 What's happening guys? It's Shane here, your friendly success satellite based radio navigation system with another video. This time we're going to be talking about is a finance degree worth it. We're going to go over the degree itself, what it entails, how much you get paid for jobs that you might get after getting the degree, what the job market's like, what your job satisfaction is going to be like, and all those related things that you're going to want to know about. At the end of this video, you're going to have a much better understanding of whether this degree is worth it for you or not. Now, if you've seen my video titled is an accounting degree worth it, you might be wondering, what is the difference between an accounting and a finance degree? I get this question in the comments all the time. Accounting focuses more on the daily management of records and reports in order to measure the company's performance. In finance, you're going to be using a lot of the same information, but you're going to use it in order to forecast future performance and future growth. Now, of course, this information could be used for a lot of different things, but mainly it's going to be focused on planning company strategy and growth. Simply put, accounting is more backward looking, whereas finance is more forward looking. And now that we have that comparison out of the way, let's proceed to the comparison between clicking the like button now and clicking it later. There's really not that much difference. So go ahead and just click it now. So you can make my financial advisor stop telling me to tell you to click the like button. So first, we're going to start off with salary, and I'm going to be grading each one of these from one to 10. So we're going to be going over four main things in this video that are very important when it comes to evaluating degrees. First of all, we're going to be talking about salary of different jobs that you might get after graduating with this degree. We're also going to go over the satisfaction that you might have in these different jobs. Then we're going to go on to the demand. And then lastly, we're going to talk about certain x factors that might make it better or worse. So first, let's talk about salary. Now, very similar to accounting, you do have a lot of flexibility when it comes to what types of jobs and careers that you can go into after you get your degree. Now some of the common careers that you're going to see over and over again when you do research are going to be personal financial advisor, financial manager, and then also financial analyst. Now just overall with finance as a degree, one would expect to make around $55,000 a year in the first five years after graduating and then nearly 100,000 about $98,600 a year after 10 years or more on average. But that's just in general what people who graduate with a finance degree reported. There's going to be a huge variation depending on what career that you go into. So financial analysts, for instance, are going to make $81,000 a year. There's 487,000 jobs available and it's growing at 5%. For personal financial advisors, they're going to make $87,000 a year. There are a lot of things that aren't mentioned when it comes to these majors. A lot of the time you're going to be getting bonuses, sometimes you might even be getting stock options. On top of this, you could work with a company or you could start your own business where you'd make quite a bit more. Because of the commission based structure in these careers, the money that you earn is going to depend quite a bit on how much you work and how hard you work. Now out of the common jobs that you're going to see people with finance majors get, the highest paying one is definitely going to be a financial manager. They make around $129,000 a year. Now, another thing, and this is something that I talked about in the video where I talked about the careers that make the most millionaires, finance related careers made up a significant portion of both the top 10% of earners as well as the top 1% of earners. And beyond that, they made up a significant portion of the top .99.5th percentile of earners. So the top, top, top earners in the United States of America. So this is what you would call a high risk, high reward degree and the careers that you go into with this degree, a lot of the time are going to be the same. Now, one thing I always like to mention is people who get business degrees and get some experience in the business world are going to be much more likely to be successful as entrepreneurs. I did a video on the degrees that create the most millionaires. And in that video, finance was one of the top 10 degrees. And a lot of the time it's not just because of the fact that you can get really good jobs, but it's also because of the fact that it teaches you how to invest at a young age. And later on, you're much more likely to become an entrepreneur, which is going to give you a much better chance of becoming a millionaire. So for all these reasons, I'm going to go ahead and give finance a 9.5 out of 10 rating when it comes to salary. Next, let's go ahead and talk about satisfaction. No, not that type of satisfaction. That's not what I'm talking about. With satisfaction, what I mean is the percentage of employees that are satisfied with their job, of course. And also, I like to add in there the percentage of employees that think that their job has a lot of meaning, aka it gives a lot of value to the world. A high paying career doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be satisfied with your job. It also doesn't mean you're going to have much value in your job just because of the fact that you earn a lot. Now, according to payscale.com, jobs related to finance like personal financial advisor, financial manager, etc, are going to have a average or below average score when it comes to meaning personal financial planning, aka personal financial advisor is going to have the highest meaning score when it comes to all the finance related careers. However, as you can see, most of them have a score of 50% or even below 50%. This is really low when you compare it to healthcare related degrees or education degrees. However, meaning isn't the end all be all. Everybody's different and meaning and job satisfaction are going to be different for everyone out there. There are many careers out there that are extremely meaningful. For instance, medical doctors, for instance, where there's a lot of people who are absolutely miserable doing it just because they're not a good fit for the job. So that's why we don't just look at meaning. We also want to look at overall job satisfaction out of the three careers that we mentioned, a higher than average percentage of them would say that they're overall satisfied with their job. Now, this could be because a bunch of different reasons, but one of them, for instance, would be that the high salary sometimes can compensate for the lack of meaning in someone's career. It could also mean that although the career itself doesn't have very much meaning, they enjoy doing the job. And this makes sense. I mean, if somebody paid me to play video games