Fellow monkeys,
I'm 35, was in Banking and PE for 10+ years and left it because I was absolutely miserable. The carry dollars were nowhere near what would have given me a real way out, they were semi-golden handcuffs, not enough to keep me in this shit. Sometimes I think about the usual "another 5 years and it would have been over" kind-of-stuff, but I just couldn't take it anymore.
So I decided to quit, leave substantial $$$ on the table and focus on living a life worth living. I am now in corporate M&A, basically heaven compared to the shit before - except for compensation. Anybody on here who made a similar move? And if so: how did it turn out for you?
Good for you man. Maybe you have twinges of regret on comp later, maybe you don't, but the one thing you won't regret is choosing happiness.
I left a banking gig at one of the coveted names to something smaller. I miss the dough but well fucking worth it to be out the door at 6 and be master of own weekends at the bare minimum. I can spend time with friends and family, I can have hobbies, travel, date. Hell I can get baked and fire up the PS5 without constantly stress checking emails. It's the little things that come with freedom that made it so worthwhile for me. I can have a full life and still scratch my deal junkie itch at work by compromising on the one thing that matters the least to me, money.
this
rabbit, sorry for waking an old post but are you no longer in banking?
Still around. Left a bulge early in my career for a boutique and couldn't be happier.
How much carry did you leave on table and you'd still keep vested portion no? Or get bought out or something ?
Turned out pretty good....
Can you add some rough numbers around your story?
When you left the industry, what was your net worth?
What was the phantom carry you walked away from and how long would you have had to stay to earn it?
What was your base when you left and what do you earn now?
How did you find your corporate gig?
Also OP for sake of Smokey and the rest of the readers, please include whether or not your spouse covers your 2nd/3rd/4th apartment + Hamptons house?
😂😂😂😂
I never understand why my non-troll posts also generate hate.
It's a finance forum, don't you wanna know what comp he walked away from and what he makes now?
Who cares about the other data in his post? Every week there is a guy crying that finance sucks and they want to go corporate and have wlb balance.
Smoke FrogI never understand why my non-troll posts also generate hate.It's a finance forum, don't you wanna know what comp he walked away from and what he makes now?Who cares about the other data in his post? Every week there is a guy crying that finance sucks and they want to go corporate and have wlb balance.
Inb4: "but BRO, if your DAD offered to pay for ur whole life would you have the courage to say NO???? Sorry my parents arent POOR"
Dude I’m living rent free in your head man. I don’t think your dad is a loser if he doesn’t have money, relax bro lol.
You are also living rent free in your apartment
I've literally seen you call people's parents losers for not paying for their rent on other threads lmao
I’m new here, why does everyone shit on every thing you say dude? 😂😂
I would say there's probably going to be pangs of golden handcuffs that you'll deal with for a long while (but eventually you'll realise in a gut-feel sort of way the "wisdom" people spout about wealth not being end-all as true - this is a sort of nuanced point as it's clear money isn't king for you, but there really is a whole entire journey of self-reflection there most people never get to experience beyond acknowledging money isn't important). As well, you may miss the fact that the finance 'crowd' sees the world a certain way - that 'community' vibe dissipates on the 'outside'.
On the whole though, well done on breaking out of the box. Your destiny is truly yours, and if you ever get down about that you can always push it further (go full nomad and live in South East Asia, LATAM etc) to really get at who you are and want to be.
My story was simple, I rolled not from banking / PE but trading into a start-up, did okay, doing my own thing + off to an MBA (international here so not quite the whole 2+2 thing you guys have in the US, hence getting at it a bit later).
I can honestly say I feel a world more mature, not just personally, but on life outlook. This becomes jarring when I occasionally catch-up with others who I had gone through Uni / banking with who are all still stuck in the ladder-climb mode (albeit a lot of them are very successful from a brand-name perspective), you realise there's a lack of depth there, which is fair enough because the difficulties encountered aren't the same existential ones.
I'll finish with an aside. I was recently watching the Lord of the Rings, and after many years, I can't help but reflect on how true it rings for most on a difficult journey. As soon as you leave the Shire, you will never be the same, even if you returned to it like Bilbo had. Others like Frodo realise they could never go back, and that's okay too. Both bore the One Ring and still have the scars from it, and they'll never return to being the same.
