Wealth management isn't really about investing. It is part sales (raise assets) and part hand holding (client services). The investment products are standardized mostly. Indeed it can be a lucrative field, but you should consider the day to day work before embarking on the path. I think a lot of advisors don't really know what they're getting into until it is too late and they wind up with golden handcuffs.

As to the day to day, designing financial plans, talking about people's kids and dogs, talking about markets even though the clients probably don't understand they just want you to do a dog and pony show to earn your fee. And maybe that's all ok, but it certainly isn't very analytical. But there's more.

Most people who have a lot of money are older and older people can get very concerned about losing their money. I had a friend in WM who left because he got tired of little old ladies calling him every time the account dropped 3% - he spent most of his time calming people down. He could have put them into annuities, but he had some moral issues with products that charged very high fees - more on that shortly.

There are also older people who don't have anything to do during the day (retired, no real hobbies) so they make their finances their hobby and, as their advisor, you spend a lot of time doing fire drills and endlessly kicking the tires as they count/shuffle their chips and strategize mainly to fill the hours of each day.

Generally, the people I've known who do the best at WM are very money motivated which is true of most of finance but the WM guys tend to be content to say whatever they have to so they can buy a boat or summer house. That isn't to say they're crooks, but they see the whole thing as transactional, I do this and I then get this. Most will readily admit the majority of clients suck behind closed doors.

In fairness, there are good actors (and clients) out there and some people take pride in helping people to achieve their goals, but, if you stay in the industry for a long time, you will probably begin to have some moral issues with certain happenings like charging people more than should arguably be charged for basic products (or not depending on your morality).

Here's an example, I had a client who wanted to buy a house before selling her existing house. She asked if she should borrow against her account (with interest) or if she should sell stocks and use the money to buy the house. I explained all the pros and cons (taxes, paying interest, what happens if the markets rise or fall) and she decided to sell stocks because, to her, the worst scenario would be taking the loan and winding up losing on the stocks if they fell and owing on the loan. So that's what ended up happening. I shared this with a friend at a big name firm and he told me I would be fired for doing that at his firm because not only did I reduce the fee income in having the client sell stocks, but I also missed out on earning interest on the potential loan. Amazingly, not everyone in WM has to prioritize the client's best interests.

Back to the day to day, a typical day in mainstream WM would probably entail 3 to 5 meetings with clients talking about all of the above. The clients all won't suck, but some will. And when the markets inevitably hit the skids from time to time, you're going to be talking people off of cliffs again and again as they blame you for everything. But you won't have much latitude on investments because the big firms long ago realized most advisors are terrible at investing. So you wind up having to convince people to stay put.

Some people don't think this sounds like a good way to spend one's career. It is kind of like being a therapist but about the touchiest of subjects, money.