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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:

"Passed!!! Thanks to Brett, ChoiGPT and the Danko team."

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

"Passed! I am so happy with my decision to sign up with Brett Danko! I have never been more prepared for an exam then I was Friday. I felt really good the whole time and knew halfway through that I passed. I did everything Brett told us to do. I was told many times to trust the process and that is what I did."

G.C., Live Review student (July 2023)

"First time test taker here, and I PASSED today thanks to everyone at Brett Danko, LLC!"

J.M., Live Review student (November 2023)

Ready to PASS the CFP® Exam?