Hello everyone,
I see the standard 250-300 hours of study anywhere when I look for how to prepare for CFA exam. My concern is, does having a break in between study hours included in 250-300 hours of study time? Or do I have to allot the lost minutes because of breaks to compensate my study hours?
Your answers would be really helpful.
Thanks so much!
Yes, breaks count. The strategy I used was study 5 minutes, break for an hour.
Is this a serious question?
Think about it. If you had 1hr breaks in between 20min study sessions then would you count the breaks in the total number of hrs you studied for? No.
Just study until you’ve done all the material and know it inside out.
Thank you pokhim 
lol yep. pretty much do a few questions. get them all wrong. get pissed. play 1 game of dota. then get back at it.
Your looking into this wayyy too much.
I did 258 hours for level 2 using a stopwatch…i.e. I stopped it whenever I got distracted or took a break…so thats 258 hours of pure studying.
250-300 hours is just a rough estimate. I can only speak for myself but I truly have no idea how many hours I spent studying to pass L1. I don’t even think I can ballpark it. But it took up a lot of my free time outside of work and I had to put a lot of other personal stuff on the backburner to get it done… as I’m currently doing now for glorious L2.
You’ll get a feel for it once you get into it. As sdooley pointed out, you’re probably looking into it too much. Open a book and get going. Hitting some arbitrary number, even if given by the CFAI themselves, isn’t going to guarantee anything.
A strategy I’m using for L2 is recording my study hours, and practice questions completed on an excel sheet. I find it keeps me accountable to reaching weekly/monthly goals.
I’m really not sure of the hours I put in for L1 but it was likely around 250. L2 is looking more like I’ll end up in the 400-450 range give or take, based on my average hrs/day over the last few months. Nothing like doing a little analysis on the study process itself!
Yikes. This is what I’ve become.
Take a break say, every 1.5 hours, smoke a cigarette. Level I, you could go 3 hours before break.
If you don’t smoke, touch yourself instead.
If your disciplined, then break per 1.5 hours is optimum.
If it’s just a #1, then don’t stop the clock.
But if you’re dropping a deuce (or something akin), then don’t count that time.