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hello and my name is sylvia menent and i am a certified financial planner and a cfa charterholder and in today's video i am answering all of your financial advisor questions from how i started my business to what my salary is the hours the team the clients literally everything that people have asked me for i'm gonna be answering it today so stay tuned for all of your questions so a little bit of an intro and some background so i graduated from business school in 2015 and then i went to work for credit swiss in zurich so i graduated from business school in barcelona spain at essare and ended up working for credit suisse for about two and a half years as um in the ultra high north mexico desk where i was basically an assistant working for ultra high net worth clients clients that had over 50 million dollars and up um in assets and pretty much catering to them helping them with you know very high lines of credits and loans and things like that and then in 2017 i moved back to the united states where my family was in boston and worked for morgan stanley as a financial planner where i was pretty much helping out uh financial advisors with their clients and i was doing financial plans and financial strategies for them so um that's a little bit of a background on me i got the cfp in 2019 in the spring of 2019 and the cfa charter in the summer of 2019 um and a couple months after getting my cfa i actually started my own company um my own firm to cater to like the younger clientele so that's a little bit of a background on me um so my first question was the one you guys all want to know is kind of salary progression so my first salary right out of college was 84 swiss francs um and so the swiss franc has been up and down it was it was about like 90 000 u.s dollars but switzerland has way lower taxes than anywhere in the united states uh so i was paying only about eight percent in taxes and as an expat um as a us citizen in switzerland you're actually exempt from almost a hundred thousand dollars so i didn't have to pay u.s taxes on my worldwide income so that was a really good job because even though i was like an assistant to the financial advisors i got a really good salary from like a first year starting out and um it was like just so much fun so that was my salary um kind of starting out then when i moved over to morgan stanley i got a little bit of a higher salary it wasn't too much higher and in the end i actually made it made up less just because of like massachusetts tax and everything so net net i was pretty much making like 70 000 or so um that was kind of like right after college i was still pretty young so ended up making that and then once i started my firm that's when things started to get really nice and like pretty much things exploded so my salary now pretty much ranges with the market the way i make my money is i charge a asset under management fee so it's about you know one to one and a half percent depending on the amount of money that you have the more money that a client has the less the percentage that i charge so if a client comes to me with a million dollars i'll charge them um 1.25 so that's 12 500 a year um and so having that like those clients that's kind of like how the salary works when you pretty much go on your own and have your own firm um so right now as of right now i'm making about like 200 000 kind of like recurring and then just from like current clientele and then i will make anywhere between like 50 to 100 000 with um kind of like one-time projects that i'm doing with younger clients that may not have the assets but are kind of looking for like a one-time financial plan um and therefore i'll charge 2500 for that so that's a little bit of like the salary it my salary didn't really jump until i actually started my firm that was because you'd kind of have that unlimited um salary potential that you wouldn't have when you have a job um and so that's pretty much then uh another question you guys asked is my salary enough to live in boston massachusetts and i can say yes it is um boston is very expensive i'm paying roughly 2 700 for a one-bedroom apartment with parking in boston and i'm way under market like i should be paying something around more 3 500 so i do have enough money to max out my 401k which is you know 62 sixty one thousand dollars because i'm a single member owner and so i can put a lot more money into my 401k versus a regular person which which can only put twenty thousand five hundred um and so i feel comfortable with living like that i don't have a very like lavish lifestyle i spend money on travel and eating out but that's it um and like maybe a little bit of gas but that's usually to see clients um in person so that's kind of taxed that's like a tax deduction um so yes i would say it's plenty um to live in boston now having said that realize that i am a single woman living in boston i don't have any kids and my health knock on wood is pretty healthy um so i don't have like these high medical expenses um then let's talk about hours how are my hours so i have to tell you my hours have never been bad one of the things about private banking and financial advising is that it's a very lucrative career um for the hours that you work right like your goal right for the first five years you're working super hard kind of getting those clients getting that content out um trying to get like really that clientele but i mean think about it if you manage a hundred clients at one million dollars each you're literally making a million dollars in you're making a hundred million not 100 one million dollars in revenue and then if you wanted to hire an assistant for like a hundred thousand dollars your and after expenses and things like that you're pretty much taking home like maybe like six hundred thousand um and if you're like part owner many of your expenses that you would otherwise have at a firm you're able to pass through your business especially if you have a very lifestyle