all day long, I would really enjoy doing it even though I wouldn't necessarily be helping the rest of the world. So for some, it might not be enough to say that their job's perfect, but it's one that they can overall be happy with. With a lot of finance related careers, you're going to be in a very competitive environment and you're going to be working extremely long hours. And so for that reason, I highly recommend that you're probably the type of person who's very competitive and you're probably like an A type personality. Again, this one is a high risk, high reward career. A lot of it is going to be commission or incentive based. So people who are really competitive and they're extremely driven are going to probably excel. So overall, I'm going to go ahead and give this one a seven for satisfaction. Next, we're going to go ahead and talk about demand. So we found out that it's possible for the right person to be extremely happy with finance related careers, but is there enough happiness to go around? Or will you need to look all over the country just to be able to find your first job? Now, finance does have one of the lowest unemployment rates out of all the different degrees. And so you're probably going to be able to find a job pretty much wherever you live. Now, talking more specifically about some of the common careers that you would get with the finance degree that we were discussing before, for financial analysts, there's going to be around 487,000 jobs available. And the average growth rate for this occupation is 5%, which is faster than average over the next 10 years. For personal financial advisor, there's 263,000 jobs available. And it's growing at 4%, which is about average. So there's less than half the amount of jobs available compared to the financial analyst. And it's growing a little bit slower. However, for financial managers, there's 697,000 jobs available. And it's growing at a ridiculous 15%, which is much faster than average. Now, when it comes to finance, if you're going to aim, make sure you aim high. Now, to become a financial manager, you would only need a bachelor degree. However, some say that getting a master's is going to improve your chances. Now, business degrees in general are pretty great because of the fact that they're extremely flexible. So just because you get a degree in finance doesn't necessarily mean you have to work in one of these three careers. There's actually a ton of options out there for you. You can work in any number of other positions within a company. For instance, you could be a product manager. For certain people, moving up a ladder in a company, trying to get to those executive positions like vice president, president, CEO, CFO, etc., is what's going to make them happy. Now, on top of that, I've mentioned this before, but business degrees are much more likely to be successful when it comes to opening their own business later on down the line. So there's a ton of flexibility here. It really doesn't matter what industry you go into or what business you try to work for. Pretty much everyone is going to be hiring business majors and pretty much everyone is going to be hiring people who have finance skills. So overall, it might be a little bit difficult for you to get your very first job. That's always the toughest part. Once you get your foot in the door, you get your first job, you get your first two years of experience. After that, it's going to be relatively smooth sailing, but I would give this one an overall score of eight for demand. Now let's talk about X factors. Now, having a degree in finance, working in finance in general can come with a lot of financial freedom. First of all, if you major in finance, you're very likely going to be someone who is going to be investing at a young age. Most people don't start investing until their 30s, sometimes even 40s. They don't even start thinking about retirement and thinking about saving their money and investing it instead of just spending it. So if you start investing in your 20s, you're way, way, way ahead of the curve. On top of this, you're going to be looking at financial markets all the time. And so there's a very good chance that you're going to recognize certain opportunities and that might lead you to starting a business or just getting a job in a certain industry that you think is going to do really well. So the diversity of knowledge and expertise is one of the things that makes this degree very interesting. You see all these different investing and finance related channels popping up on YouTube. And so a lot more people are getting interested in this subject. You're probably not going to become the super cool, super rich Jordan Belfort, Wolf of Wall Street, making it rain $10 million a day. So before you go diving right in, if you don't have a passion for some of these subjects like personal finance investing, you definitely don't want to go into this one just for the money. You're going to get worked super hard. It's going to be an extremely competitive environment. You probably are not going to have a life, especially when you're starting off at the beginning. When it comes to working in an investment banking, for instance, a lot of people say that they're basically just selling their 20s. You're going to be working around the clock in your 20s, and then in your 30s, you might move into a position where you can have a more normal life, or you might have made enough money by then that you could actually just retire. With a lot of the other stuff, it's relatively objective. I'm giving you the stats and the figures. But when it comes to X factors, it is just my opinion. So keep that in mind. The finance industry in general, I think is a very, very good industry to get into. It's my favorite industry other than technology. And I talk about this a lot on the channel. If you're a salesman or a saleswoman, for instance, you don't want to work in a dying industry. If you're in sales, you want to work in technology, finance, you want to be selling maybe life insurance, something along those lines, because there's just so much more opportunity and industries that are booming. If you go into a dying industry, just about everything is going to be worse. Your salary is going to be lower. You're going to be worked really hard, and you're not going to be properly compensated for it. Your job satisfaction is also going to be very low just because of the fact that the company is constantly going to be trying to find ways to cut money. So overall, going into the finance industry is fantastic. So that's going to factor into this score a little bit. Another thing I always like to think about is whether something is future proof or not. So everybody knows AI is coming, automation is coming, streamlining of processes in general that are getting rid of jobs left and right is coming. You really want to think about what degrees, what skills, what careers are going to be future proof when this inevitably happens. Now business related degrees, in my opinion, are one of the most future proof degrees. The reason for this is because it really doesn't matter how many individual jobs get automated, you're