The Investment Banking Trap: High Salaries, Low Returns on Life

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Sure, you make a lot of money. But at what cost?

In the heart of New York City, young professionals pour themselves into 100-hour workweeks, bragging about sleepless nights like badges of honor. Many junior bankers also lose their Saturdays too which means they’re putting in even more hours than some blue collar union workers.

The six-figure salary arrives, but so does a receding hairline, a growing gut, and a complete evaporation of anything resembling a personal life. What starts as ambition quickly hardens into a cycle of wage slavery—golden handcuffs that tighten with every bonus check.

Your role becomes increasingly narrow. You spend so much time refining a niche skill set that you miss the bigger picture. You don’t actually learn the breadth of investment strategies available, nor do you get hands-on experience with leverage, hedging, or de-risking in any meaningful way. Ironically, despite being surrounded by capital, many bankers don’t actually learn how to invest. The money they make ends up in passive index funds and ETFs, not because they’re the best option, but because they’re the only ones that compliance allows. Trade restrictions further neuter your freedom—if you’re independently wealthy, you’re effectively handcuffed from deploying your own capital in the ways that could actually build your net worth faster than your salary ever could.

And unlike tech, media, or real estate, investment banking is not scalable. There’s no equity upside. You climb the corporate ladder, but your time remains linearly tied to your income. And you sacrifice your 20s and 30s—your most energetic and experimental years—to a firm that would replace you in a week if you collapsed in the bullpen.

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When Does It Make Sense?

Unless you're an immigrant or coming from real poverty—starting from absolutely nothing—investment banking often doesn’t make sense as a long-term career path. For someone trying to break a generational cycle, it can be a golden ticket: the fastest, most direct route to stability, citizenship, and a six-figure safety net. In that context, the 100-hour weeks and brutal environment are a price worth paying.

If your family owns an investment bank—if your dad is the CEO, your uncle the CFO, your cousin a managing director—you can expect special treatment. You’re not just working the job, you’re protected by the structure. While the rest of the junior class burns out under impossible hours and cutthroat politics, you’ll quietly receive softer reviews, insider mentorship, and invisible leeway that others can’t even see, let alone access—because the game is engineered to preserve dynasties, not reward merit. If you’re not connected, it’s not just demoralizing—it’s maddening. You’ll be working twice as hard to prove yourself, all while watching others glide by on last names and family ties.

But for everyone else—people with even a modest support system, a family they love, close friendships, a community—investment banking is a slow form of isolation. It rips you away from all of those luxuries and convinces you they were distractions. Your parents might live a train ride away, but you’ll go months without seeing them. The college friends who once kept you grounded start to drift, because you're never free. Your days bleed into nights, weekends are stolen, and before you know it, your family becomes your coworkers.

But they’re not really your family—they're your competition. You all share the same cramped floor, the same Slack threads, the same vague ambition to “move up.” But raises are scarce, promotions scarcer, and the camaraderie is a lie. You’ll celebrate a colleague's success knowing it just cost you leverage. In the name of “teamwork,” you become disposable, fungible, and constantly measured.

If you already have a foundation—a life that’s full outside of work—investment banking will systematically erode it. The career only makes sense if there’s nothing to lose. Because once you're in it, you lose everything else.

There’s a smarter way to play this game.

There are situations where investment banking makes sense. If someone is starting from nothing and needs to build wealth quickly, it can be a viable path. But for most people in their early twenties—especially those with even a modest safety net—the tradeoff is steep. Time, energy, relationships, health—those are all more valuable than a paycheck, and once they’re gone, you can’t buy them back.

A better path is to take a job with balance. Keep your evenings. Use that time to build something of your own. Start a business on the side. Invest your savings in high-conviction individual stocks and learn how to use leverage through options and contracts—the very tools investment banks won’t let you touch. Work in an industry adjacent to your startup, gain insight, make connections, and scale gradually. When the time is right, take it public or exit through acquisition. A well-timed IPO or sale can make you a multimillionaire overnight—dwarfing anything you could earn over a decade on Wall Street.

Most bankers don’t last. They burn out, vanish, or pivot out of desperation. The few who do make it to the top often look back wondering if the sacrifice was worth it. Because while investment banking might offer prestige, prestige doesn’t compound. Ownership does.