Its the end of August already. Seems like just a few weeks ago that my professional life changed course. It was December 15th, 2008 when I left the regional airline I used to fly for. I began the CPA endeavor on Jan 5th, 2009 knowing that it would take me about 13-14 months to complete on a full time basis. Rounding out the end of eight full months shows me quite on target for completion around the end of January 2010.

Currently, I have one CPA exam (of 4) down with three left to go. As it stands, I am about 70% complete with the initial run through of all the material for the FAR section that I am taking next. My basic study plan is to expose myself to everything, get intimately familiar with the subject material on the first pass through, finish up about 2-3 weeks from the date of the test, then use that remaining time to review, work on the weak areas, and perform other miscellaneous test prep actions. I am well on target to sit for the exam on 10/8 (in fact, that might be too much time).

My very last class of the academic line up is underway. I purposely front loaded my academic work to the spring and summer, so that I would have more time available to study for these tests now. Accordingly, I am enrolled in a single class for the fall term, Cost Accounting II. I don’t really have my heart in school anymore – you could call it burnout. Sitting in an undergraduate class at damn near 28 years old just doesn’t feel right to me, but it is done all the time.

My primary objective is to study and pass these 3 remaining CPA exams over the next 5 months. Whatever work I do for the Cost II class will just be background noise to the larger picture.

I am still flying regularly. Its been a while since I’ve gone a weekend without flying and I hope to keep it this way from now on. One of my students just did his first solo cross country flight. The other student is progressing along as well, though we aren’t as far along in the training. On a weekly basis, I am averaging about 3-4 hours of flying. Much of it is simple, clear day, single screw, type stuff. But this is all I can get right now and am satisfied with it.

I am still trying to decide where to go after January when this CPA endeavor comes to an end. There is no way that I can plan everything to the letter. However, I am trying to piece together a general plan. I would have loved to have found success as an airline pilot. Flying is certainly more in line with my basic purpose in life. As I am getting older, having a child is coming closer and closer and being able to provide for (and be home to enjoy) my family is increasingly weighted in my thought process over merely going out and doing what I love above all costs.

But, did I really love airline flying? The answer is probably no. Much of it was VERY cool and much of it was not cool at all. Accounting likely falls in the same category. Absent the flying part of the job, it really was a crappy job. My current goal is to see if I can figure out a way to maximize the benefits of both of these career choices. I have more thinking to do along this line.

Either way, jobs will be VERY scarce for the next two or three years in the aviation world. Therefore, in the short term, I have two choices as I see it. The first is to go find a low paying flying gig (i.e. flight instructing, banner towing, parachute dropping, etc) and sort of park myself for a while and make just enough money to scrape by. In the end, this might work to bridge the gap between now and when material movement picks back up in the aviation world. However, the only thing I’ll have to show for it is more hours in my logbook. With my current 2,000 hours and just over 1,000 hours of turbine multi 121 experience, my bet is that I’d still be competitive in the airline world so long as I keep the hours trickling in at a reasonable rate in the interim to keep my recency up. The second option would be to go back to accounting armed with this newly acquired CPA credential, make considerable money (compared to starting flying jobs anyway), use said money to pay off my small student loan, rebuild wealth (one of the opportunity costs to this full time CPA endeavor is the lack of income I could have been making this whole time), and otherwise view my job as getting paid to build experience in my backup profession. My goal with accounting, should I choose to stay long term, is to run my own business in a hand full of years. I will need 3-4 years of good hard experience to build up what it takes to be able to offer something of value (and worth paying me for) to my clients. Even with the CPA cert in my hand, I will not be armed with enough “real world” experience to go out on my own.

Therefore, when you distill it all down, I can either do something I already know how to do (fly an airplane) while making little money, only to likely end up in a very similar position that I am currently in (IOW, basically possessing the same degree of marketability that I have now) or I can go back into accounting with my fresh CPA credential, make at least twice the money and capitalize my time into ultra valuable real world experience with which I can use to open my own business in a matter of several short years. Considering all aspects and that there is hardly any career progression going on right now in the aviation world, I believe the decision is a clear one. Imagining two parallel lives, one going one way and one going the other, I can either still be where I am now (still broke and trying to break into the airline world for “another” attempt at starting my pilot career) or I can have three plus years of experience as a CPA, armed with the knowledge gained, and actually possess a marketable skill that I didn’t possess before.

Even with this in mind, I do not know exactly how it will all shake down. But, as I pass month eight of the thirteen required for this CPA, I believe it is healthy to be thinking along these lines so that I can begin to ramp up a situation that I can be happy about when the time comes.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 31st, 2009 at 7:55 pm and is filed under Day to Day Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.