practice kind of like i do many of my business partners and my clients i actually consider them friends um so you're able to kind of maximize your income that way so um from an hour's perspective i actually work part-time i don't work that many hours um i pretty much only work uh tuesdays and wednesdays and thursdays like head-on and then i pretty much take fridays off i don't work fridays or weekends sometimes some weekends i'll do but honestly i'm usually like reading staying on top of the markets that's kind of like what my job entails um and so another question was like what is a typical day in the life as a financial advisor and what is the difference between financial advisoring versus investment banking so there's a huge difference right investment banking has always been known as the creme de la creme and then everyone wants to go into investment banking because you kind of work for two years really hard and then you kind of have all these exit opportunities um but i honestly never wanted to work so many hours to be honest number one and number two um i just was not really good at math and so investment banking was like never just i did not enjoy watching people you know work until one in the morning that was just something that i thought was like so unsustainable and so crazy and i was like no way and so that's one thing so the financial the way that it's different from financial planning is very recurring right you're getting your clients if you can like 98 of clients like stay with you so it's a very sticky recurring type of business that many people like because of that recurring revenue whereas with investment banking you have to go get clients every single time and you're charging like project-based fees so so many companies right morgan stanley goldman sachs jpmorgan credit suisse all these companies they're moving away no they're not moving completely away from investment banking but they're moving towards wealth management and private banking because it's much more stable and much more um like um you know exactly what you're going to be making every single month since clients stand to stay there so you obviously have to keep your job it's just a lot less hours and it's just like so much more about making the client happy and being way better than every other financial advisor staying on top of the markets just clearly communicating with them versus kind of trying to you know help a company ipo help a company have a merger that's just crazy hours and it's not for everyone so um the other one is for people that are working at companies right what are like some exit opportunities if you're starting as a private banker um so the way i started right i began a an internship at jp morgan and then i went over to credit twist then i went to morgan stanley and i always knew i wanted to have my own firm just because i knew that's the only truly way like that's you yes like totally investing is like my passion and what i believe everyone should do but not everyone is meant to be an entrepreneur um but i come from a very entrepreneurial family i know i wanted to have my own firm i knew that was the only way to truly build explosive wealth you know if you look at the people that are the wealthiest in the world they're business owners they're real estate investors pretty much they've been investors and so i knew that i had to be a part owner in my business and it's not for everyone right like when you have your own firm you're going to have to sell you're going to have to go out and get clients and many people realize especially after the great resignation that they realize that they don't like doing that so if you don't like to sell or you don't like to be like salesy or get clients it's probably not like you probably should not start your own business um that i could say like you're going to fail like if you can't sell or you can't and i'm not saying selling is not a bad word it's like serving clients right like if you can't go out there and put yourself out there and ask um for the client you're not gonna make it and that's it and that's okay you know not everyone is meant to be an entrepreneur and there's many successful people that make you know two to three million dollars a year working for a job that they really enjoy and they're getting that paycheck and they're happy so i'm not saying that everyone should have a business i just wanted to have my own company um so for me that's kind of like an exit opportunity if you want to start your own firm a lot of people what they'll do is they'll create um they'll go work for a large company they'll build up a clientele and then they'll leave the company and then most of the time the clients are going to leave with them um so that's a little bit of like the exit opportunities um and then some of my previous internships you guys were asking for so my first i took a couple internships before i graduated i did a consulting internship at a biotech firm i also did a biotech internship in san francisco i thought i was going to go into life science and biotech my family my father was a biotech ceo very successful and i worked for some of his competitors so they never actually hired me until my dad sold his business and that's actually one of the reasons why i also started a company because i really just saw that that was the only way to really build extremely good wealth right like my dad had a very good salary uh and but at the end of the day he didn't really make his wealth that really big wealth until he sold his company and that's another reason why i just think that's very important to build your own firm if that's something that you like to do um so i worked at a biotech firm i thought i was gonna go into marketing um and then i ended up meeting someone when i was in san francisco his name was dan and he got me an internship at jpmorgan in the boston office and in the boston office i realized that i was working with the emerging markets team and ended up absolutely loving it so much to the point that i just