What does a CFP do?
A Certified Financial Planner has passed a licensing exam and will advise you and help you reach your financial goals. A good CFP can help you a lot, especially if you are unsure how to set up your insurance, investment, savings, and financial plans on your own. You do not need a CFP to get a life insurance policy. If you do get a CFP, he or she should help you above and beyond life insurance -- i.e. retirement planning, investment advice, education planning, etc. It's advantageous to you to pay a fixed price for services instead of a percentage or commission. Negotiate fees up front. For life insurance, in most cases a term policy will fit your needs. Whole life, universal life, etc., combine investments and life insurance into a single product and are big commission makers for the salesman. They make it sound like the best thing ever, so be aware. One of my rules of thumb is that, generally speaking, the larger the commission is for the salesperson, the worse the product is for the consumer. Welcome to life insurance pitches. Term life is far less expensive and provides a death benefit and nothing else. If you just had a baby and need to protect your family, for example, term life is often a good solution, easy to buy, and inexpensive. As you stated, any of the major providers will do just fine. "CFP stands for ""Certified Financial Planner"", and is a certification administered by the CFP board (a non-government non-profit entity). This has nothing to do with insurance, and CFP are not insurance agents. Many States require insurance agents to be explicitly licensed by the State as such, and only licensed insurance agents can advise on insurance products. When you're looking for an insurance policy as an investment vehicle, a financial adviser (CFP, or whatever else acronym on the business card - doesn't matter) may be helpful. But in any case, when dealing with insurance - talk to a licensed insurance agent. If your financial adviser is not a licensed tax adviser (EA/CPA licensed in your State) - talk to a licensed tax adviser about your options before making any decisions."
I should also add that the 7/63 won't do much for you. If you're really interested in finance, you have a few options.  1) Sales - in which case the 7/63 is about all you need. The rest is just time and practice.  2) A job as an analyst. Your best bet here is to pursue the CFA charter.   3) A financial planner/advisor. This job is kind of a subcategory of #1. I always like to say that an advisor's primary job is to sell, giving meaningful advice is secondary. Nonetheless, a CFP is helpful here.  4) A trader. CFA charter is helpful here as with #2.  5) High Frequency Trading - Masters/PhD in math or a quant discipline and C++ is a must. Well I just had my interview about 2 weeks ago and some of these questions DID come up.  So these are a start, but also you should just pay attention carefully to your finance course literature.  Things like price/yield relations of bonds. How does maturity affect their price sensitivity? What does dividend issuance do to the value of an equity's stock?  As to your next summer internship... I find it a little weird that you'd be involved in VC.  No offense, but those people usually have many years of background in an industry before they start giving seed money to prospective companies.  Maybe some specifics on what you'd actually be doing for a VC firm could help me help you. "There's nothing to rebalance, the index fund rebalances itself to continue matching the index. However, you need to understand that such an investment is not diversified and you only invest in a very specific market, and very specific stocks on that market. S&P 500 is large (500 different companies, most of the time), but still not as broadly diversified as your retirement investment portfolio should be. You should talk to a financial adviser (CFP for example), many companies provide access to these for 401k plan participants. But in any case, I'd suggest considering ""target date"" funds - funds that are investing based on your expected retirement year, and become more conservative as you get closer to that year." It doesn't matter if he is Russian....  Putin is not trying to be a Stalin.  The west has been holding Russia back since the days of the Czars, Russia will never conform to the ways of the west so this angers the Western trading blocs like the EU, America, Japan now etc....  Putin is not a dictator when he has more support from his people than Obama does of his.  What Obama does have is the support of the rich however, which Putin does not.  The sanctions being placed on Russia are targeted to effect the richest Russians with hopes they will overthrow Putin themselves.  They are losing more money with every sanction placed, where the lower class Russians do not feel the sting of the sanctions as much as the rich so they continue to support their President.  the USA seems more like a dictatorship these days than does Russia.  Our government has gone to a Monarchial system lately where Congress is being bypassed completely simply because the President wants to take action.  Our government cannot get anything done, so corporations that were founded in the USA are leaving at an astounding rate to save money on taxes..  Putin does not feel that Russia is the only country in the world when he does a huge deal with China and Iran.  Obviously he knows that he has to have allies and since the West has alienated Russia thoughout history, they have to turn to China.  Also you have the BRICS bank, which will be a huge hit to the Western superiority that has existed for centuries.  I don't care if he is Russian, Putin's actions contradict what he is saying.  He is only alienating the traditional western powers while aggressively working with BRICS countries, Iran and many others. I should mention I work as an analyst for our Wealth Management division and am also a CFA charterholder. I have done the basic research on WSO into IB and corporate banking roles. I was hoping to get into the weeds with very specific jobs and duties, if that makes sense. For corporate finance you probably don't need it. You say you want to have a year of job experience after you get your degree but instead I would recommend getting an internship next summer before your senior year, that would be a lot more helpful and if you do a good job it is likely whatever company you intern for will offer you a full time job after graduation.   The CFA is more for people who want to work on wallstreet and such. If you still want to take it, my recommendation would be to try and take the first level test in college and try to find scholarships and help for it. I had a friend who had the test and all the study material paid for by the university (of arizona). "Pros for WHOM?  Cons for WHOM?  Whether the Federal Reserve is good or not really depends on WHO you are (i.e. where in the ""inflate/debase the money supply"" you are positioned, and how that affects your position in the debt/asset game).  Because the impacts of just about everything the Fed (or any central bank or government/cartel manipulated ""fiat"" money supply) does... affect you significantly different depending on where you are in regards to those things." In some senses, any answer to this question is going to be opinion based - nobody outside of HFT firms really know what they do, as they tend to be highly secretive due to the competitive nature of the activity they're engaged in. What's more, people working at HFT firms are bound by confidentiality agreements, so even those in the industry have no idea how other firms operate. And finally, there tend to be very, very few people at each firm who have any kind of overall picture of how things work. The hardware and software that is used to implement HFT is 'modular', and a developer will work on a single component, having no idea how it fits into a bigger machine (a programmer, for instance, might right routines to perform a function for variable 'k', but have absolutely no idea for what 'k' stands!) Keeping this in mind and returning to the question . . . The one thing that is well known about HFT is that it is done at incredibly high speeds, making very small profits many thousands of times per day. Activities are typically associated with market making and 'scalping' which profits from or within the bid-ask spread. Where does all this leave us? At worst, the average investor might get clipped for a few cents per round trip in a stock. Given that investing buy its very nature involves long holding periods and (hopefully) large gains, the dangers associated with the activities of HFT are negligible for the average trader, and can be considered no more than a slight markup in execution costs. A whole other area not really touched upon in the answers above is the endemic instability that HFT can bring to entire financial markets. HFT is associated with the provision of liquidity, and yet this liquidity can vanish very suddenly at times of market stress as the HFT remove themselves from the market; the possibility of lack of liquidity is probably the biggest market-wide danger that may arise from HFT operations.