, and feedback from advisors after the first couple of webinars was so gratifying that I began producing a webinar every week.

A4A was borne from a need to provide Certified Financial Planners™ (CFPs) with continuing education credit on 24/7-replays of the live sessions. A4A is now a portal for news analysis, practice management, and professional education for CIMAs, CPWAs, as well as CFPs.

I’m thrilled to be able to provide CPA financial planners with CPE credit for professional education webinars.

I first started working with CPAs as a 28-year old writer in the communications division of the American Institute of CPAs from 1983 to 1986 in New York City. I was ghost writer of a personal finance newspaper column for state CPA-societies, which was published in more than 2,000 local daily and weekly newspapers. The column was content marketing for AICPA, a revered institution with 394,000 members headquartered then in Rockefeller Center. Having been trained as a reporter at NYU and Columbia University and having worked at a couple of small daily newspapers covering the police beat, I found CPAs to be great sources.

These number-crunching quants could give me authoritative answers to the most complicated personal financial planning questions. They tend to prefer year-by-year cash flow-based financial plans and many know the tax rules on trusts, gifts, and partnerships off the top of their head.

In 1983, personal finance journalism was just getting going. In fact, the personal financial planning profession was just getting going, and AICPA was at the forefront of the fledgling professional movement. Around 1984, the Institute established the Personal Financial Planning practice section. I attended the initial meetings establishing the PFP division, not that I appreciated the gravity of the moment back then.  

I broadened the scope of AICPA’s “Money Management” column to cover financial planning as well as personal taxation, and major daily newspapers in New York, St Louis, Chicago and other major cities began publishing it. The New York Post published it. After ghosting the column for nearly three years, The New York Daily News hired me and I covered Wall Street and personal financial planning. But I always stayed in touch with CPA financial planners because they are generally practical, analytical, and trustworthy. Point is, I have personal connection to the CPA financial planners.

Although CPA financial planners are incredibly cheap and are terrible marketers, they tend to know what they’re talking about. I respect their professionalism. By the way, the continuing professional education requirements imposed on CPAs are much tougher than continuing education requirements imposed on other financial professionals.

I’m thrilled to be able to provide CPA financial planners with CPE credit for professional education webinars. CPA financial planners will be a great addition to the Advisors4Advisors community and I am privileged to be able to put together these programs for financial advice professionals.