[justgivemea75]

Hi all,

I’m going to start REG by the end of the month and was wondering about some things. The first is, how bad is REG if you don’t have extensive background in tax? When I did my masters, I avoided tax classes like the plague and I’m wondering how hard it is to pick up the concepts using Becker. I did take the basic tax, corporate tax, and merger tax, but didn’t do much else, so I’m wondering how handicapped I’ll be.

The second is that I was wondering what it’s like to study for REG. I’m currently doing FAR and even though I’m decent at financial accounting, there’s a broad number of topics, many of which have little in common with each other, and I’m taking forever to study because I struggle with remember lots of stuff and retain all the info. I’ve heard that REG is somewhat the opposite. It’s still a lot of material, of course, but I understand that it’s more an inch wide and a mile deep. I’m wondering if this could work in my favor. I usually am able to form connections in my mind about how things within a topic relate to each other, so I’m wondering if REG lends itself to this or if it’s less topics, but still requires knowledge of a bunch of random things.

The reason I ask this is the following. I start work in September and want at least a good jump on the CPA. My current plan is to finish FAR by the end of this month, then get a good jump on REG by doing most of the homework/lectures, so that the blackout month, the month I start work, won’t be so stressful. Then, I’m hoping that I can take REG in October and figure out BEC/AUD later (I’m not worried at all about BEC/AUD, just REG/FAR). I’m trying to decide if it may be better to knock out FAR, then try to knock out both AUD/BEC before work and save REG for while working or stick with the original plan.

Any thoughts?

FAR - 84
AUD - 76 (phew)
BEC - 88
REG - 77

DONE!

[GSU-CPA]

I studied for REG having only taken federal taxation in my undergrad.

The biggest thing with REG for me was that it was alot of information. First you got like 10-15 chapters of business law that will only cover about 20-30% of the exam. Then you got the tax chapters that are complicated because you have to remember items that are included in gross income , items that are not included in gross income, all deductions and how they are applied.

There is like 40-50 different deductions. Each of them are applied differently some like capital loses you can deduct 3000 from your ordinary income and carry forward indefinitely. Now take that same deduction for a business and you cant deduct any capital loses from ordinary income .. you can only offset it with other capital gains and the amount can be carried back 3 years and carried forward for 20 years….. As you can see thats only one potential deduction and its totally different for business taxes and individual taxes.

If you plan on itemizing your return you can deduct medical bills for example but the way you deduct it is based on your adjusted gross income. First you have to find out what your adjusted gross income is then multiply it by %10 percent and then you take that answe and subtract it from your total medical bills and thats the amount you can deduct.

As you can see they work very differntly.

On top of that you have deductions where there are tresholds. if you make over xxxx amount your deduction potential decreases by xxx dollars for every xxx amount you went over the tresholds . so you ahve to remember all that stupid stuff.

REG-77
BEC -Waiting on score May 5th
AUD - May 30
FAR - Q3 depending on if i pass above two in Q2

[Author]

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