££ Ching Ching $$
Salaam,
This entry is dedicated to Ms (soon to be Mrs) "Bushraaa" who recently got engaged...! Yippee...! And as a gift, i now add your blog to the selected reads i recommend on the left...lol
With that piece of good news, some other good news (for some..) - last Wednesday was "B-Day" or Bonus day. I'm sure the people in the UK have been reading about the obscene amounts of money people in Banking are earning as the media seem to be obsessed about it all. B day was quite weird as there was a general atmosphere of apprehension all around and as people got called in every half an hour to have their chat and ultimately get told how much they will be getting paid...so all day there were some very happy people wondering around the office...and others who were not so happy (nb graduates get their bonuses in Jul...so i didn't get a share in the pie..!)
Having spent a yr abroad in some very very poor countries, no matter how hard I've been working it never feels like I deserve my pay..ok now it wounds like I earn loads...just to clarify, I don't. The first few years you work pretty crazy and are paid OK, but after a few years when you're actually bringing in money for the company is where you make serious money. But nevertheless having seen certain scenes in Bangladesh etc....sometimes I end up feeling quite sick about the discrepancies in life. Like the guy who I worked for in my internship two years ago got paid....lets say above £9m and below £11m in bonuses....OK, I'm sure he works hard but....! Then you think about what footballers are getting paid and then compare it to nurses and teachers (NOT doctors..!!) ...it's all about supply and demand I suppose as its because 60,000 people are prepared to pay £50 each to go and watch a football match that football players are getting paid £100k per week. And to be fair for every £1 you earn in banking its probably because you made the company £5 i.e. you don't get free money.
Anyway to those who know me and think they will soon be cruising in my ferrari in a few years (ie my fake friends, u know who u r...! Lol) you're be waiting a long time as fortunately/unfortunately I moved divisions last yr so I'm in equity research now which is pretty much the lowest paid division in Banking...i'm not regretting it at the moment as in the first few yrs everyone gets paid similar amounts but in 3yrs + everyone else in other divisions will be racing ahead of me..... I made the move cos in research you can actually have a life outside of work so long term you can have a family life and also in my long term plan I was thinking I would try and get married before I start work or a few years after....so since I had to chose last yr I thought I'd take a risk and go for the division with reduced hours from the outset just in case.....but evidently things didn't work out on the marriage front hence a single Me with evenings and weekends free but emptier pockets. Ahh well who wants to be a millionaire anyway? More money more problems.
Salaam
ps, The Fri after i wrote the above (early last week) i was leaving work and randomly outside the building was my ex-boss who i mentioned above. I was just gonna walk past him as i thought he wouldn't even remember who i was..but he came up to me and was all like "hi, how you doing, nice to see you again...blah blah"...and then basically he said it was a shame i had decided to move divisions but if i wanted to move back to where he worked, for me to let him know and he would sort me out...so maybe i was lying about the ferrari after all...! lol
posted by Me at
4:59 PM
5 Comments:
Salaams! WOW, I feel so special, jazakallah khair for mentioning me and adding me to your links (btw, from where I'm sitting they are on the right not the left, LOL).
I totally agree with less money if it means more family time, but of course it's relative. We are so very blessed, and it's easy to forget that when you're not living amidst the rampant poverty that exists in the third world. InshaAllah khair, I pray that Allah(swt) puts immense baraka in your earnings and that you are able to use them to buy your future wifey wonderful gifts, ameen!
By
bushraaa, at 4:37 AM
isnt working for a bank haram? especially earning bonuses off of pure interest? that is what sunnipath.com says (unless u the cook or security)
By
Anonymous, at 4:59 AM
Ws
Ameen to the latter part of your comment Bushraa, Ameen indeed..lol
Anonymous - thank you for your concern over my earnings, it pleases me that there are muslims out there taking concern over the Islamic welfare of their brethren. As someone once said to me "It's better that one absolves their responsibility and be embarassed today, rather than be held accountable for an action of someone they knew on the day of judgement"
It's funny you mention Sunnipath.com because the issue of the permissability of my job was discussed with Sh. Rabbani directly with him when i was in Amman, and he said there was nothing wrong with it.
I think the main reasoning behind it was because the division i'm in has nothing whatsoever to do with interest. All you are doing is looking in depth into certain companies, forming a view on whether the company will do well or not, and then trying to "sell" this view.
Also Investment Banks in general are very different from conventional banks, something which most people aren't aware of. Investment banks make the bulk of their money from Mergers & Acquistion deals. So when company x buys company y, an Investment Bank will advise one of the companies and get a fee for this. So again nothing really to do with interest.
Obviously there are some divsisions which deal with interest e.g. Debt Capital Markets which deal with loans etc but i think this is akin to asking about the permissability of working in a large supermarket which happens to sell pork and alcohol, even though you work in the grocery dept.
Obviously, in an ideal world no muslim would want to work in a supermarket where there is pork and alcohol being sold. So i once asked Abdul Hakeem Muraad about this analogy wrt to a bank, and he said when it comes to these issues, we have to bear in mind that at the end of the day we are living in a non-Muslim country and if we are really going to be picky about the fact can we work in supermarket because in a corner of the store they are selling some pork, then we should just move back to a Muslims country where our conscience should be more at ease. Specifically re interest, he actually said it was Imam Ghazalis view that in a non-Muslim country the rules of interest are not applicable because interest is so prevalent that you can't completely be clean from it (e.g. whereever you work, the building is probably on a mortgage, the equipment has been bought on credit etc etc). However he did mention though that Ghazali did not formally include this in his writings.
So yeah ideally inshaAllah i'm going to try and move out of coventional Investment Banking and go into Islamic Banking in a few yrs time..so do dua that this works out inshaAllah
Sorry for the long answer, but i'm asked this question quite a lot so i thought being thorough on it would inshaAllah help everyone else who might have been interested in this.
Salaam
By
Me, at 1:54 PM
Eid Mubarak!!!
By
bushraaa, at 9:06 PM
Eid Mubarak to you too...!
Re your first comment...just goes to show that you can be a Cambridge graduate, work in a poncy city firm..but still get your left and right mixed up..lol
Salaam
By
Me, at 7:13 PM
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