Freshman looking for a career with a life

Honestly there are thousands of posts exactly like this one; I’d suggest searching for them to get a deeper insight into career possibilities.

Finance isn’t a very “work-life balance” kind of deal. The finance with the best work-life balance is actually just accounting or glorified accounting. If you’re interested in finance and don’t want to be a CPA but you want a normal 40-50 hour work week, you can expect to make $60k/year working up to around $120-$150k/year in corporate finance. This includes FP&A, controllership (given pretty much strictly to ex-Big 4 CPAs), treasury, investor relations (only really given to ex-consultants and bankers), and corpdev (only really given to ex-consultants and bankers).

• FP&A: its best you forecast profits for a project to determine its worth or you control a little bit of capital/maybe work with bankers to create the models of an M&A deal if your company buys another. At its worst/most commonly you’re just projecting budgets and comparing your actuals to your projections, which is just glorified cost accounting.
• Controllership: straight up accounting for a business
• Treasury: you control the risk + liquidity of the business to keep it running. I believe these jobs are given mostly to ex-bankers though I could be wrong
• Investor relations: stock drops, people call the company wondering why and threatening to sue. Stock raises, people call the company wondering why and asking for insider info. You’re hired to control the crap fest and keep up public appearances for the company without getting thrown in jail for releasing confidential info. If you don’t know the markets then you won’t get hired in this role, so they really only trust people with market experience (people like ex-MDs at an investment bank, ex-PE management, etc.)
• Corporate development: this is basically the banking of the corporate finance world. You work to strategically acquire other companies to grow yours. You work with bankers to raise capital, you source deals, etc.

If you wanted, you could aim for a job which leans more towards the markets like an asset manager or go into S&T/equity research or something. All of these jobs work more like 60-75 hours a week because they’re based around the markets entirely. You stay in afterwards/before the markets open to read up on the news and upcoming deals and stuff, but it’s not like IB where you’re constantly putting out fires. These guys make pretty decent money, but not as much as you could make elsewhere.

You could go into private wealth management, which is more like a sales job than a finance job. A ton of these PWM companies really just want people who can sell others on their set portfolio. Not even kidding, a common title for these jobs is “relationship manager”. Your salary is typically a percentage of your assets under management (AUM) each year. When you get into high net worth individuals, this job is more like a sales job WITH golf, so that’s pretty nice. You’ll basically go around playing golf with famous rich people, trying to convince them to keep you as their portfolio manager, and you’ll get paid like 0.5% of their total worth each year so you better make them like you. The problem is, if you don’t have experience outside of PWM, it’s hard to get into PWM. Nobody wants to hire a 22 year old kid straight out of college to control their $500MM portfolio, so they’ll go to the dinosaur who has been controlling portfolios ever since the Great Depression. To get into this, you’re best off partnering with someone who has experience so you can sell them on your services and say you have a combined experience of 40 years or whatever. If you break in, these guys make $200k+/year if they’re good, but the first 5-10 years of your life are SUPER boring and you make closer to $30k out of college and work up to like $60-$70k until you transition over to being a broker. You really just file paperwork and crap until someone dies and you can potentially move up in a firm, unless you start your own partnership like I said earlier.

If you truly want a good life where you make a good living and you hardly work throughout your career, finance isn’t the place to go. If you want to put in a crap ton of work for 5-10 years and transition over to an easier lifestyle and make good money, finance is your place to go. You can’t work 20 hours a week and expect a yearly paycheck of $500k, otherwise everyone would do it. There are trade-offs everywhere you go, which you’ll learn in your basic economics class later in college.

TLDR: just work hard dude. Also this is more of a banking forum, so you’ll get mostly banking mindset people answering.