Do you consider yourself to be frugal? Are you great with a budget and know how to determine if a purchase is wise or not? Do you know how to take a debt and create a plan for paying it off in a reasonable amount of time? If you answered yes to each of these relevant questions then you should think about pursuing a career as a financial planner. As a financial planner you will work to offer specific clients a consultation regarding their personal investments, their insurance decisions, and their taxes. You may even help a client identify financial risks they are dealing with, to set long term and short term financial goals, and to create budgets and investment portfolios. In this profession it will also be important that you can consistently exhibit discretion, since you will be working with many different clients’ financial information. To become a financial planner you will likely have to pursue a master’s degree program related to finance or a master’s of business administration degree program. It is important to note that most post-secondary schools do not offer an undergraduate degree program in an area of finance or financial planning. Your coursework will most likely begin with an introductory course in accounting. This will teach you how to use accounting concepts and techniques to prepare payroll statements, statements of equity, and a listing of assets and liabilities. You should also complete coursework relative to the principles of finance. This will help you learn about market value, the value of money, tax rates, income, and cash flow. The concepts in this portion of your coursework will prepare you to work with stocks and bonds, to analyze the potential growth of an investment, and to calculate investment returns.
Prior to completion of your degree program you will also be required to take a statistics for business decisions class, a business law class, and a financial management course. Within your business decisions class you will learn about exploratory data analysis, regression analysis, statistical interference, sampling theory and analysis, and time series models. The business law classes that will be a part of your coursework will be designed to help you learn about liability bankruptcy, business liability, principles of the law of agency, accounting law, and corporations. A financial management course will teach you about how to evaluate financial investment decisions, how to estimate potential risk, how to estimate the value of a business, and other topics such as financial planning, capital management, and capital structure. Take a moment and request a free information packet from any of the schools on the site that may interest you. Due to the fact that your degree in finance will actually be contained within a business degree program there are many different jobs you can seek out, such as in financial planning, money management, or real estate. Get all your information here on your financial planning schools.