The Cynical Career Counsellor Predicts Your Future as a

Financial Planner

Investments? Let's see your transcript. Hmm... it's pretty clear you aren't going to be getting an honors degree in economics, but I think you'll be able to eventually work in this field. You'll be a financial planner.

You won't do it at first. Like most financial planners, you'll piss away the first eight to ten years after high school taking a variety of different community college courses--none of which lead to anything and most of which you drop before completion--and you'll try your hand at all manner of unskilled and semi-skilled jobs. You may be the guy at the cell-phone kiosk; you get to wear a suit and pretend to be professional, or maybe you'll work as a travel agent. It will be about jobs where you can act like you're white collar without actually having any real academic qualications and where you can fake your way through your day with a mediocre grasp of the fundamentals of your business.

Eventually after you achieve little more than a bad credit rating you'll decide to try yet another comission-based career, and that will begin your foray into the world of financial planning. You'll go to a weekend training seminar and be given a very basic introduction to the field, and then sent home with books and videos which you'll intend to read but never get through. All you will bother to learn is how to pitch the investment products and collect your comissions.

Transglobanationalamericorp Securities and Investments will provide you with glossy brochures with meaningless graphs and then you will enter the lonely world of the "cold call". You will go through your personal phone book and harass every friend and acquaintance you've ever had to let you come and give them a "free no-obligation financial consultation". Only the lonely elderly ones will let you visit; dozing through your prattle about some prospectus that even you don't understand is small price to pay to have someone finally listen to the stories of their latest hip replacement surgeries.

Luckily for you, some of these old folks will actually have money to invest, and you soon realize that soliciting the nearly dead is your best chance for success. After some time you realize that your beater Geo is not a suitable base for operations and you lease a small mall office you can't afford but gives you a more substantive presence in the community. This move begins to widen your client base and soon you can afford to hire a secretary and add a few more suits to your wardrobe.

Unfortunately, there are two pitfalls that destroy most ill-educated financial planners: stock market crashes and corporate crime. One or the other will come eventually, and whether it's an unprecedented downturn in the market that instantly halves the worth of all your clients' investments or simply the sordid tale of some corporate executives who vanish to obscure tropical islands after siphoning off almost all your clients' assets, you will never see it coming until it's too late.

There's a reason that the only people who are described by the adjective "registered" are financial planners and sex offenders. It's because when something awful happens, the lynch mob needs to know where to easily find you. You will have assured your clients that they are protected by the "International Investment Insurance Fund" which you discover too late is merely a phone recording in Nigeria.

You'll be thankful for your office's back door when your secretary informs you that the angry clients have arrived. You escape and get out of town as the unhappy investors have to satisfy themselves with trashing your office and defacing your photograph. Unfortunately you too had tied up most of your savings in the same funds you pushed on your clients, so you have no nest egg with which to finance your flight to Belize.

Your clients never recover most of their money, but they do develop a phone tree to make sure they inform each other when it's your shift at the drive through window and they all are sure to show up with their cups of urine to toss your way in memory of your financial planning career.