switched careers switched majors and went into finance despite the fact that i sucked at math could not read a balance sheet could not read an income statement did not know how to do like one plus one i was really really bad but to be honest it was just so fascinating the investment world and it's when my father sold his business and he started investing in the stock market with his financial advisors i just saw like the amount of wealth that could have been like that could be built in the financial market on top of the fact that he was actually making way more money uh being retired than having worked at his crazy job crazy hours and so i realized that's exactly what i wanted to see to do for my life and so we started investing very early on my sisters and i with his advisor and later on i kind of took um my own money into the hand and then once i had like 10 years of experience then i took my sisters as well as like my families um and then do you need a finance internship to go into finance i would say you don't need it to be honest a lot of people in private wealth and wealth management you just need to be good at sales all they really care um can you get new clients and do you know a little bit like finance basics i do think though that because it's getting so competitive because it's such an attractive field especially for women because of the flexibility clients are demanding way better information from their advisors and lower fees and so if you're not going to lower your fee you have to be better than everyone else so this is one of the reasons why i got my cfa and my cfp because i wanted to be better than 99.00.96 of the other financial advisors and so you don't need to have a finance internship what i would say though if you can at least get cfa level one i mean everyone's gonna give you a job i mean i would even give you a job to be honest uh because it's just like so valuable um so you don't need a finance internship what people will wanna see is that you can do sales um the other one is did getting the cfa helped me so in the in terms of getting jobs no it did not help me because i got my cfa after getting jobs it did help me when i started my own firm and i wanted to get clients so the cfa actually helped me less than the cfp so if you're in the united states and you're trying to work with regular clients what i mean by regular clients i mean like one to two million right they're not ultra high net worth but they're just like regular people that kind of want to retire um the cfa is not really going to do anything for you but the cfp will um and more and more people are demanding that their financial advisors are fiduciaries they're fee only and that they're um they have the cfp so if you're going to get one or the other i would go with the cfp it is much easier to get regardless less time consuming and i think you're going to get most bang for your buck the cfa is if you have an ego like me and if you want to be better than everyone else um and you like kind of to show off i'm a little bit of a show-off so i think the cfa kind of helped me get that confident that i needed to really put myself out there i don't think i would have been able to kind of start my own business without having the cfa just because of my mental mindset so the cfa didn't get helped me in terms of getting new people it helped me to for my own sake and then i think it just made my business so much more profitable because clients could see my level of confidence and my level of expertise and then other financial advisors would actually bring me in to help them with their investments because you know the cfa is like the gold standard when it comes to investments um all right then you guys talk about my academic journey so you'll be surprised to hear this but i was a terrible student in middle school and in high school i pretty much never liked to study i was pretty like uh i was like i wasn't very like good at math i wasn't good at finance so i didn't get the best grades but it wasn't until i went to business school that i really really liked what i was doing and so i started to just get way better at it then you guys asked about work-life balance i have an amazing work-life balance i mean i pretty much just worked like two to three days a week um and most of that is kind of creating content and staying on top of the markets just staying on top of my clients money uh because the the thing is that i create a lot of content and so i get clients through my content so i don't have to cold call or do anything weird like that they kind of just come to me which is why i have way more time on my hands than i did when i had to like cold call um then you guys asked me um my favorite part about the job i love helping clients like most of my clients are younger women um in their late 20s and 30s and they want to get like started investing and doing that but then i have a level of clientele that is like older more high net worth clients that just are divorced and they're like oh my god i don't know what i'm doing i'm so scared about the markets this is really confusing and so i really enjoy helping them you know talking about the markets with them staying on top of the new investment strategies that's one of my favorite parts of the job um then let's see do i feel appreciated about my from my job and my clients and do i get to choose my clients all of my clients really i mean i hope they appreciate me it's a really win-win there's been some clients in the past or new prospects that i just didn't think it was a good fit so we ended up parting wades and we didn't work together um so i just didn't yeah i um those clients did not become clients and it has to be a win-win like i'm at that age where i'm not will i'm 32 and i'm not willing to sacrifice my mental health for a bad client so i have to appreciate my clients and my clients have to appreciate me most of my clients are all very successful women that either have built businesses or that are divorced and have gotten a lot of money and just