FAQs

CE FAQs

HOW TO START EARNING CE/CPE CREDIT ON A4A

Start by making sure you have filled in your profile with your credentials. Without the license or ID number associated with your credentials, you will not receive a certificate of attendance. Here’s how to add a designation(s) to your A4A profile.

 

A4A organizes advisor CE activities in two reports: credits earned in the past 12 months and classes you can replay on-demand anytime to earn more credits.

The new reports save you time and money on CE and will help improve your CE habits. They help ensure you take full advantage of A4A's knowledge stream curated for fiduciaries -- member-sponsored CE from Bob Keebler, Fritz Meyer, Craig Israelsen, Frank Murtha and other thought leaders.

CPA CPE credit is only available from attending live A4A webinars. Please refer to the Webinars tab to see which upcoming sessions are eligible for live CPA CPE credit.

 

When attending the live webinar, you must remain in the session for at least 50 minutes and answer the 3 polling questions.

 

For sessions listed as eligible for 2 CPA CPE credits, you must remain in the session for at least 100 minutes and answer the 6 polling questions.

CPA CPE credit is only available from attending live A4A webinars.

First check the session's event listing to confirm that it is either eligible or pending eligibility for the CE credit you're seeking to obtain.

 

CFPs, IMCA designees and EAs must all remain in the live session for at least 50 minutes. However, EAs must also answer the 3 polling questions launched during the live session.

 

Enter your CFP ID, IMCA ID or PTIN in the exit-survey. We report live webinar attendance for CFPs, IMCA designees and EAs.

To learn how to receive continuing professional education credit viewing webinar replays, please see our detailed instructions.

If you do not see your GoToWebinar registration confirmation, please double-check your email spam/junk folders. The emails come fromcustomercare@gotowebinar.com. If you still cannot find the email, please contact us right away.

We stopped doing it in 2012 because no one wants another daily email.

 

We send a weekly digest and invitations to webinars. 

 

Sign up to receive it and make sure it does not go into your junk or clutter

 

 

Fritz Meyer's monthly PowerPoint presentations are available for just $600 a year — to A4A members. You can use them to create newsletters, blog posts, videos, articles, and presentations. Brand them with your logo, but be sure please to source it to Fritz Meyer Economics.

Robert Keebler's tax analysis PowerPoint presentations are available for just $600 a year — to A4A members. You can use them to create newsletters, blog posts, videos, articles, and presentations. Brand them with your logo, but be sure please to source it to Keebler Tax & Wealth Education.

Craig Israelsen's asset allocation PowerPoint presentations are available for $600 a year. You can use them to create newsletters, blog posts, videos, articles, and presentations. Brand them with your logo, but be sure please to source it to 7Twelve® Portfolio.

The slides are only available for download at downloads.advisorproducts.com. Or, if you subscribed within the last few months, the slides plus the newly offered webinar transcripts are available for download in your dashboard at www.AdvisorProducts.com. 


You should have received your user name and password via email when you first subscribed. If you've forgotten your username or password, please click on the 
Forgot your password? Forgot your username? links as appropriate.

We submit the completed CFP certificants' Ethics CE credit to the CFP Board in monthly batches. Once the CFP Board has processed your Ethics CE credit, you will receive an email from the CFP Board detailing the continuing education hours that have been credited to your CFP account.

Upon your purchase of the A4A Ethics course, you should have received a system email with the subject: "Advisors4Advisors - Thank you for purchasing our 2016 CFP Ethics CE course for A4A members.", which contains the unique link to access the Ethics course.

CIMA® designees report programs  accepted for CE credit online via your own IWI account, using the approval letter that will appear in your A4A Account's CE Credit tab upon successful of the Ethics test. The A4A approval letter is the certificate of completion and already contains the unique IWI-assigned program ID number, so IWI designees can report the program online with ease. Please remember that designees must maintain physical evidence of completing CE programs in the event they are selected for audit.

