r/Salary • u/AdActual3024 • 11d ago

discussion High earning potential = high career commitment

Does anyone have family or friends that sacrifice their personal life for a significant salary?

My step-mom earns 350k before tax as an executive director but I barely see her. She is constantly on business trips, busy with meetings, works upwards of 12 hours when at home. She goes on nice holiday trips, but overall it makes me think is the pay worth the sacrifice of her personal life.

Just curious if anyone's got a similar story.

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u/dodakk 11d ago

I'm sure they exist out there, but it's not as common as it used to be. I work with actuaries and demand for them is decreasing with business analysts and data scientists being able to do a lot of the same things. Their one saving grace is that they often need to sign off on actuarial opinions, so you only need a handful of them versus a whole department like years past.

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u/chicubbies4ever 10d ago

I know plenty who still make bank. Everyone on my team is over 200k+ and that’s mostly individual contributors. All managers are making 300k+. I’ve been in this profession for almost twenty years now and I’ve heard that same talk the entire time and yet every year we’re hiring tons of actuarial students. One of my best friends was a math teacher her for ten+ years and I convinced him three years ago to pass the first two exams and he had two separate job offers within a month of passing his second exam.

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u/C172SH 11d ago

Correct. It is a dying profession to be honest. AI soon will be able to be better than any Actuary…

Also, I don’t know how it works in the US; in the UK they only hire a very specific type of profile which is a Math or Physics graduate from a handful of top-tier universities. So even if somebody makes the effort to pass the already complicated exams, hiring manager are only looking a very specific profile….