they don't know anything about investing because that's why they're good at their job because they're not focusing on you know being good at something that they should like they should be focusing on their job not folk and like let me handle their finances and their investments i think everyone should have a level of basic expertise but to be honest if you're gonna be working and like learning way too much about finances it's just gonna be a waste and then and then do i like financial advising abso freaking lutely i mean this is a job that i'm gonna do probably for the rest of my life um and then how has my life changed since i started well i feel so much more i've always loved the jobs right morgan stanley goldman jp morgan credit suisse they all treated me amazing but when you have your own business it's so much fun it's like your baby you're and then i'm like i'm also able to say whatever the hell i want right like i can swear and i it's the only people that i report to are my clients um and my clients understand that i kind of have like a big mouth um but i just feel like i can be myself and i'm not embarrassed and before i feel i felt like i was always censored um so that's one of the things that i think wins over having your own business but you also you know it's a lot of you know stress i mean there's days i don't sleep because i'm stressed out about my clients and i just want to make sure they are okay and so you know i take on the stress for them um and then am i ever gonna switch careers most likely not i might um start new cur like new businesses um and invest in other businesses that's definitely something that i like especially because i have a lot of friends that are creating new businesses so i really like that um and then what do you think is the best cities for financial advisors i would say a lot of cities are great because you can pretty much work remote now um new york city is obviously the hub for finance um and especially especially if you want to work with international clients new york city and miami are like international client hub um so we had a lot of mexican clients from there um but boston is really awesome if you want to get those like really rich biotech executives like the ceos and things like that um and it's much more like old money and then what motivates me just helping clients build passive income like i really want to help them have so much financial security that they can start their own company and then why did i become a financial advisor honestly it was very random my dad sold his business and he started to invest i saw the amount of money that he was making investing with his financial advisor and i wanted to do it and i did an internship at jpmorgan loved it and then just switched careers pretty much why i became a financial advisor and then who inspires me when it comes to investing my two favorite investors three i have three is phil fisher he's a growth investor william o'neill and obviously warren buffett uh i think warren buffett is just such a good person like such a down-to-earth human being so smart and like just so good with people i'm just i'd love to meet him right he's 92 i would love to meet him and then do i have to travel internationally for work yes and that's one of my favorite parts right i'm going to be traveling in the next month and i'm going to be actually seeing new clients there in spain which is great because i get to travel and i get to enjoy my time with amazing clients so yes i love i do get to travel that's my favorite part of the job and then how many clients do i work with per month so right now we have about so i'll work usually for like with like four or five new clients per month like a one time um and then i have like my recurring clients that are like more like longer term um so that's about like 20 clients or so and then um how many clients does a team handle at once or does a financial advisor handle at once so i would say that most people will um will handle between one financial riser will handle between 50 to 100. if you go over 100 you're probably gonna have very bad service and if you can handle 100 they have to be young and very self-sufficient and very low maintenance so i would say if you want to handle a financial like a really good team like say that you won a really profitable financial advisor practice i would go for 50 clients at two million dollars each and that way you can actually handle all of them yourself make a million dollars a year after taxes you're probably left with like half a million and like expenses and things like that um so that's what i would do if i were you right get 50 clients that you really enjoy for two million bucks each or something like that um and because if you have 100 you're probably gonna need an assistant and then how important is math to financial advisors zero you don't need to know any math um to get a job in the financial advisor frill like they don't ever ask you math all they really must ask you is do you have a network and do you know rich people so you don't need it and then do you like your job post going abso frequently yes because i actually get to work with clients in texas in california and and colorado and south carolina and boston like all over the place because it's just better so overall i think being a financial advisor is one of the best jobs in the world because it's very not only is it just so rewarding to work with people but not only it's rewarding it's very lucrative if you actually do a good job and that's why i really advise you guys to get the cfp and get the cfa and if this is something that you like and you want to do long term because it's just an amazing job where you can just cater to people and really get to know people throughout their life and it's amazing work-life balance and it's just one of the best jobs from a like just happiness perspective and i wouldn't have it any other way so i hope that was helpful please let me know if you guys have any questions and i'll talk to you guys next time bye