A study plan needs three things from you: your exam date, the hours you can study each week, and a rough idea of where you stand in each topic. From there, your weakest topics get the most time first, the last few weeks go to timed mocks and review, and the plan gets rebalanced whenever a week falls apart. You can build all of that yourself for free with FreeFellow's question bank and readiness score, for any of the 40 credentials it covers, and FreeFellow's planner does it for you as part of Fellow.
Most candidates spend an afternoon on a study spreadsheet and give up on it the first time a bad week puts them behind. A plan holds up better when it expects bad weeks and moves the unfinished work forward instead of dropping it.
If you haven't picked a credential yet, start with the Finance Credentials Map.
The six steps
Each step works by hand, and FreeFellow's planner automates most of them.
Step 1: Pick your exam
The plan is built around your exam's blueprint, meaning its topic weights, so start there. Open the FreeFellow exam picker and choose your credential. The planner covers every exam FreeFellow does:
- CFA Levels I, II and III (all five pathway combinations)
- CPA AUD, FAR, REG, BAR, ISC and TCP
- CFP (one exam)
- SOA actuarial: P, FM, FAM, SRM, PA, ALTAM, ASTAM
- CAS actuarial: MAS-I, MAS-II, Exam 5, Exam 6U
- CAIA® Levels I and II
- GARP FRM Parts I and II
- FINRA / NASAA Series: SIE, 6, 7, 79, 63, 65, 66
- IRS Enrolled Agent Parts 1, 2 and 3
- IMA CMA Parts 1 and 2
- IIA CIA Parts 1, 2 and 3
Step 2: Set your exam date
The date tells you how many weeks you have. Hold back the final 2 to 4 weeks for mock exams and the review after them (nearer 2 if your hours are tight, nearer 4 if you want room for several mocks), and lay out the content weeks before that. If the date moves, earlier or later, rebuild the schedule from the new date instead of squeezing the old one into fewer weeks. FreeFellow's planner rebuilds itself when you change the date.
Step 3: Set your weekly hours
Use the hours you'll put in, not the hours you'd like to. The classic way to wreck a plan is committing to 20 hours a week, managing 12, and falling behind by week 3. You can always change the number later if your weeks change.
Rough study time per exam, from the estimates sourced in the Finance Credential ROI Map:
- CFA: about 300 hr for Level I, 350 hr for Level II and 350 hr for Level III
- CFP: about 300 hr
- CPA: about 160 hr for FAR, the heaviest section, and less for each of the other three
- CAIA: about 220 hr for Level I and 280 hr for Level II
- FRM: about 275 hr for Part I and 250 hr for Part II
- Actuarial preliminary exams: about 225 hr for P, 200 hr for FM and 300 hr for FAM
- EA: about 80 hr for Part 1, 100 hr for Part 2 and 50 hr for Part 3
- CMA: about 170 hr for Part 1 and 170 hr for Part 2
- Series: from about 40 hr for the SIE to 110 hr for the Series 7
Step 4: Get a baseline
Before you plan the weeks, answer an untimed mixed set across your exam's major topics, small enough that you have time left to read the solution to everything you miss. Nothing rides on the score, and it shows you where you're starting in each topic so your weakest ones get the most time from day one. A miss on a topic you haven't studied yet just means it's still to learn. The misses that matter for the plan are on topics you thought you knew. On FreeFellow, mixed practice and the readiness score are free, so this step costs nothing.
You can skip it and weight each topic by its blueprint weight alone. That works, but the first few weeks will be aimed less precisely.
Step 5: Work week by week
Give each week a short list of lessons and practice sets, sized to your hours and to how much of the material you already know, and check them off as you go. Leave room in each week for more than new questions: reading the explanation for every miss, fixing the gap behind it, and a fresh try at that topic in a later session to check the fix held. Keep an eye on your accuracy by topic. When a topic improves faster than you expected, move its remaining practice to short spaced refreshers, and when one lags, add questions and reread the lesson.
FreeFellow's planner puts this in a weekly tile of what's due. It tracks your accuracy and your time per question on each practice set and uses both to see how your readiness is moving in each topic.
Step 6: Finish with timed mocks
In the last 2 to 4 weeks, take timed mock exams under exam-day conditions (on FreeFellow, mocks are part of Fellow). A good mock matches the real exam's length (3 hours, 4.5 hours or 4 hours, depending on the credential), follows the published blueprint's topic mix, and, where the exam body has released item statistics, has a similar spread of difficulty. After each mock, go back over the topics you missed before taking the next one. How many mocks you take depends on your hours, because each one needs time afterward: reading the explanations, fixing the topics it turned up and trying those topics again with fresh questions before the next mock. Take as many as you can follow up that way, and leave a few days between them instead of stacking them into the last weekend, since spaced practice tends to stick better than cramming.
If you've missed two weeks
Say you planned 10 hours a week, lost two weeks to work, and can manage about 6 hours a week for now. Don't try to win back the 20 hours. If you can move the exam date, rebuild from the new one as in Step 2. If you can't, take the lost time out of the content weeks by going lighter on the topics with the smallest blueprint weight, and keep the final review weeks whole.
A first week back at 6 hours could look like this:
- About 1 hour: an untimed mixed set on the topics you'd already covered, to see what held up over the break.
- About 2 hours: reading the explanation for every miss, and going back to the lesson where a miss came from a gap instead of a slip.
- About 2 hours: the next new topic, picking up where you stopped, lesson first and then a short practice set.
- About 1 hour, late in the week: fresh questions on the topics you repaired earlier in the week, so you know the fix held.
Keep that split until your hours come back, then let new material take the bigger share again. You can start today: pick your exam from the free exam pages and work one short untimed mixed set on what you'd covered before the break. Mixed practice, solutions and the readiness score are free with an account.
What the planner does, and what's free
Most study planners are a static PDF or template that tells you what to study in week 1, week 2 and week 3 and has no idea what you did. FreeFellow's planner works from your own results instead. It reads the exam blueprint, your readiness in each topic, your exam date and your weekly hours, gives your weakest topics the most weight, and moves the topics you've got down to spaced refreshers. If you miss a week, it moves the unfinished items into the coming weeks instead of dropping them, and it rebuilds whenever your readiness or your exam date changes. It spreads your timed mocks through the back half of the plan, with the last one close to exam day, so there's time to work on what each one turns up.
The personalized plan is part of Fellow, along with timed mock exams, the spaced review after each mock, flashcards and analytics by topic. Fellow is $39 a month or $79 a quarter per track, and the $199 annual plan is Fellow Plus. Prices are in USD, and each subscription covers one credential track. Check pricing for your track and country.
A free account gets you everything you need to build the plan by hand: the full question bank for every exam, step-by-step solutions, written lessons, mixed practice and the readiness score. Set an exam date and you'll also see a preview of what the planner would build for you: the headline numbers, the mix of phases and your first week. The study planner page walks through how it works.
When to write your own plan
If you're taking a paid course with its own video schedule that doesn't line up with FreeFellow's topics, follow the course's pacing. And the planner only knows the 40 credentials FreeFellow covers, so it can't help with the bar exam, the MCAT or the USMLE.
If you'd rather follow a written week-by-week schedule, the per-exam guides are a good place to start: the FRM Part 1 6-Month Study Plan, the CPA Exam Study Guide, CFP and Exam P.