Spanky,
I am in the process now. I am primarily investigating MBA programs, law school, and the related careers.
The biggest problem I have now is that nothing for me just jumps right out at me and says, "Be an <X>!" where X is a firefighter, architect, or what have you. I've been an engineer for a Fortune 500 company for 10 years, and that's been OK so far, but I'm not the kind of person who just thrills at learning the finer points of embedded COM or whatever.
So it's a series of tradeoffs between trying something else I might like more (but not have it be the "love of my life" career-wise) versus time to retirement. I did a rough analysis that said going to law school would have an opportunity cost of about a million dollars in terms of lost wages and tuition compounded over the rest of my working career. Maybe I would make that up in terms of higher salary or not; maybe the increased job satisfaction would be worth it. Or maybe I'd find out being a lawyer would be just as bad or worse than what I do now.
B-school has other issues that I won't go into here. Overall it's a lower-risk, lower-reward choice.
If I could get paid really well for helping others with their financial problems, I'd consider that, whatever "that" is. I don't want to be an investment "salesman" of any kind, and I want whatever I do to be ethically compatible with what I do with my own money. So far the only options I see here are to work for Vanguard in their IT/programming area, or to become a Scott Burns-like financial writer (and I don't like writing too terribly much). Or an estate planning attorney, which sounds interesting.
I personally am taking a lot of time and asking a lot of questions and plan to ask a bunch more. With a family relatively rooted where we are, it's a big decision and I feel I owe it to them.
malakito