Andrea Mahoney, CPA, CFA

Andrea spent five years in financial-services audit at a Big Four firm in New York — enough quarter-end close cycles that she still flinches at the sight of a January calendar. She left audit in 2018 for a broker-dealer compliance role, where she sat the FINRA SIE, Series 7, and Series 66 in rapid succession and lost a weekend each time relearning the municipal-securities arithmetic she had buried after college.

Her credentials include the CPA (active in New York), the CFA Charter (charterholder since 2019), FINRA SIE, Series 7, and Series 66. The CFA is the credential she most regrets in retrospect — three years of structured suffering for a designation she rarely uses in compliance work — but the discipline is genuinely useful for the IRS Enrolled Agent track and parts of the CPA Exam she covers here.

On Cert Climb she writes the financial-services exams (FINRA SIE, Series 7, Series 63, 65, 66), the accounting and tax tracks (CPA Exam, IRS Enrolled Agent SEE), and risk-management overlap with PMI-RMP. Her guides emphasize regulation-reading discipline: FINRA rewards candidates who can predict which rule is being tested from the phrasing of the question, not candidates who memorized SIPC limits in isolation.