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Investment Banking VS Lawyer (1 Viewer)

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if you do fin/law u could do both of these jobs, im wondering which has the highest salary, which has longer working hours? id assume law has highest wage and most stressful with most working hours, but i know investment banking has alot of hours too. which is a more stressful job with longer hours and if you could have the opportunity to choose which one would you do?
 

Minai

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codereder said:
if you do fin/law u could do both of these jobs, im wondering which has the highest salary, which has longer working hours? id assume law has highest wage and most stressful with most working hours, but i know investment banking has alot of hours too. which is a more stressful job with longer hours and if you could have the opportunity to choose which one would you do?
Well what do you mean "law"?
There are many fields in law that you could potentially work in.

My guess is thought, that investment banking would be tougher (and it's pretty damn hard to get a grad position), due to its 12 hour days, but you do earn a lot (I've heard $80k as a graduate)
 
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working in law as a lawyer.. wat else can u do. policy stuff? wats the best job with not alot of working hours.
 

Soma

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You're an idiot. Stop worrying about the money and do something you enjoy.

And by the way you are wrong by saying that lawyers earn more. Your average Barrister would probably earn more than a lot of investment bankers but as a professional, lawyer's income is pretty much capped at the $2m mark it is more heavily regulated and thus illegal to charge performance fees (which is where merchant bankers make mega bucks). Alan Moss, CEO of Macquarie got an $18million bonus this year so go figure.
 
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Götterfunken

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My uncle is an investment banker (ABN-AMRO) and he seems to be doing alright. Though, I’ve learnt, he doesn’t get much time for family life. So it depends on what your goal are, to spend time with, and start a, family, or to make money?

Well, either way we are only young once. :)
 
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im not worried about money at all. its just an extra incentive for working longer hours which is of more importance to me. wat i wanna know is which of these jobs enables u to live a generally "good" life?
 

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any job will get you a "good" life
you just need to work hard

don't expect once you graduated with your flashy B Commerce(shove whatever majors u want)/LLB(honours * 10000) that you will be set for life; you still need to work your way up
 

Götterfunken

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I’m not sure what you mean. How do you define “a generally ‘good’ life”? I would define a good life as doing something that makes me happy, and not doing something that I hate for whatever reason.

What are you passionate it? I could never really imagine anyone being passionate in investment banking, although the way my Uncle described it was fairly interesting, so I guess he meet my criteria. He really did seem to be happy in his job.

If I could choose one, answering your original question, I would pick law—if it wasn’t for the >99 UAI (or close to it) I properly would pick law. Have you spoken to your careers advisor?
 
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i mean good as in getn the money but not working 20 hours a day. i know u may occasionaly have long days in any job.. but if ur an invest banker do u have any leisure time
 

Götterfunken

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codereder said:
i mean good as in getn the money but not working 20 hours a day. i know u may occasionaly have long days in any job.. but if ur an invest banker do u have any leisure time
My uncle (I’ll try not to refer to him in every post!) works from 9am to 7-8:30pm weekly. Not bad, but I’m not sure if I would won’t to do it.
 

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codereder what you have to understand is that while alot of people can probably claim close to $1million dollars in assets, and it isn't exactly that rare to be in possession of a multi-million dollar business an actual sallary anywhere near $1m/a is crazy.
 

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codereder said:
if you do fin/law u could do both of these jobs, im wondering which has the highest salary, which has longer working hours? id assume law has highest wage and most stressful with most working hours, but i know investment banking has alot of hours too. which is a more stressful job with longer hours and if you could have the opportunity to choose which one would you do?
How is your maths and English ability/interest?

If you like English, you're leaning towards law. If you like maths, you're leaning towards banking.
 

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do something you're good at. you'll find both uni and employment to be a lot less stressful
 

Götterfunken

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- Money: “People starting out in investment banking have a base salary of $80,000 to $95,000 plus a bonus of up to 50 per cent. Young investment bankers have double degrees and work hard. Your salary can increase very fast and the bonus element becomes much bigger. But that makes up for the unpredictability of this industry. If the economy contracts, the first thing they do is to start firing people. A lot of my colleagues lost their jobs after the stockmarket downturn in 2000 and 2001.”
http://radar.smh.com.au/archives/2005/05/fast_track.html
 

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it's stupid to give your life and your youth to some company just for the sake of a few extra bucks. you only get 1 life; sure work can be enjoyable, but there are so many things you can do when your young!
 

§eraphim

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Also, I think there IB has different sides to it that would attract people from both humanities and science background. I think the M&A stuff would suit lawyers (all that legal stuff blah blah) but mathematically trained graduates are ideally placed in the more technical and rigorous areas such as developing new products (securitisation?). The modelling skills you pick up in a Maths degree cannot be matched as it's not about plugging in numbers into a formula or about fitting a problem into a model (like what many actuaries do! :p).
 

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