A Day In The Life Of A Former Investment Banker
I’ve been getting a lot of emails lately congratulating me on finishing up my time as an analyst and wondering what I’m up to now. Is life less stressful? More fun? What do I actually do all day? And most importantly, what about the models and bottles?
Since I looked at a week in the life of an investment banking analyst (my old life) last week, I thought today would be a good chance to contrast old and new.
6:30 AM – Wake up. Look next to me and confusion sets in when I see no Flashing Red Light: yes, my Blackberry is gone. For a moment I pause in panicked confusion.
Some habits die hard, and despite being on “vacation,” I can’t bring myself to wake up late. Being in a different time zone doesn’t help either.
8:30 AM – Sleep in for awhile longer. None of my other friends is awake yet. Back to sleep… for even longer.
11 AM – 11 sounds like a good time to wake up – everyone else is also conscious by now. It’s 2 PM or so back in the office, which means my friends still working there are probably being told that whatever model they’re working on currently is “needed ASAP.”
12 PM – Head to lunch. Life near the beach is slow. We spend around 2 hours eating and reminiscing over the good old days. The whole time I keep looking down at my hands, only to see no Blackberry…. still. My friends are wondering why the nervous twitch persists.
2 PM – Finally we finish up and leave. Can’t do anything too strenuous, though, so we head to the beach and sit in the sun for awhile. The water’s much more colorful than my Excel spreadsheets.
4 PM – Time passes quickly when you’re in the sun all day. We go and play frisbee on the beach while some other friends head off to go kayaking.
5 PM – On our way back from the beach, I get a text message from a friend at work wondering about some model I worked on a long time ago.
While I’m under no obligation to answer such inquiries anymore, without my bonus in my bank account yet I’m not about to take any chances. Sure, 2008 bonuses were down quite a bit (as I predicted), but it’s still way too much money to risk losing.
Bonuses are typically paid out in mid to late July or sometimes even later, so I have to be careful for awhile longer.
And even without a Blackberry, I am still reachable 24/7 thanks to cell phones.
6 PM – Head over to the spa for a massage. Turn my cell phone off. There’s no way anyone’s interrupting this one, not even for the most urgent Excel question ever.
7 PM - Go back to our hotel and I do some more planning for my upcoming investment banking prep program. Today I’m outlining what the Networking Into Investment Banking course will look like and what kind of content I want to have there.
I think this is a subject that other courses and products have not covered in much detail, so there’s a pretty good opportunity to go in-depth here. From my survey, it also seems that most readers are very interested in learning more about this topic.
See, even when I’m on vacation I manage to do some work – old habits…
8 PM – Go to local restaurant for a late dinner. The food is almost as good as all the places back home, but there’s no $30 expensing of dinner each night so we’re a bit more conservative with spending.
Everyone loves expensing dinners at first, but eventually you realize eating out too much just results in even more of a gut than you’d normally get from staring at a computer all day.
As I wrote back in how to stay fit as a banker, I strongly recommend using your daily dinner expense at the grocery store instead of eating out all the time (if possible).
10 PM – Get back and get ready to go out. It’s a Monday night so there probably won’t be much in the way of models and bottles, but one can always hope.
11:30 PM – Luckily there are always people on vacation here so the club isn’t totally empty, but it’s not exactly happening either. In short: there are plenty of bottles but no models.
But hey, it’s a Monday night and this sure beats sitting in a cubicle until midnight.
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yes I am completely hands-up for “Networking into Investment Banking” course. This is completely lacking on the market and rarely do career offices give you great advice… (well maybe it’s coz im not at Harvard/ Wharton…)
My friends and I are totally in for that section. So if you will offer that part separately from your other services, it will be a hit.
oh yes and thank you for replying to my email. i was so happy when i saw your reply come up in my inbox =)
Glad you think so too. Still deciding what form these courses will take, but I’m trying to make it as flexible as possible for everyone.
Were you really an investment banker? what happened to a day in life Saturday/Sunday?
Yes, I really did banking (see the older entries to verify).
A bunch of people have asked me about Saturday/Sunday now so maybe I’ll add these on Friday…
are you on permanent vacation aka retired now? how many years did you work in banking, and did you only work in banking? how old do you look compared to your actual age? :P
I own my own business (this site!) right now, so it’s certainly not a “permanent vacation.” I look about 10 years younger than I actually am.
But then, I was only in banking for 2 years before leaving and my 2nd year I hardly did any work.
I worked in IT, consulting, and project management at tech companies before IBD.