Those people need help; it does not take much to be the person who provides that assistance, and the pay can be quite lucrative in financial services positions. These positions require people who understand the immediate and long-term trends of the marketplace and who have the education to recommend specific investment options to clients, either as broad categories, or as items to buy or sell.
Depending on your interests, this can be a position where you are doing community service helping people get started in the world of having their money work for them rather than them working for their money, or you could be working as an analyst or an agent at a money market or hedge fund.
These business analyst jobs are demanding, but well paying. They start in the high $80,000 range for people with the right educational background. For people working at the sales desk there is a pretty solid commission and fee structure that ties into annual bonuses.
Even more appealing, many of these openings are for online jobs; the days when you had to show up in the office to do this kind of work are waning fast; many good consultants in this field work from home and give their advice online; everyone does their research online.
What do you need to get into financial services positions? First and foremost, an understanding of the fundamental principles of making money: People invest money in businesses, accepting a bit of risk, on the basis that they will get more money out of them than they put into them. Business investing means doing a lot of research. As someone in a financial services position, mostly what you are selling is your ability to do that research, studying up on a business’s 10-K forms, reading about their management practices, investigating where they are in their market niche, what products they sell, what their competitors sell, how they differentiate themselves, and how they stack up against their competition.
This means that, like any other purchase you make, you are doing comparison shopping. At its heart, the basic principle of investing is ''buy things you feel are going to increase in value.'' If your skill set includes decent research skills and good quantitative analysis talents, this may be a worthwhile career for you to pursue.
As to the types of clients you will be dealing with, it depends on where you are hired. Most people who get into the financial services industry become specialists in a particular niche of investing, whether it is a group of products they can recommend or an overall investment strategy to help their client base through different periods in their life. (For example, young investors should be a bit more willing to invest in risky investments; as the client ages, shifting their portfolio to more-guaranteed income derivatives is more useful.)
And these services are absolutely necessary. The percentage of Americans who have investments but have no clue how they work is staggering. The field of managing other people’s money has been a growth area since the ’80s, and with the creation of hedge funds and more abstruse funds out there in the ’90s, plus the opening of the commodities and foreign exchange markets to private investors, the breadth of knowledge needed has gone up dramatically.
While it is possible (and indeed, eminently sensible) to follow the practice of Warren Buffett and focus on investing in companies that you understand, and understand well, there is more to financial services management and the jobs they entail than picking the right stocks or mutual funds to recommend. There is also basic financial counseling—helping people learn to make a budget, helping people learn what they are making, what they are spending, and how those may or may not balance out. A lot of that is pure and simple common sense that some people just do not have.
Being able to dispense common sense to commercial and consumer customers is worth something in today’s market. If there had been a bit more common sense floating around over the last four years, there likely would be fewer problems with the current economy and the current credit crunch.
Backing up common sense should be some training in basic business procedures, especially business accounting. You need to be able to look at a balance statement and figure out what is being said and, just as importantly, what is not. That can be had for a fairly inexpensive investment in basic and advanced business accounting classes. Other classes that are useful to take are those covering business tax regulations, tax preparation, and how businesses are regulated in their transfer of money.
If you are looking for a position where you are helping people while making a decent living and not having to work a doctor’s hours or go through crippling graduate school programs, consider working your way up in the financial services sector. It is the kind of job that easily becomes a career and one that, for a significant portion of the people doing them, can be done from home or online.
