1. Go to school, try to get a professional job ie. Doctor, lawyer, accountant and if not, try to get a good white collar job at a bank or some office.
2. Well, I finished school 8 years ago with a diploma in corporate finance and paid my own way working in the summer and after school at menial jobs at $10/hour. My first job out of high school was as a proprietary trading firm based out of Las Vegas because my passion back then was valuing stocks. What I found out was that I hated day trading, I hated trading on the West Coast (getting up at 5am as the market opened at 6:00) and I hated staring at a computer monitor all day to trade 100-1000 shares on some crappy stocks for a $0.05-$0.15 move because that was the strategy mandated to us because the firm was getting paid by the trading volume commissions. I hated that we weren’t actually valuing stocks, but trading for the sake of trading. I’ve done much better in the last 5 years valuing stocks and taking longer term positions. I learned that there is a vast difference between trading (similar to counting cards at the black jack table all day) and investing in a real business and collecting your share of dividends and earnings over a longer time frame. (Yes, that includes the horrible crash of 2008 when you could have doubled or tripled your money in wonderful businesses by now.) My next job after that was for a financial planning firm that used to be a life insurance company. Again, because my passion was in stocks and valuation. What I found was that the financial planning industry sells a lot of junk to the public. I never felt good selling a portfolio of junk segregated funds that would under perform an ETF for less fees to the client. The only way to make decent money was to in my opinion rip your client off. Although you would put together a proper financial plan utilizing all the insurance and investment portfolio that would normally be fine, when you implemented a solid financial plan with junk and over priced products, with fees, very high fees tilted toward the company-that felt bad. On a risk adjusted basis, the client was making less than the market. The life insurance, critical and disability insurance was good in theory, but telling a client that they would retire with their desired lifestyle on sub-optimal investment vehicles really made me feel bad inside. So I left. I then moved onto general insurance. I’m bored out of my mind. Selling low margin, high volume and getting less than half the commissions on the products I sell. Making money for people I don’t really like or respect, but doing it because I’ve built up a clientele that has followed me around all these years and not wanting to throw away my years and years of sacrifice. I really do want to poke bicycle spokes in my eyes and do something else. But the available jobs, the high paying jobs, where you just get to go to work, turn off your brain, doing something completely different just seems like a green pasture on the other side of the fence. Always unattainable, and always wondering if it really is greener over there rather than staying with the devil you know.
3. 5-10 years after college I really thought that I would be in my own business-not a business within a business, but my own business. Possibly my own fund like Warren Buffett. I really though that. My other idea would have been selling items on TV like K-tel, or Billy Mays. Creating and selling products like a Tim Ferris muse. A real e-myth business.
- Nelson
