Jay is a weekly columnist as a Club 75 Blogger, where he documents his journey through the CPA Exam. He has been a member of Club 75 since April 2010.

Week 34:

I’m back from my 2 week break and what a great 2 weeks it was. I didn’t open any CPA books or surf the blogs or even think about anything CPA until after Memorial Day. I spent great quality time with my family. We did a good amount of barbequing and frozen margarita concocting.

Did you know, a splash of Triple Sec is a must for frozen Margarita’s? Well, now you do.

As much fun as we had, I also got a ton of chores done in between. Swimming Pool is open, backyard is groomed and cleaned, squeaky doors oiled, broken mailbox fixed, etc. I won’t bore you, because the list goes on, it was a busy 2 weeks. I wish I could say I am recharged and ready to go, but not the case.

I did start on REG this week, if you can call this a start. I’m embarrassed to say that I only logged 8 hours since Memorial Day. I thought I would have logged at least 14 or 15 hours, but this weekend was jam packed full of commitments. My niece’s birthday party was Saturday afternoon and my 4 year old daughter’s dance recital was Sunday afternoon, so minimal weekend studying. I will need to get back to my disciplined ways this week, but it will certainly be tough.

For my REG studying routine, I have the Becker 2011 home study review, along with a set of Becker 2009 flash cards, a Wiley 2011 REG book and Wiley 2011 REG Focus Notes. Becker will be my primary material, but based on the feedback thus far, I will utilize Wiley to fill in any gaps and to better understand any materials which I feel need more detail than Becker offers.

Do you think I’m prepared? Lol.

Well, I did get into the first chapter of Becker on Individual Taxation and started the multiple choice homework. I do expect that it will probably take me most of the coming week to finish reading the remainder of Chapter 1 and complete all the remaining multiple choice questions. I know I’ve said this before, but I always get caught up trying to finish one chapter per week….this time I really want to do a better job of going back to the early chapters and reviewing the questions to keep the material fresh in my mind.

I have done a poor job of this for my first 3 sections and I always feel like I forgot all about chapter 1, when I finally complete all the material. It just makes for unnecessary panic, because it’s usually pretty close to the test date by that point.

This is one of my main goals for this section. No rushing to finish chapters. Will let you know how it goes. Back to the books!

Jay. O