Until now, you did not need to know anything about the psychology of financial planning to be a CFP® professional. Effective Jan. 1, 2022. however, the psychology of financial planning will comprise seven percent of what you must know to hold a CFP® designation. Ahead of the CFP Board action, A4A added psychology of financial advice topics to its core curriculum to fill a gap between traditional knowledge topics financial professionals are required to master and current requirements.  To be clear, a completely new topic, the psychology of financial planning, is being added to CFP Board knowledge requirements, and A4A designed this course ahead of this crucial new trend. 

A4A strives to be the most efficient way for a fiduciary to always stay current on what you need to know to run a professional financial services firm ethically -- just the facts you need to know about investment, tax, and financial planning with no commercial influence in a single website, on-demand 24/7. Spurred by the burgeoning social science of behavioral economics for the past two decades, the nature of client relationships has grown more personal, collaborative, and individualized, requiring today’s professionals to possess investor personality counseling skills. That’s why A4A added psychology of financial advice topics to its core curriculum.   

IRA Course FAQ

A4A submits your attendance information to CFP Board weekly, usually every Friday.

If you’re a CPA, CIMA®, IRS Enrolled Agent, or other professoinal who manually submits credits, log into your A4A account to download proof of attendance certificates.

Professionals who hold a CFA charter, CLU, ChFC or other financial designation can also submit A4A programs for educational credit this way.

A4A tracks credit earned for members and shows you how to earn more credits free with your membership in a comprehensive report.

 

Bob Keebler has taught 12 monthly classes on A4A since July 2012. The IRA course would take up nine of the 12 hours of Bob Keebler’s annual curriculum, which is strategically planned to deliver a well-balanced a well-balanced set of classes on a broad range of what you need to know.
 
 
A4A strives to provide members a well-rounded perspective of the most important topics investment and planning professionals must know about, the knowledge needed to practice ethically at a high margin.
 
 
The 48-hours of classes produced annually are from a curated list of subject matter experts covering crucial knowledge topics, including financial economics, financial planning psychology, portfolio construction, and insurance, as well as financial planning and taxation.  
 
 
If  Bob Keebler's nine-hour IRA course were part of our annual curriculum, we would not have time to teach classes on year-end planning, estate tax reform, charitable planning, strategies for business owners, doctors, and real estate investors, gifts and trusts, and other tax topics.
 
 
Over the past several decades, the pace of tax reform has accelerated sharply and knowledge of tax rules today grows obsolete every few years. A4A’s goal is to provide continually updated financial and tax planning education for professionals about topics in addition to what's covered in the Advanced IRA Planning Course.

Certified Financial Counselor™ (CFC™) FAQs

The $199 annual CFC™ certificate program includes:
 
 ● 4 CE/CPE credits about a vital new professional specialization. (June 1, 2022 Class Description
 
 ● Open Invitation – to ask questions, discuss cases and meet with Dr. Murtha -- on the first and third Wednesday every month at 12:00-2:00 EST – unless otherwise specified. Appointments requested 24 hours in advance.
 
 ● Digital badge for website, social network profiles, etc., validating you meet requirements of the Financial Counseling Institute annually.
 
 ● Printable CFC certificate suitable for framing (upon request).
 
 ● 1-minute video for your website about the value of the CFC™ designation to clients and prospects
 
 ● Four-slide PowerPoint about the CFC™ to add to a presentation about your services.
 
 ● FAQ for your website about the designation and The Financial Counseling Institute
 
 ● "Frank Talks," a semi-annual meetup of CFCs in which Dr. Murtha reviews client cases (anonymized for privacy reasons).

To display a list of additional classes needed to complete the 12-credit Certified Financial Counselor™ course and certificate CE program:

  1. Sign into your A4A account
  2. Click on Account at the top to open your A4A account profile.
  3. Click on CE Credit tab
  4. Click on Earn More Credits
  5. Sort the list by clicking on Instructor
  6. Scroll down to Instructor Frank Murtha to see which CFC™ classes you need to complete the 12-credit course

Download PDF

If you successfully completed the 12 class CFC™ certificate course, your certificate of completion can be displayed on websites, email-newsletters, and anyplace else using any HTML editor.

