I had schweser last year and this year I got Elan, I can say that the Elan notes are pretty good and less money than schweser. There are some things that irritate me about Elan’s videos but if you are looking side by side at the notes from schweser and the notes from elan you can’t go wrong with elan based on the price and the quality of the notes. I’ve only read Quant and Econ from elan so far but I can tell you for the Econ section the Elan notes are 10 times better than schweser and I’m seeing elan explain things in the econ notes that were on the exam last year but I feel like schweser did a bad job of explaining in their notes (hence probably why I failed econ last year)
The key to earning the CFA on a budget is to pass the exams one - two - three. The expensive way to do the CFA is to sit for L2 and L3 multiple times, and thus pay the CFA Institute $1000+ in exam fees every year for a decade.
The opportunity cost of failure is huge. I figure my L2 failure cost me $15k at the very least. Some study aids would have been helpful and likely cost effective compared to my wasted time (I used CFAI only). Paying $1k to increase your odds of passing by even 25% should be a rational decision most should take.