always going to have to have people with business skills, people who make decisions and companies, people who look at the numbers, people who analyze the data, etc. And as I mentioned before, business related degrees are extremely flexible. In fact, I'd say they're probably the most flexible out of all the different types of degrees. So if by chance, your job does end up getting automated, there's a very good chance that the skills that you learned from that job will be able to transfer over to another job that maybe doesn't even exist right now. I also mentioned before how finance was one of the degrees that created the most millionaires. And that could be for so many different reasons, and it could have happened in so many different ways. But that's kind of the point when it comes to finance, it could have been that they got a really good high paying job, like they became an executive, for instance, it could have been that they ended up starting their own business. It also could have been that they were just extremely smart when it comes to investing, they started investing at a young age. And so therefore, they were easily able to become a millionaire. So overall, I'm going to go ahead and give finance a 10 for X factor. So I'm going to go over the pros and cons really quickly. So some of the pros, there's a ton of money when it comes to finance, they make high salaries in general, and there's an opportunity to make ridiculously high salaries if you're an extremely competitive, kind of a type personality who can make it that far. It's just a fact you make a lot of money when it comes to dealing with matters that are related to money. Then after you acquire more experience, and you get a few years under your belt, you might find yourself making even more money than that. This is one of those rare careers that's incentive based. And so you're not really exchanging your time for money, you're actually exchanging your work for money. So the harder you work, in some cases, probably the luckier you get, the more money you can make. The second thing is flexibility. I talked about this before an extremely flexible degree, so many different career paths you can take, so many industries you can work in, so many different occupations you can go into, and a lot of them are going to be high paying and in demand. Another thing is the demand. There's pretty high demand for this degree. There's going to be a lot of opportunities out there. And unlike a lot of degrees out there, you're probably not going to even have to leave your own city. Although if you want to go for the really high paying jobs, you're probably going to have to move to somewhere like New York. And the projected growth for finance related careers is either as fast as average or at the very least average. Now the cons, there's going to be a really big one and that is going to be stress. I was looking this up online and as you guys know, I've done hundreds of hundreds, if not thousands of hours of research by now on different careers and different degrees. And I always look on different forums, for instance, just to see what people are saying. And I noticed that out of a lot of careers and a lot of degrees I look at, this is one of the more stressful ones. A lot of the time you're going to be working like 80 hours a week, you're not going to have a life, especially if you're going for the really high paying jobs. So if you're someone who wants more of a work-life balance, which is totally okay, I'm somebody who likes having a work-life balance, for instance, I would much rather have that than make like twice as much. If you're in that category, finance might not be the best degree for you, although there are some careers out there in finance that aren't as heavy when it comes to the workload. Another con here is there's going to be years of continuing education depending on what career you go into. So for instance, if you're going for a CFA, this is a really difficult exam that a lot of people have to go into if they're financial analysts. People are going to dedicate hundreds and hundreds of hours in order to pass this exam. It's extremely difficult. And once you pass the exams, guess what? There's going to be a lot more continuing education and a lot more things that you have to learn. The learning is never going to end. The market is always going to be changing continuously. And so you are going to have to change with the market itself. You're going to have to be very adaptable and willing to learn new skills. Now this might be positive for some and negative for others. Definitely negative for me. That's why I put in the negative column, right? Don't get me wrong. I like learning new stuff, but I don't want to be forced into a situation where I have to constantly be studying and not be getting paid for that studying in my hours that I have off. I want that to be an option, not something that I have to do. Now, considering everything that I said in this video, adding all of the scores up and dividing by four, I would give finance an overall score of about 8.6 out of 10. It's a lot of advantages to getting a degree in finance. It's not always going to be an easy road. Everything is subjective for some people. This might be like a one out of 10. It might be the worst degree, the worst careers that you could ever get into. And for some people, this might be like an 11 out of 10 best career ever. You love that super competitive environment where you get to work 80 to 100 hours a week. That's why it's so important that you always do your research, look into it for yourself. If you're interested in a certain career, for instance, I would really recommend contacting people who are currently doing that career. You can do that on Facebook, LinkedIn, you can reach out through your own personal network. You can even cold call people, just open up your local phone book. Always be really nice. Always be very respectful of their time because everybody's really busy, especially people who went into the finance industry. Not everybody is going to want to talk to, but if you do enough, you're going to find somebody who will talk to you and you will be able to get a really good idea of what the career is like and they'll be able to give you good advice. Then at that point, you can reverse engineer it and figure out what steps that you would have to take in order to get to that career. Sometimes that will involve getting a finance degree. Sometimes it will involve getting a finance degree and then maybe an MBA. Sometimes it will involve going to a certain school instead of another school. There's a lot of different variations there and that's why it's so important that you do your research up front. So consider the pros and cons that I mentioned. Think about other things that I talked about in the video. Do your own research and then figure out whether it's a good fit for you or not. As always, don't forget to smash the like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell, comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera that you have on the video. And before you go, make sure to check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you.