Choosing a profession to turn into a career isn’t easy. Your options are virtually endless thanks to technology and the internet. While you can spend days sifting through various career options if you’re interested in finances and crunching numbers, you may want to consider becoming a Certified Public Accountant (CPA).
Becoming a CPA requires obtaining a professional license. The entire process usually takes around 18 months, starting with a CPA prep course, during which time you’ll learn how to study for the exam and take several practice tests.
While becoming a CPA isn’t the only profitable career with a short certification timeline, when you become a CPA, your income potential will be greater than many other licensed careers.
Having a CPA license will grant you the freedom to work from home
If you’ve ever wanted to work from home full-time, you can do that as a CPA. You might even make more money working from home than working in an office. With enough experience, you can easily become self-employed, set your own fees, and work on your preferred schedule.
Working from home is an opportunity to earn more money
According to statistics published by Apollo Technical, people are 47% more productive when working from home compared to working in an office. When you’re more productive, you can take on more work and earn more money.
Another benefit to working from home is you can take on simple, quick work from clients like basic tax preparation. Even if you choose not to specialize in tax prep, you can still take on tax clients to supplement your income. Have your clients mail or email you their documents and you’ll never have to spend time or gas driving to meet someone.
Having the freedom to work from home will make you happier and healthier overall. If you had a choice, you probably wouldn’t want to get up early and drive to an office every day. If you’re like most people, it takes a couple of hours to get into the groove and be productive.
When you work from home, you can get a little more sleep and choose when to start your day. You’ll be productive from the start and you won’t need to struggle through the morning sleepy-eyed.
Having a CPA license will give you leverage to multiply your time
Time multiplication is a well-known entrepreneurial strategy that can help you turn a good profit. Multiplying your time is the key to financial freedom and is the secret ingredient in making money without effort.
To multiply your time as a CPA, you need to create value for people that can be sold an infinite number of times. For example:
- Create a blog to share tips and tricks with other industry professionals, then monetize your blog through affiliate links and advertising partnerships.
- Create your own affiliate marketing product that others can promote. For example, create a 7-day course for entrepreneurs to learn how to do their own taxes.
- Create webinars you can run on a regular cycle to generate leads for your email marketing campaign. Additional webinars can be used to sell products, services, and promote partner services.
- Run PPC ads to get more traffic to your blog and sales pages.
Digital content doesn’t cost you anything to reproduce. Once you have your content, all you need is a strong sales funnel and a smooth checkout system that runs automatically.
The cost of obtaining CPA certification is low
The cost of getting licensed is something few people think about when obtaining a professional license. At least in terms of profitability. For example, you can make $250,000 per year as a doctor, but you’ll be hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for many years.
While you’re in med school, you won’t have time to work any kind of high-paying job, so you’ll basically be sacrificing 4-10 years of your life without a decent paycheck. For some, this amounts to millions of dollars in lost income.
When you account for being hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and lost income, it will take years to become profitable making $250,000 per year.
On the other hand, after accounting for the cost of your CPA prep course, exam, and other fees, you’ll be profitable quickly. You won’t have to get buried in debt just to become a CPA.
Get your career off the ground quickly by getting your CPA certification
If you need a career that won’t take a decade to get into, consider becoming a CPA. The money is good, and you don’t have to go into debt to get certified.