Finance Jobs with GREAT Work Life Balance & HIGH Pay

After having worked in finance for many years I've seen all the worthwhile career paths that both pay well and have exceptional work-life balance and so I thought I'd share with you guys what the three main paths are, the jobs within them, and at the end of this video I'm going to break down how much you can expect to get paid. So if you've realized that hustling 80-hour work weeks and investment banking is just not for you then my first path might be exactly what you're looking for and that's corporate finance. Corporate finance is the jack-of-all-trades path. It's where you want to go if you want to work in a variety of well-known companies like Apple, Netflix, Coinbase, and even McDonald's. Yeah that's right except instead of flipping burgers you could be flipping through excel spreadsheets. Now at the same time corporate finance's work-life balance largely depends on the type of companies that you go into so if you want to know the best companies to aim for leave a comment down for me below and I'll make a video on that. Regardless though all the jobs within this path hover around 40 hours a week with only a few weeks throughout the year where you might have to work a little bit more than that. Now the two main jobs I recommend looking into within corporate finance are FP&A which is really focused on forecasting all the financial metrics of a business and presenting a financial story to executives to help them make decisions. And then secondly there's treasury. In treasury you're really responsible for making sure the company has cash in the right place at the right time. There's a few other jobs that I don't really qualify as corporate finance but they still have a similar pay scale and around the same benefits and those really are compliance, tax, and internal audit. On corporate finance though FP&A and treasury both have a fantastic balance between how much you get paid and how much you have to work. But before we talk about how much you get paid I want to talk about path number two and that is banking. Now banking you see it's a little less chill than corporate finance because instead of getting to vibe out in a casual t-shirt you might have to dress up every day like you're about to go out to a fancy dinner. This is the ideal path for someone who wants to help out other businesses with the work they do rather than your internal company like you would within corporate finance. The only main job field I recommend going into within the banking path is commercial banking. In commercial banking you primarily help small to mid-size and some large companies with financial services such as loans, credit, and cash management. Since you're serving businesses as clients banking has an element of sales to it that's great for those wanting to manage relationships The work-life balance in commercial banking is it is amazing and hovers around 40 hours a week. Now this is not to be confused with corporate banking. Corporate banking is similar to commercial banking except they really focus on large financial institutions. So with that they typically have a lower client base but along with that comes a little bit of higher work hours but at the same time a higher level of prestige if you care about that and more pay. Their work-life balance is still far better than their investment banking peers but I'm not including them in this recommendation because they're just not on the same tier as the other jobs that I'm mentioning. If you want a great work-life balance in banking go with commercial banking. The banking path as I mentioned though is interesting because you get to work with external customers whereas in corporate finance a lot of the times you don't really get to do so. It's kind of like an in-between of our corporate finance path and our third and final path which is client finance. The client finance path as the name suggests is the path most focused on serving a client and it really has the strongest exposure to sales out of the three paths. There are three job fields within this path that are important to get familiar with starting with financial planners. Financial planners guide individuals and households with strategies and services aimed at reaching their financial goals specifically relating to investments, retirement planning, and taxes. The goal of financial planners is really to build a book of business throughout their career and a lot of clients that trust them for their services. Next is wealth management. Wealth management is very similar to financial planners except they're really focused on high net worth and ultra high net worth individuals. They not only help with investment portfolios but also offer services such as estate planning and have a lot more of an emphasis on building a client's wealth. Fun fact though a lot of wealth managers actually started out as financial planners. The thing is though that in wealth management it's really hard to build a book of business so a lot of people either get burnt out along the way or just don't make the cut of having a successful career in the long run. As I said with financial planners your goal is to build a strong clientele and with wealth managers you're really focused on people with a lot of money and so you have to have the skills to get those individuals to trust you. In that sense the job is more of a grind initially and wouldn't start out with what I'd really define as great work-life balance. However if you stick to the wealth management grind you can get some of the best work-life balance out of any of the job fields that we'll talk about