How to leave Bank of America, live in Bali, then work from home

It's Friy-ay and if it seems you might want to leave banking, live in Bali, and return to London to work in finance adjacent roles from home, we would like to let you that this is all a possibility. 

Meena Sadeghi has done it.

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Sadeghi spent five years working in investment banking for Bank of America in London before leaving in 2021. She briefly got a job working on Amazon roll-ups in the e-commerce space before being made redundant. She went to Bali for seven months, came back to London, and has been working on a contract basis for private equity firms, corporates and start-ups ever since.

Sadeghi now describes herself as "Nomad Advisory" and she is self-employed. It sounds a fair alternative to the corporate grind. "I’m more focused on how I work - I do my best work in high-trust environments where I’m judged on output," says Sadeghi. "Most of my roles over the last few years have been remote-first."

 Sadeghi's new modus operandi wasn't a foregone conclusion. When she first lost her job at the Amazon consolidator, she got a private equity job offer and considered studying an MBA. But she turned down the private equity job offer because she wanted to make a more considered move instead of "just following what comes next." And she forewent the MBA because it would cost $250k, when what she really wanted was "a break from finance and a change of environment." - "I realised I didn’t need an MBA for that,"  Sadeghi says on LinkedIn. She booked the one way ticket to Bali instead. 

Speaking to us, Sadeghi says she mostly needed space to think. "I’d already done investment banking and the roles post-MBA were the same ones I could already access.” She adds that it's becoming acceptable to take time out to recalibrate: “The idea that you need to move straight from one role to the next is starting to break - more people are questioning the default path.”

Sadeghi says time on the beach has become more acceptable. “It used to be about your CV - now it’s about how you think and how you operate. People are looking for judgment, initiative, and what you’ve done outside structured roles, not just which bank you worked at.”

Writing on LinkedIn, she also claims to heard a KKR partner saying that simply working at Goldman Sachs won't get you a job in private equity now. You need to do "something different" and to have "stories that nobody else has." 

If you want to leave banking now and maybe work in private equity in the future, seven months in Bali may therefore still be a good thing. Presuming you can get there amidst fuel shortages due to the war.

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