Maybe someone on LW could recommend you a better job. Either here (but you would have to tell us at least what country are you from) or at a local meetup.

Welcome!

So, presumably you're familiar with companies like Vanguard, Wealthfront, and Betterment, which are much more customer-aligned than the rest of the financial services industry. But part of that is spending much less attention on individual clients--and, consequently, employing considerably fewer people, and different sorts of people. (I would expect that Wealthfront needs more web programmers than economists, for example.) You might consider applying at those places, but my suspicion is you'll end up in another field entirely.

Hi chalime,

Welcome to LW!

There are many of us here who share your views on the financial services industry, and index funds with low expense ratios have been strongly recommended in nearly all of the financial advice threads posted on LW. I once went to a career information session hosted by a botique wealth management firm myself, and ended up not even sending them my resume because of similar reasons regarding my personal fit with the field, and value of services provided by advisers.

The 80,000 Hours blog has historically mentioned that the good done by donating a small part of one's income to excellent charities likely outweighs any harm done by a career in the financial services industry. However, if working for a wealth management company doesn't feel like a good fit to you, you certainly shouldn't feel morally obligated to stay with them for earning-to-give reasons!

Hello LW!

Been lurking for about three years now- it’s time to at least introduce myself. Plus, I want to share a little about my current situation (work problems), and get some feedback on that. I’ll try and give a balanced take, but remember I’m talking about myself here…

First, for background, I’m 23, graduated about a year and a half ago with degrees in finance, accounting, and economics (I can sit still and take tests), and I also played basketball in college (one thing I can definitively say I’m good at is dribbling a basketball).

Brief Intellectual Journey
I didn’t care much about anything besides sports until I got to college. Freshmen year, I took a micro class and found it interesting, so I went online and discovered Marginal Revolution. I’ve been addicted to the internet ever since.

It started with the George Mason econ guys (Kling, Caplan, Roberts—that’s my bias), then I got interested in the psychology behind our beliefs and our actions (greatest hits being The Righteous Mind (Haidt), Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman), Mark Manson’s blog, Paul Graham’s blog). Somewhere during that time I stumbled across Lesswrong, SSC, HPMOR, and the rest of the rationality blogosphere, and it’s all just amazing. I love it but the downside is that I probably spend too much time reading instead of doing something more challenging.

The Big Three (EA, job/career, religion)
Right now, these three are overwhelming everything else, and I want to talk about them. First the easy one, religion. I am not religious, and that fact has caused me significant strife. I’ve lost an important relationship, become less close with my family (I’m in the closet- can’t bring myself to tell my mom), and generally feel kind of isolated because everyone I know seems to be religious and I struggle to look past that Important difference of opinion.

EA
I admire the EA movement and everyone involved. My base belief is that I do not need a lot of money to live on, and there are many people/causes that could make better use of the extra than me. I do have a high degree of uncertainty on what the best cause is, but I’ve simply been deferring those questions to GiveWell and I’m ok with that arrangement. So that’s the vision, but what about the execution?

Not great. While I did donate a pretty significant amount (for me) at the beginning of this year, I’ve stopped sending any money. The current problem is the uncertainty around where my income is going to come from in the future, as well as the overall unenjoyable experiences that all of my office type jobs have been to date. Those experiences make me want to save as much as possible, so I can be free to spend time how I want.

Let’s talk about my current job, and how utterly crazy it is. I don’t have anything lined up to do after this, but I don’t know how much longer I can hang on- it’s that bad. I try to stay upbeat about it but I know it’s only a matter of time (in my mind as of now, if I’m still working there in one month, I have failed).

I work at a small, boutique wealth management firm, and I have many objections with how this business works. It’s pretty simple- in my opinion, the incentive structure (how we are paid) is in direct conflict with actually giving good advice. And no one knows what they are paying us. And we don’t give good advice because that is harder to sell. And it doesn’t matter because there is money everywhere. And the industry is changing and we are not. And the work environment is mildly toxic. Ok, let me explain all of this more clearly.

Fees/Revenue- This is our emphasis- all team meetings come back to discussions of revenue. This part of our business is very easy to understand. We are paid based on our Assets Under Management (average fee is just over 1%- that means a $1,000 account would pay us $10/year, a $1,000,000 account would pay us $10,000/year). We are also paid commissions for selling insurance and annuity contracts.

My objections:
- Logic of AUM model means we literally value people based on the size of their investable assets.
- The +1% fee is too high. The dollar amount for our larger clients can get truly absurd, even though we do the same stuff for them as everyone else. There is starting to be more attention to fees as competition and technology change the game, but we are still getting by the old way because we can (for now).
- % fee obscures the true amount that they are paying us. Also, fee is deducted automatically from their account, similar to payroll taxes, so they don’t even notice when it goes. Sorry, I can’t help but focus on the fee because it matters, especially over long time periods we are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars. And this is to do something that basically amounts to a commodity service- investment management- and we won’t even do that as good as we could (I am an advocate for indexing- but we have to make things complicated and put portfolios together with 20+ holdings and an active/passive mix of funds).
- We push insurance (permanent life insurance specifically) and annuity contracts more than we should because of the commissions.

I would like to simply give financial advice, and charge a clear, transparent fee for those services, but because it wouldn’t be as profitable (you have any other theories?) we get this mess of a system.

This is getting long, so I’ll wrap up with some quick-hit ‘culture’ objections:
- I am in the office from 7:30 am – 6:00 pm at a minimum every day. That is soul-crushing when I have zero confidence that we are doing a Good Thing. I don’t have time to do much else.
- I have to wear a tie every day (not ideal)
- Charisma and delivery matter more than actually giving good advice.
- I make retirement plans for people. Most of these people project their income ‘needs’ in retirement to be something ridiculous like $20k/month throughout their thirty year retirement. I know, I know- I try to detach and I realize that this is their money and I have nothing to do with it and not to get overly moral with it, BUT I struggle. I struggle to care enough to actually dig in as much as I could, because 1. You’re very rich, it doesn’t matter and 2. The discussion on fees above taints everything.
- My bosses will say one thing in this meeting and the opposite in the next- it’s whatever the client wants to hear- whatever will get the deal done. They are completely malleable to what the situation requires. Kind of amazing to watch, but mostly sad/upsetting.

Qualifiers
Overall, we are not robbing them. We do provide value in that we are giving people some structure and guidance (most people need this- the behavioral aspect can make a huge impact). They came to us and agreed to the terms, so what the heck. But it just gets stupid when you could say instead of engaging with us, make these two clicks and save $20,000/year. That is wasteful, and I do not like waste.

Agree/Disagree? Am I crazy? Feedback is welcome.