40 hours jobs that pay well...when you are "old"

Easy. Run your own business.

Why would you want to take orders from someone else?

SEC and Federal Reserve. With several years of finance experience and Grad school, I believe they would be starting you at between 100 and 120K. Normal raises in a 10-15 year period would bring that salary up to around 150-170K. Those two agencies have a higher pay scale than all the rest so that they can compete with the high paying finance field. Or......

Take a few years and get a PH D in a three year program (UVA)and teach for good pay and plenty of time off.

Ugh, working for the government? How embarrassing.

The government would need to pay me considerably more than 150k-170k to compensate me for the humiliation involved.

Yea my dad runs his own business, works like no hours (he plays golf liek 6 days a week) and makesavery varied income of between like 70K and 300k depending on how the weather is (he sell hurricaine shutters). And he lives at the beach. Not a bad life.
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So what do you do?
-I work for an investment banking firm.
Oh okay; you are like my brother, he works for Edward Jones.
-No, a college degree is required in my profession

I doubt most people would consider working at the FED to be embarrassing. SEC maybe. Keep in mind we are talking about someone who has already had a successful career in IB/PE/HF, made plenty of money, and is looking for something easy to occupy their time. Prestige has already been accomplished. My personal plan is to run scuba diving trips after I retire from the business world.

Freelance Consulting. Try to use your network to set up some consulting gigs. You only have to take on as many projects as you want.

The problem with running your own business and only having to work 40 hours a week when you are 40 or 50 is that you must start that business in your 30's. I have no intentions to start a business in my 30's.

Teaching career sounds very good to me actually. I have been thinking about it...it would be a nice thing to do when older. Are you able to start a PhD when you are "this old"? Wouldn't the MBA be enough at some business school? Must not be Harvard and the likes...

Freelance consulting is also something you can do parallel with teaching so that appears to be attracting.

I have onve heard about a company that uses ex-consultants in sort of freelance projects. It was mentioned that they do not have to work a lot, but clear around $300K a year. Anyone heard of this? I know it has been dealt on this forum, but I forgot the name.

Which idiot told you that?

If you're over 40 or 50 or whatever, there's nothing stopping you from starting your own business. I hope you didn't think entrepreneurship was the exclusive preserve of 20 year olds in Silicon Valley. I actually know a few 40+ year olds who've successfully started their own businesses.

Alternatively, you could buy up one or more existing small businesses and work on improving them. I also know a few people who've gone down this route.

In the cases I have in mind, the people work extremely flexible hours, as little as a few days a month. The trick is always to hire the right people then delegate. 40+ year olds are far better at doing this than 20 year olds.

I gotta say, never disappointed in the idiocy of some posts... starting a company is not an easy thing to do and not something you can dismissively toss out there as an alternative.

It reminds me of an adult asking a kid what he wants to be when he grows up and the kid replies with "I want to be a millionaire."

In my view, starting any kind of company requires a huge amount of time and energy in the first X years. There might be guys who can make it with "just a couple of days of work a week", but I highly doubt it is the general picture. A strat-up is very riksy and when you are in your late 40's, maybe you do not need that stress anymore. You are in a good position if you can continue doing--as a freelance, or as an enterpreneur--exactly what you did at your previous job, bringing over the clientile, i.e. continue being a consultant. This represents minimal risk and that is what an older dude might be looking for.

Some ppl might jump at me for this idea :-) :
One of my friends works as a local branch manager--that serves small- and medium companies--of a national bank (non-US). He is out by 4 p.m. sharp every day and on fridays, he's out by 2 p.m., the latest. The branch performs pretty well on a national basis, so they clear ok bonuses as well.

How does this sound?
Does someone have friends, familiy who do this job?
How do they like it?
How does this pay in the USA?