Instructions are in the two-minute below and outlined step-by-step in this PDF with screenshots.

 

Dr. Frank Murtha earned a doctorate in Counseling Psychology from the University at Buffalo. He was the first to explore cognitive errors in gambling behavior, and he has taught at The City University of New York, Penn State, and New York University. In 2001, Dr. Murtha co-founded MarketPsych Inc., a statistically valid proxy for the NEO personality inventory diagnostic for identifying investor personality traits. Dr. Murtha currently consults to institutional investors on macro- and micro-behavioral economics. In 2021, he founded the Financial Counseling Institute to charter financial professionals as Certified Financial Counselors.

The CFC™ is not a replacement for a CFP®, CFA®, CIMA®, CPA or CPA/PFS® designation. Stringent education and testing requirements, along with the comprehensive knowledge requirements, separate these credentials in the alphabet soup of financial designations. In addition, financial counseling is a new knowledge topic professionals must master. CFP Board on March 31, 2021 announced it was adding financial planning psychology as a knowledge topic, effective March 2022, and it estimates 7% of a CFP’s job requires financial planning psychology. The other 93% of a financial professional’s time is not spent utilizing knowledge of psychology. While 7% may underestimate the importance of psychology in practicing financial planning, the main body of knowledge advisors must know requires no training in psychology. Like other professions, the financial profession requires specialists.

 

advisor certificationsDigital certificates are like SSL (secure socket layer) certificates on websites. Financial advisor professional accreditation organizations, such as the AICPA, CFA Institute and CFP Board are already issuing digital certificates to authenticate professionals. The digital certificate image is encrypted and validated by the Financial Counseling Institute (FCI).

 

CFP Board, AICPA,  and CFA Institute, all mint digital badges to validate their respective credential holders. The use of digital badges transforms branding for practitioners and clears up consumer confusion.    

 

According to FINRA’s database, the number of financial professional designations has swelled to more than 200! For financial consumers, it's confusing and nightmarish. Designation proliferation raises a fundamental question for consumers: How do you know whether to trust an advisor?

 

A digitally validated badge on your website, social profiles, and emails clears up confusion for consumers.   Powered by A4A,  the digtital badge that comes with maintaining a Certified Financial Counselor™ (CFC™) certificate puts professionals at the forefront of the trend toward digital specilization certificates for CFP®, CPA®, CFA®, CIMA®, and other financial professionals.      

 

Pay-to-play five-star advisor badges are not based on rigorous research or objective data. In contrast, a digital badge earned by attending the 12-class program and two classes annually, demonstrates that you have done the hard work to maintain a CFC™ designation.  

 

Of the four comprehensive designations earned by financial advisors, the CPA and CFA® designations have been around longest. AICPA was founded in 1887 and CFAs® were first chartered in 1962. These two senior certifying bodies are integrated into the U.S. regulatory system.

 

Founded in the mid-1980s, Investment Wealth Institute and CFP Board are relative newcomers as accreditation bodies. CFP Board certifies more than 92,000 practitioners, compared to about 10,000 IWI accredited professionals. CFP Board has also outflanked the AICPA. CFP® is the predominant financial planner designation known to financial consumers. CFP Board extended its consumer brand recognition over other acceditation bodies by investing in a years-long advertising campaign on national TV. 

 

Attending the 12-credit Financial Counseling course, which is available on-demand, earns a CPA, CFA®, CFP® and CIMA® professional license to display the Certified Financial Counselor™ badge on a website home page, social network profile and email signature.  

 

 

 

 

 

Within the past 12 months, if you have successfully completed, “Applying Financial Psychology In Current Conditions, download your Certified Financial Counselor™ digital certificate badge by:

1.       Logging into Advisors4Advisors.com

2.       Clicking the red “Edit Profile” button

3.       Clicking “Copy Script” and choose the size of the certificate needed

The 12-class Certified Financial Counselor™ Certificate Course was free to A4A members through December 31, 2021.

