Speaker 1: The answer is, it does not exist. I've been getting this question a lot recently. Are there any finance jobs that are like banking where you make a lot of money, but you also have work-life balance and you're not as stressed? I don't think that answer exists, and this is why. I'm a big believer in that people are paid a lot for a reason. Either they're paid a lot to do a lot of work, or they're doing work that only they can do, or both. If you're doing a lot of work and it's a work that only you can do, you're probably being paid the most. I think most jobs in the world, most careers in the world, make sense. But in order to not be clickbaity, here are some finance jobs that I know of that I know that my friends are in that might not make as much as banking, but definitely has a better work-life balance and also gives them some form of meaning by doing something intellectually stimulating and sexy. Corporate finance is, by definition, a finance role where you go into a corporation and you work with its finances. I actually don't have many friends in corporate finance, and corporate finance is not a hot, exit opportunity. Most people that I know of that are in corporate finance, I think, go directly into corporate finance after college. And it's more of an accounting-based role that turns into a finance role. And we largely know it as FP&A or being a controller. And these folks project company bottom line and they tell their bosses that the company's going to perform this much next quarter, or we're projecting to hit these revenues next quarter, next year, so on and so forth. I personally don't find this very fascinating to look at historical numbers, current performance, and how we're going to perform later. But it's definitely a much better work-life balance because you're working for your man, not someone else's man. The salaries are obviously lower, I think. Introductory, entry-level salaries start out like $70K. And then as you move up and become senior, you definitely hit the six-figure number. But on the better end compared to investment banking and other more high-intensity finance roles, I think the barrier to entry of networking and trying to get a role is lower. The end goal for such a role is becoming a CFO of a company at which you'll obviously make a lot of money. But you're making less money, less money than you would in banking. It takes you a very long time to become a CFO. Better work-life balance, and appropriately less pay, and perhaps slightly less exciting work, but lower barrier to entry. And then the reason why I think that the whole question of, are there jobs like investment banking that has better work-life balance, but you don't need to put that much work in as much as investment banking, but you make similar amounts of money? The reason why I think that question is flawed is because there are rules like that, but most, if not all those rules, require banking as a background. So people always talk about exit opportunities in banking, and I think that's exactly what they're talking about. Rules like PE, hedge fund, or dev, being strategy-oriented, are all requiring banking backgrounds. And I think that's no surprise because they want to filter those out that can handle the heat, that can get that concentrated amount of training, of working in a professional field, learning how to work with financial numbers and Excel, and then come into the field. You have to realize that companies want people that are trained so they don't have to spend their time and money training them. Recent grads right out of college who have had that two-year high-intensity experience through banking are more comfortable. They're more qualified than others that don't. It's not necessarily about the actual skills you learn, but I think the title itself gives you a label, almost a free pass into these advanced, sexier, slightly better work-life balance fields because they expect you to have learned in that expedited time of two years and that concentrated, highly-focused, 80- to 100-hour-a-week career the things that you need to get into those roles. I've talked about these roles numerous times in these videos, so I don't want to juice them out and make a repeat video, but basically the buy side, so you're working on the sell side in banking, working on behalf of clients, and then you can jump over to said clients, the biggest being private equity, where these funds have their own money and their whole purpose is to play hot potato and buy a firm, grow it, financially engineer it, and then sell it off to the next private equity or strategic buyer. You can join as a PE associate post-banking and make great salary, definitely six figures, make decent bonuses, maybe not as much as banking associates now, but the longer-run, longer-term goal is to get that carry interest and make millions and millions of dollars out of a VP, principal, director, partner, whatever they call it in private equity. The issue is that the top is very narrow and it's not as easy as banking to go up that ladder. Venture capital kind of behaves in a similar way, except VC firms need a lot less juniors, need less technical ability, and it's more about networking and finding the right companies to invest in and developing a relationship that allows you to invest in these companies, and VC firms don't really directly recruit. You'll notice that in LinkedIn, unlike private equity, corp-deaf, corporate finance, and even banking roles, there aren't job posts, things that say, we're looking for VC analysts or associates. It's because they don't need that many, and it's very bottom-lean and partner-heavy. Many VC firms consist of two to three people who came out of a previous VC fund and are now using their own money to invest in companies, and they kind of play this one nice egg will make the entire, it's not an egg, one bad apple makes the entire, that's also a bad analogy, but initially, they invest in 100 companies, want one of them to succeed, and the one will cover for the 99 that are bad. They don't really necessarily need that many juniors to cover for that, hence the lack of recruitment there. VC also, perhaps less than private equity, you'll reach the six-figure mark, and then if you cash out and do really well in one of those investments, you'll make a crap ton of money. And then there's corp-dev, which is the slightly less sexier side of the buy side, but it's essentially the same thing, except your company's sole purpose isn't to buy and sell companies or make money off the investment in the company, but make the company as a whole better and make more money as a result of the investments slash companies that you chase after. So when Amazon bought Whole Foods, there is an internal team that works on that alongside a bank, and you're working within the company, working for the real company, and looking for potential mergers, acquisitions, and divestiture opportunities. And even in those roles, you are working decent hours, definitely better than banking, probably 60, 70 at most, sometimes 80 if you're near the deal closing, but I've heard that it's much better work-life balance. You're not depending on deals for your salary slash end-of-year compensation, so there's less of a pressure to attest to clients because your company, yourself, or technically your own client, if you look at it as a bigger picture, you're gonna hit the six-figure mark, but the compensation upward range is definitely limited compared to banking and the other sexier side-by-side roles. Essentially, what I'm trying to say is I think the question of, are there roles like banking that are in finance where you make a lot of money, but there's a better work-life balance? There is no perfect job, because if there was a perfect job, everyone would be asking about that job, and YouTubers that cover those topics will do extremely well, and everyone will study to go that route. I think there are reasons why certain jobs pay a lot. There are reasons why people stick with certain jobs even though they suck. There are reasons why people default to other jobs even though they don't pay as much. There's a reason for everything, and that perfect, perfect job that you guys are looking for sadly doesn't exist, and if there was, I would be pursuing that too. So, in conclusion, my one-sentence summary of the day is become a software engineer. As always, I thank you guys so much for watching this video, and I will see you guys next time. Let's go.