I am 32 years old and have been working in finance since 2005. I have a BA in Political Science and Communications Studies, (terrible choices of majors btw.) I’m currently working at a call center in a cube farm selling mutual funds, ETFs and managed accounts. About 80% of my time is making phone calls, which I don’t really mind, but I’ve been doing it so long I feel like a dummy for failing to develop a better skill set. 20% of my time is working with inbound calls, which I like a lot better, plus I get a lot more clients that way.
My current income is 59k with salary and bonus, my wife’s is around 80k plus a potential bonus that seems like a long shot. Additionally she does some contractor work on the side for her prior employer, if she stays with that it would bring in an extra 5k this year. To sum it all up, having a pretax income of around 140k to 145k
A friend of mine at work asked me about my career plan and reminded me that I don’t want to be him, sitting there at age 40 working the same job. Our SVP has said he wouldn’t consider hiring someone as a manager without prior management experience. However, there aren’t any roles as team lead or anything like that would lead to becoming a manager so I’m stuck if I stay here. I’m ready for something different but don’t know what that would be.
I’ve considered trying to sit for the CPA exam. I’ve taken 2 accounting courses and had straight As in both of those. I would need an additional 24 credit hours, plus studying for the exam itself in order to take the exam. Currently I can only take 3 credit hours a semester and work this full time job, so it will be about 3 years before I can take the exam if I go to school year round. My wife has been extremely supportive and said that if my job ever gets to be too stressful I can always quit my and go back to school full time if I wanted to.
Now I’m just trying to decide what to do. My questions would be:
• Are there any CPA’s on this board and would you recommend trying to become a CPA now?
• Other than just enjoying the courses or not, is there a good way to test if I would like being an accountant? Or if I would be any good at it? I’ve found that school smarts don’t always match up with real world experiences.
• Instead of just taking courses at my community college, would it make more sense to try to get into some sort of master program? I’m a bit reluctant to do that primarily because of the expense. I would likely need to get pre-requisites at the community college anyway.
Any comments or links you could provide to direct me would be greatly appreciated.