When you think of portfolio management, images might fill your head of men in suits, on the floor at Wall Street, shouting orders while waving tickets in the air. It calls to mind the stories of companies like Enron and Goldman-Sachs, plagued by corruption scandals. It also makes you think of people who have gotten rich quick by taking one crazy risk on the stock market. Despite these images of wild swings of fortune, the salaries that portfolio managers make are often actually quite stable and predictable. While earning commission does lend some unpredictability to a portfolio management salary, the median salaries aren't too difficult to predict.

How much you earn as a portfolio manager doesn't have too much to do with your level of education. You could simply get your bachelor's degree and, with the right clients and a lot of business savvy on your part, you could still earn a great portfolio management salary. But the problem these days is not earning more money with less education. It's being able to break into the world of portfolio management in the first place. Not only is this field highly competitive and filled with the cream of the academic crop, but clients are becoming more and more educated themselves, so you must have what it takes to convince them that they're better off entrusting their assets and securities to you than to try to manage them themselves.

A bachelor's degree is really the bare minimum if you want to break into the world of portfolio management. If you want to make sure that you earn a solid portfolio management salary, then you really need to consider earning your master's degree in portfolio management. With a master's degree, you'll be taken more seriously, both by potential employers and by potential clients. Getting your master's degree shows that you have an advanced knowledge of portfolio management.

Your base portfolio management salary will range anywhere from $60,000 to $110,000, depending on where you earned your degree, whether or not you have a master's or doctoral degree, and where you earned that degree. If you also have prior experience in the field, you'll earn even more. But you'll also earn commission in addition to your base salary. If you're really good at what you do, you could earn a salary of $150,000 per year, or perhaps more if you get lucky in addition to just being good at your job.

While many people with wealth management needs might be capable of looking after their own investments, most people with this level of wealth would prefer to delegate that task to someone else. That's why a portfolio management can get so high. In order to get the most trustworthy and savvy people to work for you, you've got to pay top dollar in order to make sure that it's worth their while to do their best for you. It's this combination of trustworthiness and savvy that makes a portfolio manager worth his or her salt.