On January 1, 2022, the course became an optional elective. 

If you successfully completed the initial 12-class course in 2021, renew your CFC™ designation here.       

If you did not complete the inaugural 12-classes in 2021, sign up here

Applied Financial Psychology In Current Conditions may be attended live or replayed anytime on-demand. If you take the live class, you must complete three polls administered during the class. If you replay the class, to receive CE credit, you must complete a 10-question quiz at the end of the replay and answer at least seven of the 10 multiple-choice questions correctly.  

“Applying Financial Psychology In Current Conditions,” which must be completed annually to maintain the Investor Behavioral Coach certificate, is taught every six months.

A4A Membership FAQs

Click  Account, and then Edit Profile.

Then click Picture and upload a new image from your local drive.

See the two images below.

 

 

 

Log-in to your existing account on Advisors4Advisors.com.
***At the top, click Account.
Click the red Edit Profile button towards the top-left.
Scroll down and, for example, fill in your CFP ID into both of the ID field. Then click the red add button to locate your professional designation.
Select your professional designation and then fill in the ID number into the field that will appear below the list.

Click ‘Update’ at the bottom to save your professional designation(s) ID number(s).

Sign up to receive our emails.

If you don't receive an email thanking you for subscribing in a few minutes, it's probably in your Junk or Clutter folder. 

If not, please open a ticket.

 

Click here to sign-up for Advisors4Advisors.

Unlimited free continuing education credit available 24/7 on most sessions from the CFP Board of Standards and the Investment Wealth Institute, PACE credit toward CLU® and ChFC® designations, as well as IRS Continuing Education credits for Enrolled Agents.

CPAs are eligible to receive continuing professional education credit for attending live sessions but not replays.

 

A4A MEMBERSHIP BENEFITS
 

  • CFP® Continuing Education On Demand  
  • Unlimited Browsing Of All Sessions
  • Thought Leadership for Fiduciaries 
  • Integrated Client Content Option
  • Timely, Incisive, Facts And Analysis   
  • Low-Expense Investment Management   
  •  Fritz Meyer, Independent Financial Economist 
  • Systematic Practice Management For Fiduciaries   
  • Robert Keebler, CPA/PFS, Tax and Financial Planner Education 
  • Listing & Badge On RealFinancialProfessionals Validating Your Identity, Linking To Your Website
  • Craig Israelsen, Ph.D., Strategic Low-Expense Portfolio Design    
  • Eligible for Listing & Badge On Advisors4Consumers  
  • Objective & Independent Journalism 
  • Community Based On Shared Professional Values 
  • CFP®, CIMA® CE 24/7 On-Demand 
  •  Breaking News & Analysis for Professionals
  • Live CPA/PFS CPE 
  • Community Based On Shared Professional Values

 

The quiz will only show up in your A4A profile's CE Credit tab if you view the replay for an uninterrupted 50 minutes for a session approved for one credit hour or 100 minutes for a session approved for two CE credit hours, without adjusting the time tickerYou cannot pause, rewind, or fast forward the replay.

If the session is listed as pending CE credit, the CE quiz will not yet be accessible.

There are two steps to complete within your PayPal account.

1.       Log in to the PayPal account used to create the subscription and add a new funding source.

2.       Click on the 'Profile' subtab.

3.       Choose the 'Credit Cards' link from the Financial Information column.

4.       Click 'Add'.

 

1.   Click this link to access your A4A Subscription Details: http://bit.ly/2gCwgqc.

2.   Under 'Subscription Funding Source' choose your new funding source from one of the drop-downs and save.

A4A members must contact us by phone at 516-333-0066 x219 to request a change to their subscription billing information. This is because of the way that VISA handles the security. For security purposes, the card details are stored in the VISA cloud (not our server). We are then constrained by the way that the VISA system allows these changes, and for subscriptions, the consumer can not make these changes proactively.

MarketPsych Investor Personality Assessment Platform FAQs