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Chief Strategy Officer and Instructor

Matt J. Goren, PhD CFP® designs and delivers industry-leading financial planning education - at scale. His approach combines lessons from his own teaching experience with best practices in online education, artificial intelligence, and organizational psychology. He is an Investment News “40 under 40” and his courses and programs have won national awards from ThinkAdvisor, Investopedia, Yahoo! Finance, and the AFCPE. 

Matt is the Chief Strategy Officer for the Brett Danko Education Center, which helps thousands of current and future financial planners pass the CFP exam. Collectively, those folks go on to provide financial advice and planning to millions of people.

Matt co-founded the Global Financial Planning Institute to promote competency in the cross-border financial planning space. In addition, he is a FinServ mentor and serves with the FPA and the AFS to advance financial planning education in higher education and to career changers around the world.

Previously, Matt ran Dalton Education as VP of Financial Planning Education at CeriFi from 2023 to 2025. From 2022 to 2023, Matt worked at CFP Board as Director of Knowledge for Practice. From 2018 to 2022, he worked in a series of roles at The American College of Financial Services, culminating as the director of their CFP® and ChFC programs. From 2016 to 2018, he was a professor of personal finance at the University of Georgia. And, from 2016 to 2020, he created and produced the lighthearted personal finance show Nothing Funny About Money on NPR. Before switching careers to financial planning, Matt ran the psychology research consulting firm Beyond Berkeley and taught psychology and statistics courses at UC Berkeley and the University of Georgia.

Matt has a Ph.D. in social psychology from UC Berkeley, an MS in social psychology from the University of Georgia, and a BS in psychology with minors in statistics and history from the University of Florida.

What Our Students Say:

"I am a retaker and followed exactly what Brett laid out for us versus doing my method in March. I passed this time! Thank you all for your contributions and help in getting me over the finish line."

S.S., Live Review student (July 2023)

"PASSED! This program is legit, y’all. The test was challenging, but I felt so prepared in that testing center."

A.M., Signature Live Review student (November 2023)

"John - I wanted to reach out to thank you personally for your help with the exam. Our tutoring session, the Boston Live Review and all of your calls were so through and your examples kept popping into my head as I was testing! I had a lot going on personally and changes at work, and some how managed to pull it off with a pass. I can only attribute it to the care and support of you and the Danko team."

D.M., Signature Live Review student (July 2024)

Ready to PASS the CFP® Exam?