today and that's because once you've made that book of business you don't have to put in as much effort into building more and so a lot of times wealth managers after five years to maybe a decade work a lot less than 40 hours a week and with that their compensation can grow unbelievably. But before we talk about how much they make let's talk about our third job field and that is asset management. Asset managers typically manage the investment portfolios of large clients and institutions. They often work in asset management companies like PIMCO or think of Fidelity and can start out as fixed income analysts or equity analysts working their way up to becoming portfolio managers. Now asset managers aren't as strongly sales focused as the other two jobs within this path but they still have an element of it when they're trying to bring in new clients. Just like the rest of the path though asset managers do have typically a little bit more of a grind early on in their career compared to their corporate finance or Therefore if you're a little bit more like me and you're trying to get that optimal ratio of balance in the amount you're getting paid then I recommend starting out with one of the first two paths. Now that covers the main paths that I define as the best of the best for work-life balance within finance but now let's talk about how much you can get paid. Alright so if you're anything like me then you could talk about money for days and any of the job fields within this could honestly use an entire video on their own of the salary progression throughout the career of each and so if you want that full breakdown on a specific one just leave a comment down below of which job field and I'll make a video on it. Now if I was starting out I'd care about two things how much will I make beginning in this career and how much am I going to make along the way if I eventually do well enough for myself. So to answer those two questions I'm going to break it down really simply For any of the paths above you can aim to start right out of undergrad anywhere from sixty thousand dollars all the way up to a hundred thousand dollars. The reason I'm applying this range is it really varies depending on what kind of role you go into and what company you're in. Let's say you join FP&A within a tech company and it's remote you could be making upwards of a hundred thousand dollars and on the same hand you can go into a different industry starting out there same thing remote and be making sixty five thousand dollars. You could also become a financial planner and you can grind really hard and just not build that book of business that you thought you would and still make only sixty thousand dollars within that first year which is still great but there could be someone else at the same company who got lucky or did the right things within that first year and had commissions making them a total of ninety thousand dollars. So you know how much you can make starting out and I know what you're thinking Sean if I wanted to talk about pennies then I would have gone to a coin collecting video. Tell me how much I'm going to make a decade or more down the road and am I going to be rich. And to that I have to say for all three of the paths that I've mentioned within this video let's call it within a 15 year average in your career you can be making anywhere from three hundred thousand dollars all the way up to half a million dollars. Now that comes with one caveat and that's that you're really ambitious and set on growing consistently throughout your career and if you're watching one of my videos I'm assuming you probably are but maybe you're wondering Sean no no no I don't want to have to make a choice I don't care about the risks I just want to know which path can I take to make the most amount of money. And to that I really have to say you probably are going to want to go with the client facing path. I mean come on it's obvious it's sales it's not based on the amount of hours you put in it's based on the amount of clientele you bring in and so with that especially with asset management they're both going to be making upwards potentially if you do very well for yourself from seven hundred thousand dollars to even a million or more per year. Also with being a financial planner or a wealth manager you have a higher likelihood of making your own company or building your own business and just having clients directly pay you because of the skills you've built throughout that career path. And on top of that eventually one day you're probably going to work less hours than the other two paths because at some point you're going to just be maintaining your clients and not constantly seeking to keep building more. Yes in commercial banking you can eventually become an MD and try hard to transition to a corporate bank where you could be making 700 to even a million or more per year and yes within corporate finance you could eventually become a CFO but the likelihood of that is probably as equal to me getting to a hundred thousand subscribers within my first year on YouTube. I mean yes it's possible but is it really going to happen? Probably not unless if you like the video right now and subscribe. With money in balance in mind I actually have a video right here that goes into detail on how I tripled my salary early on in my career and on top of that I have another video going into details on why I think FP&A is the best career to go into. Now if you're new here I'll be making a lot more videos around progressing through your finance career in the best way possible so hit subscribe and until next time, talk soon.