Some days you just don’t feel that motivated and you don’t want to write. It’s natural and it happens to everyone. There are days when even if you love your job you just don’t want to go, you want to take a break and stay under the covers for a bit longer.
When I first started this blog after my birthday in 2016, it was because I had been inspired by other people who had created and monetized their blog to the point where they ended up quitting their day jobs to write about what they wanted to full time. However, I gave up after 3 months of writing posts that were 1500 words long each, 3 times a week. It definitely was a challenge. There were days I wasn’t sure what to write and it felt forced, there were days I felt the writing wasn’t my best. There were other days where no one read what I wrote and I felt like my effort was for nothing. On the flip side though, some of those posts I felt weren’t my best ended up being popular and people still viewed old posts long after I had written them. The only thing I really regret about that 3 months of writing is quitting.
I had posted a few times since I quit but they were intermittent. Once I passed an exam required for my job in December, I vowed to start writing again and stick with it. This time scaling it back to twice a week to make sure I can put out consistent content. That is what I am aiming to do here with Cash Chronicles, deliver consistent, thought provoking and hopefully interesting posts that have the general theme of dealing with economics, finance and a bit of fashion.
If there is one thing that has helped motivate me it is consistently watching videos from motivational speakers and entrepreneurs. They have taught me to not focus on the goal but to focus on loving the process of writing and delivering great content. Changing my way of thinking in regards to this has changed my approach towards almost everything in life. To not just admit failures but to embrace them as part of a journey that will take me somewhere is much more valuable than just sinking into my couch and watching another night of Netflix.
I wanted to start this post with this message to help push all of you that read this, to change your own lives and embrace the possibility of what you can be when you just start putting things into action rather than thinking yourself in circles so much that it paralyzes you with fear and inaction. Those failures are learning experiences and I use that experience of having given up, to push me to write now. The feeling of not wanting to write is temporary but after 10 weeks straight of writing consistently, I know I will feel worse if I break that cycle and tomorrow I wake up feeling unaccomplished.
On To The Topic
That being said, I am warmed up. This post I would like to talk about jobs, pay and the self esteem we attach to them. I started to think about this the other day when participating in a group chat that I have with a number of other workers in finance.
I am one of the more senior people in this group chat and I enjoy that I get to see the perspective of people from different areas of the market as well as younger analysts who give me feedback and what they think and see through their own experience.
In one of our recent conversations, one of the younger analysts highlighted a book he was reading (he did not share the name) that quoted “Wall Street insiders” as saying that the ratings agencies (you know, the companies that rate the credit of most bonds and large companies and contributed to the near collapse of the economy 10 years ago) were for the finance workers that weren’t as smart and couldn’t make it at a bank. It mentioned their pay was a fraction of those that worked at banks, private equity or hedge funds.
Nonsense I argued. I had spent a year at a ratings agency early in my career and I knew people that were paid quite well, even by Wall St. terms, by having a very specific and in demand skill set. My boss there at the time commuted from Washington D.C. on the company’s dime and had worked for a time in research at a large investment bank before the ratings agency lured him back with an even bigger pay package.
Although that case isn’t the norm, I decided to call up one of my friends who has worked at both large banks and works at a ratings agency now, to get his perspective.
The Reality According to an Insider
This friend of mine was a quite experienced, mid career banker when he moved to a ratings agency. He explained to me that in cash terms, including salary and bonus, he would likely make about 20% less than what he made in cash at a bank. The difference however may come through the stock options plan of which he was yet to participate.
The one area where pay may be quite lower he told me was at the analyst level. Although their salaries were comparable to that of a bank analyst their bonuses were quite skimpy, so the overall pay may be significantly lower than what a bank analyst may make overall in a year.
His overall conclusion was that if you had an established career at a bank and then moved to a ratings agency, overall pay may not differ that dramatically but for new analysts, they may consistently make less than those at banks.
What Do Others Say?
The internet has dramatically changed our lives. It used to be that these discussions were left to guesswork and the art of negotiation. Now however, there are sites like Glassdoor, where employees can anonymously submit their pay packages so that they can compare what they make both within their company and what they could be making outside their company for the same skill set.
I decided to see if the numbers were consistent with what my friend told me and went to Glassdoor to check out the difference in pay for two generic positions: Vice President and Analyst. Obviously, what sector you work in can have a huge variation in pay for the same titles. An analyst in M&A will likely make much more than an analyst in operations at a bank. That wasn’t the point of the discussion here though, the question was: overall do people in similar positions at ratings agencies make a fraction of what people make at banks?
Analysts
I decided to take a look at pay for similar titles at a well known established ratings agency and a well known established bank. The ratings agency I chose was Moody’s, the bank I chose was JP Morgan. The results for analyst pay at Moody’s from Glassdoor are below.
Source: Glassdoor
I like to focus on the overall pay and not get caught up in the bonus figures just because your overall pay is what most people are concerned with despite how a role may break down salary versus bonus. The results for Moody’s show an analyst can expect to make about 100k a year. Let’s see what an analyst at JP Morgan can expect to make.
Source: Glassdoor
The results for JP Morgan show that analysts tend to have a lower salary but a higher bonus but end up making about the same overall.
One caveat here is that there is a much smaller sample size for Moody’s so the JP Morgan analyst pay may represent a much wider range of what one can call an analyst and their pay. As mentioned before, the area you are in and if your group brings in revenue can be big determinants.
Vice President
Keeping this caveat in mind, let’s look at what a Vice President makes on average at Moody’s.
Source: Glassdoor
Total pay for a Vice President at Moody’s will likely be north of $200k when taking everything into account. Let’s now see what it is for JP Morgan.
Source: Glassdoor
This is where it gets a bit interesting, it seems that a Vice President or VP, at JP Morgan tends to make less than one on average at Moody’s. Again, we have to take into account there are 582 salaries submitted for JP Morgan while just 34 for Moody’s so there is a much wider range of roles and responsibilities for the JP Morgan figure, but the overall picture flies in the face of the notion that those at ratings agencies make a fraction of what those at banks make.
Is It The Ego Talking?
Finance is not an industry that is known for selfless humble people and I suspect that the “Wall Street insiders” mentioned in the book being discussed in my group chat may have had just a bit of a complex and wanted to make themselves seem better than they really were.
In finance and especially the finance industry in New York, everything is measured by money. There is a belief that money makes the organization and makes the person, so there may be a tendency from many, especially those that want to speak to the media or writers, to stroke their own ego and look down on other sectors of finance, when in reality, it may not have much truth to it.
The lesson here is always be skeptical of the media portrayal of Wall Street or any industry as a whole. They are looking for sensational stories that get people angry which then entices them to read more. Having people who work on Wall Street typified as assholes who make a ton of money and look down upon everyone else speaks to the narrative they know people believe and they want to reinforce. Reality though, has a way of making things a little less cut and dry.
Stories of greed on Wall Street speak to our emotional side. The sense that the system is rigged against the little guy, the envy we may feel for people making much more than us, our sense of morality that makes us say “I would never do that, I am not like those people.” This is why bashing certain jobs and industries is so popular and the press knows this. They fan the flames of those emotions and even when it makes us upset, it also gets us to read more.
But this is not a tirade against “fake news” it’s just an argument for being skeptical of what you read and doing a bit of your own critical thinking. The internet and these phones in our hands are powerful tools, giving us information at our fingertips that was unimaginable a generation ago. As I showed in this analysis, use those tools at your disposal to dispel the myths and the rumors you may run into on a daily basis.
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