In a lot of ways life changing decisions are scary. They hurt to make, and most likely the pain of those choices will be with you for much longer than you'd originally appreciate. But at the end of the day, you become deeper and existentially richer for it. That's really the point of living life anyway, if it were all easy then it'd be a very boring story to live through.
do you know you are incredibly intelligent to make that LOTR analogy? you're deeper than Wall Street brother. take the silver banane.
truly amazing
This is an all-time WSO post
what are you plans post MBA
——-
ITT: comparing leaving office job to fucking Frodo journey in LotR
You feel like the lifestyle benefits were worth the pay cut? At a BB rn and it seems like you gotta do PE or you’re wasting a great opportunity, a great brand name, and taking “massive pay cuts”
Seems like if we don’t recruit we can’t break into the buyside without an MBA… but I kind of just want to have a weekend for once and finish work before midnight lol
I think the pre-req for career happiness and answering this quesiton comes down to figuring out what motivated you in the first place. That's easier said than done particularly when to get here in the first place people often had to turn off self reflection to adequately grind and you were so young you probably just genuinely didn't know what you were after. Then once you're in the seat, you grind so much it's hard to remember what you liked in the first place, and you have no time for self reflection. The only people I've seen regret leaving are the ones who pulled the rip cord due to burnout without figuring out what they wanted in the first place.
People who can parse out why they did this can figure this question out and proceed forward without regrets. If 1) it's for max money because you love the competitive aspects of it, then going all the way in hardcore finance is probably a good path for you. If 2) it's to enable a good lifestyle and the money/job is just an enabler of that, well then like OP you're probably at a point in career 10 years in that you can probably just leave to more WLB friendly pastures and still make more than enough money. If 3) there's other aspects of the job you intrinsically like - being quantitative, thinking like an investor, making outsized impact at earlier stages of a career, than that's probably a signal to stay in the hardcore job for a while longer. For me, I at one point was super burned out, concluded getting money was important short/med term but getting to the real nose bleed levels of wealth wasn't as motivating as I thought, and I came close to leaving the game. After some soul searching realized while I was probably closer to #2 than #1 described above, I was mostly #3. So I've settled in for the long haul and am happy.
Again, all easier said than done and no blazing insights but that's how I think about it. No black and white wrong answer aside from being dishonest with yourself.
I did my first 10 / 11 years on “the path” - BB IB LevFin into Private Credit and ultimately made the decision to leave as a newly minted principal at a decent sized credit fund. I took 6+ months completely off of work before finding a fully remote strategic finance role at a tech company. While I’m still early on into my new role, I couldn’t be happier. In terms of the stress scale, I’ve gone from like a 8.5/10 to a 2/10, and I have a lot more personal flexibility and freedom to spend time with my family and young child. One thing that I think is super helpful in relative work stress is that my current role doesn’t require driving negotiations with an adversarial counter-party. Instead, I’m working in a role that is supporting the business as a whole and trying to define growth objectives. I can’t tell you how much abandoning the need for midnight or later lawyer calls ahead of closing in order to finalize last-minute negotiations helps with the mental load. At the end of the day I took a big pay-cut and walked away from phantom carry / co-invest dollars, but it has been worth every cent.
Can you explain a bit more what responsibilities and day-to-day in your new role is like and what level you came in as?
Do you mean opportunity to co-invest? Or are you losing co-invest dollars?
I also didn’t realize phantom Carry was so common, it truly is a ridiculous thing to have to walk away from guaranteed bonus cycle income bc the place sucks so much but alas, alot of places and strats do suck that bad
In similar seat. Did you prior firm required you to source? Also, what was the comp level you left and what is the drop like? How did you emotionally get OK with the concept of leaving dollars at the table. Congrats on the new role - hard to put a value on stress-free existence.
