"Sensible" jobs in finance - DO THEY EXIST?

A buddy of mine works for a commercial property company as a financial analyst and probably makes in that ball park and usually works 60 hours at most. Might be different since we live on the west coast but, the jobs like that are out there.

Yes, they do exist. But it largely depends on your ultimate goal, your skills and your personality type. An academic career can provide you with that. If you feel so inclined, you can also use your quantitative skills to develop clinical trials, R&D or work in a think tank.

I could see working in Finance at an F500 falling somewhat in that bucket provided you're interested in what that company does, but you can forget about economics/math in that case.

Corporate banking. Better work life balance imo

ive never worked in corporate finance, but i assume it provides bullets 1 and 3.. maybe bullet 2 if you work with a company you are interested in

for me: market risk, finshing up my 3rd year hours are 8-6 pay is 100k base + 10~20% bonus work CAN be (not always) a good mix of economics/math

look into it. pm me with questions

Asset Management, Research, some trading, and commercial banking all have far better work/life balance than the more intense jobs.

Thing is, people don't come to finance long term so much because they like it, they come to work their butts off to become wealthy.

How hard is it to get into buy-side ER?

I think I would eventually like to get into VC, but I have to figure out what I would do to break into that.

Your post pretty much described BO (minus the interesting part for most people). You can expect 60k base as a first year in BO with a 5k bonus, and by the time you're at the associate level pulling about 80-90k all in. You're probably getting in at 9 and working until 6 or 7 at the absolute latest. Seems like a pretty decent lifestyle

Insurance companies pay pretty well and have decent balance between hours worked.

Working for a large asset manager/mutual fund manager hits those points. Interviewed a kid who said he was working around 40-50 hours a week, comp was just under six figures (for someone just out of college), and I'd imagine the work would be more interesting than IB (following companies, forming a view, etc. vs. formatting and power point all day...). I remember after the interview, the VP I was interviewing with turned to me and said "Dude how do we get that job??"