PS - based on your description it sounds like you were at a larger lender - one where one is more likely to come across dick sponsors
They didn’t require to source but the originators were broadly speaking insufferable to deal with. I took a ~20% hit on salary and a ~50% hit on total cash comp. It took a bit to emotionally convince myself around the pay shift, but for me personally it came down to a few things: (i) I made the personal decision / realization that maximizing compensation was no longer my primary career goal and definition of “success”, (ii) parallel to me taking a career “step-back” from a comp perspective was a step-function increase in my wife’s compensation so our total annual cash comp wasn’t changing as meaningfully (maybe a ~15% or 20% max decrease), and (iii) we had enough liquid net worth to feel comfortable that a lot of the heavy lifting of retirement savings was already done.
On (i), there were several factors that went into this decision. First was looking at the existence of the MDs that were 7, 15, 20+ years my senior ahead of me. A lot of them were still cancelling vacations, frequently on the road away from their kids and families, and just overall continuing to be huge slaves to the system of needing to get deals done and deploy dollars. And I realized that I was at a crossroads where I either had to go all-in on that lifestyle as golden handcuffs would just keep getting heavier, or hit the ejection button now. The ejection button looked super compelling after looking at my one year old, aging parents and in-laws who we didn’t get to spend nearly enough time with, and realizing that quality time with them was worth more to me than comp.
The plan also included an exponential increase in quality of life via moving to a perfect-to-us geography where both sets of parents also reside, so we are seeing family with so much more frequency which was a core thesis of the “life is too short, spend it with people you care about vs. chasing max dollars”.
I could go on and on about the decision making process since I spent a lot of post-COVID ‘21 and ‘22 thinking about and discussing it… but my main takeaway is that you need to periodically re-evaluate your life priorities and not be afraid to ensure that your career component of life is running congruent with those priorities.
I am currently exploring similar things - do you mind if I send you a message?
same here - open to chat?
You will have to carry me out dead in my chair like a Viking on his shield. PE is only feasible if you have that dog in you (unironically)
Would love to get a sense for what the real numbers look like as you hit VP!
Steven Spielberg has regrets about being too much of a work-aholic and missing out on his kids’ childhoods. And he became Steve fucking Spielberg.
It’s comical to me the dramatic sacrifices finance monkeys make for a relatively modest prize in the grand scheme of things.
I’ve never heard anyone express pangs of regret for having spent too much time with their kids in lieu of smashing the gas peddle harder at work.
Do what makes you happy. Most of those people that are still on the track you left behind will have deep regrets when they’re in their 50s and behind.
Let’s not downplay it. For the average person, the toll a career in finance is considered extreme. Not many would choose a 10+ career in PE/IB/etc., regardless of comp
For the average person, it’s not on offer, so that’s an irrelevant discussion.
Good for you that you acknowledge what was important ( to you) and are willing to do something about it. Way too many folks sacrificing their life for something they don't really enjoy just for financial gain. Truth is you can earn a very good living doing lots of things in lots of industries.
I'm older (59) and know a few guys who made it to the top within IB, HF, PE. They are wealthy (9 figure net worth) BUT they actually loved the biz. They thrived on it. I remember one telling me a long time ago he runs at 100 mph and can't imagine not doing that. Loved it. When my son was looking at schools, another guy who was then very senior (Vice Chair) at a BB told me IB isn't for everyone so make sure he goes to a school with inroads to lots of industries. A colleague of mine who runs a broker dealer started out in IB. Does very well but HATED his time in banking. Openly tells me about if and got out (into sales) as soon as he could. Became an Alts wholesaler and made 7 figures doing that for a long time.
The reality is you can make lots of money many ways. If you like what you do, you'll have staying power and ultimately do quite well. It may not be IB MD money or PE carry money, but unless you're reckless in your spending, you'll make way more than you need to live quite comfortably, leave a chunk for your kids and have a great life. I learned this many years ago. We are quite comfortable, live in a very nice house, go on great trips, do basically whatever we want and can actually enjoy life. Been that way for a long time.
The secret is finding what you really like to do professionally and becoming VERY good at it. "Good to Great" flywheel stuff.
And learn to not compare yourself (income) to others. That will drive you crazy. It might motivate you for awhile, but it will ultimately eat you up. Everyone's circumstances are different. You don't know what you don't know so no use in comparing.
For everyone that enjoyed the PE work but disliked the toxic culture/hours/etc, why leave the industry altogether rather than lateral to a smaller firm that's not as go-go/sharp-elbowed? I know the market's slower than usual, but VP/Principal/MDs at my firm rarely work past 6:30-7pm and everyone seems to get along, at least on the surface
What size shop and what is VP and Principal pay for those hours?
Unsure about VP/Principal pay - from what I’ve heard, highly variable.
Most recent main fund 3-4B, not including SMAs. Major metro.
Would love to do this but frankly have not come across a shop where this was the case regardless of comp. If anyone has names they can share would be really appreciated.
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Damn bro, I wish I had as big of a dick as you (not being sarcastic)
Awesome post. I'm curious how your thought process would have changed if you were, say, 26-28 years old (post associate years) who is facing a similar inflection point? Looking back, are you glad you kept at it as long as you did? Do you think you could have been comfortable making that transition earlier and trading some more $ for another 5+ years of your life back?
in that spot now, you too?
I did that - left pe post associate role and took a fully remote gig paying about $185-$200K all in cash. I’ve been a digital nomad for the past three years.
On one hand it’s been amazingly fun and I’ve grown so much as a person. Being in an environment where I’m treated with respect at work and allowed and encouraged to set boundaries has made my personal self confidence and self respect blossom in all areas of my life which has done a lot to improve my mental health. I’m finally more present and in the moment and can enjoy weddings and parties and time with my girlfriend fully. I’ve gotten to travel the world and reconnect with friends. I’ve saved a lot of money not living in NYC permanently (even factoring in travel expenses) and I’m still marching towards financial independence (I’m not a big spender so YMMV). I started a side hustle that has consistently brought in an incremental $50-60K a year in cash (so total earnings of about $250-$260K)
On the other hand, I feel really insecure about my career choices. I feel less successful than my peers and in self concious about making less money than them. My job is really easy candidly and I don’t feel like I’m challenging myself or building a tangible skillset. My ego is really bruised and there are times when I wonder if I gave up on myself and potential by leaving early. I’m in a high potential program at work but I honestly am not that motivated to make it up the corporate ladder because the incremental rewards aren’t as large as they are at every next step in finance. I sometimes feel bad that I work at this company when I look around see myself surrounded by frankly largely less intelligent, capable, and driven people than me.
What I will say though that keeps me on this path is that I have a new appreciation for time. Being remote and having boundaries means I could repair relationships with friends and family that were damaged by finance and focus on life things like fitness and hobbies that I ignored.
If I die tomorrow, because of the last three years, at least now I’ll know that I got to be free and adventurous, grow into someone with self respect, and that I will have left things with my mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, girlfriend, and sibling, who I neglected for years, on a positive note. There will be more to say about me at my funeral beyond just that I was “driven and hardworking” and I will leave behind people who genuinely love me because I showed up for them and they showed up for me.
Sounds like you're years ahead of me given I left IB at the Analyst level after 2-3 years, but I joined a corporate team that was all ex-MBB and incredibly strong performers which fortunately has translated into strong political power. Have you ever considered switching for a similar role with a stronger surrounding team?
Appreciate this doesn't tackle the other things you mention which I've found myself struggling with (but have begun to accept as natural tradeoffs for the better WLB etc.), namely (1) building a tangible skillset and (2) the effort to earn the additional marginal reward isn't comparable vs finance.
Are you more strategy-leaning hence the mention of (1)?
Re: the side hustle, don't you think of that as a strong counterbalance to (2) assuming scalable? Given the additional hours in the evening I've gained, I'm in the works of doing something myself as a way to offset the fact that the additional effort/comp ratio isn't too worthwhile here.
Bumping for this.
At a similar level and want to add some more fun to the journey as I enter my late 20s.
Time vs Money
I would recommend going towards Time as you get older. You made a right choice now don't look back. Less stress means you would probably live longer too and reduce health issues.
Anyone else do this? any updated from OP? also around the same age and just don't feel like I can keep doing this much longer.
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