How to save a fortune
I don’t consider myself particularly business-savvy, but in light of former Celtic star Antoine Walker’s financial troubles, I thought I’d throw out a potentially lucrative idea for the League’s would-be financial gurus.
Every few months, it seems we read another story about an athlete who manages to piss away a fortune in career earnings. Every few months, we incredulously ask ourselves, “How did he manage to blow all that money?”
To be honest, I find guys like Walker pretty sympathetic (granted, I’m not a Celtics fan). Players from low-income backgrounds are probably less financially literate than your average working stiff. The single-minded pursuit of a professional sports career also makes it difficult to acquire basic life skills. And as the article on Walker makes clear, getting awarded a $100 million contract doesn’t exactly incentivize careful money-management.
So why don’t more athletes outsource their savings and investment decisions? I’m sure individual players have brokers and advisers, but as a group, I think professional athletes would benefit from some very specialized financial assistance.
Top tier pros are generally well paid and financially ignorant. Shouldn’t there be a financial organization that caters to this demographic? An outfit that gives these guys a generous monthly allowance for partying and womanizing but also ensures they set aside money for retirement, injury-related complications, their kids’ college funds, and big purchases down the road? Your clientele would be pretty limited, but I imagine you’d earn a fat commission for some competent financial oversight. I also suspect that in this context, “competent financial oversight” is a pretty easy service to provide. I mean, how hard can it be to set up a few lucrative, low-risk investment portfolios for millionaire athletes?
But they do outsource their savings and investment decisions; they outsource to smooth-talking hustlers who tell them what they want to hear, just as they outsource their medical advice to doctors with a ready needle. Do you remember an old PBS soaper about the abdication of King Edward VIII? The viewer came away understanding that the King never fully understood what he had done to himself until after he was out of office, i.e., until it was too late. And this was so because he kept nobody around who would tell him the truth.Report
Right, so isn’t there an opening for a credible financial organization that isn’t on the hustle? You’d figure that players and agents would get wise to these guys eventually.Report
We’re talkin’ past each other. They do hire the advisers they want to hire–advisers who feed their narccissism and keep them up to their elbows in broads and good drugs. Worked for the King, works for them. A few years back I heard about an organization of football players’ mothers–recognizing themselves as the only ones who could speak truth to their
littlebig heroes and get away with it.ReportThere are tons of capable legitamit financial advisors out there. The problem is there is no way to force these suddenly millionair youths to use their services. Maybe the Players Union could try and require some sort of financial advising for at least a little while. But lets face it, we’re talking about young men who’ve suddenly been handed the world on a platter. Plus a lot of them have harsh backgrounds that have left them distrustful, egotistical and posessing a huge chip on their shoulder. It’s hard to convince a young thug that he needs help taking care of his cash.Report
Why should they be “forced”? They are all adults last time I checked. Besides, the Players Union is not a nanny. If they really wanted help form their union then the union would already provide it.Report
That was somewhat my point Scott. The resources are available for them to safeguard their fortunes. Easily. But barring coercion by some entity these players are just not inclined by circumstance or temperament to seek it out. I am indifferent to whether there actually -should- be such forcing. But as a person who is indifferent to professional sports and mildly annoyed by the scale of the salaries they make I really don’t have a dog in the fight. I’ll admit to a minor degree of Schadenfreude when reading stories like this.Report
So let them fail and go bankrupt, who cares? I need a good laugh every now and then.Report
Let’s spend a million bucks right here. Hurray! A million bucks.
Okay, first we pay off mom’s house (ching!), let’s pay off our spouse’s mom’s house (ching!), let’s pay off our best bud’s house (ching!) and let’s pay off our spouse’s best bud’s house (ching!), and let’s go to Disneyworld with everybody including the kids.
And we now have enough money left to… what? Go to Carl’s Jr?Report
Put another way, money is never as much as you think it is.
Another observation I’ve noticed since growing somewhat older, when I was a kid making 10 bucks an hour and my wife was making just under 7 bucks an hour, we *ALWAYS* had money in our pockets and we could do a great deal at the drop of a hat. Wanna go up to Boulder? 20 minutes later, we were in the car. Wanna go down to Pueblo? All you need is a tank of gas and a carton of smokes. There was a double-buttload of freedom. Of course, we wanted much, much smaller stuff so while we could do whatever we wanted, we had shockingly small wants… which allowed us to always have money in our pocket.
Now I make more than 10 bucks an hour. Now the wife makes more than 7. And we usually have to consult when we purchase something bigger than $20. We have a mortgage now, and a vow to never never never carry a balance on our credit cards (which we are keeping), and four cats, and all this responsibility… and it feels like we never have money in our wallets. I don’t know if we could go up to Boulder in December if we started planning it tonight.
It seems from here that actually having stuff has resulted in our wants growing exponentially and our means growing linearly. For us to do everything we want to do now, we’d need 8 figures. Back then, all we needed was a tank of gas and a carton of smokes.Report
Some fairly smart people have been done in by their finance professionals, proving once again that (a) this is another of those fields you simply cannot leave entirely to the pros; and (b) if someone has money in his pocket, somebody else is trying to get it out.
Have heard it said, though I can hardly prove it, that the suits in the entertainment biz like it when the stars burn through their stash because it keeps them docile and dependent.
This thread seems to have scratched a lot of scabs.Report
Actually, NBA rookies do have this covered during Transition Week: http://www.nba.com/news/rtp_030919.html
I had read somewhere else about how it includes advice on how not to be swindled by both friends and hucksters.Report
It’s a cultural thing that is hard to overcome. Watch MTV cribs sometime. The rock stars will have nice homes that clearly aren’t cheap but it ends there. The sports guys (and the rappers) will have gold plated tubs and a fridge filled with Dom. That’s where the money goes.Report
If I recall correctly, Jack Clark is white.Report
If I was a Democrat I would tell you how racist your comment sounds, but I’m not so I will agree with you.Report
As Mike says, I think the issue is cultural rather than race-related. I mean, does anyone think that Kid Rock is going to be financially solvent 10 years from now?Report
(Trying to walk a fine line here) I think we can all agree that black cultural is generally more homogenous than white culture so, in that respect, it IS a cultural thing, but it’s also a specifically black cultural thing.
Does Kid Rock probably spend way too much money on things? Yeah. Do I think he will be less well-off than Jay-Z in 10 years? Probably, but I suspect he already is because Jay-Z makes a LOT of money and has a wife who also makes LOTS of money. What I’m specifically referring to is when you see a guy who did backing vocals on two tracks for Jaz-Z, gets 1% of the royalties and then buys a mansion bigger than the Whitehouse. Or the NBA player that got a pretty nice signing bonus and has the potential to make some serious ka-ching down the road, but goes ahead and spends like Michael Jordan. Do white people ever act this way? Of course. But I think it’s fair to say it’s slightly less of a problem.Report
I can’t seem to leave this thread alone. Another cultural but not racist angle is lottery winners. Many (most?) public lotteries do everything they can to keep winners from taking lump some payouts (e.g., horrendously unfavorable discount rates). Most get their hands on lump sum payouts anyway, and are broke after a few years.Report
In fairness Bruce they do plenty to disadvantage the annuity option to. For instance lets say I win ten million and choose annuity. If I die three months later my estate doesn’t get one additional red cent. Horrible discount rates or not cash in the hand is worth far far more more than the possability of loosing almost all of it.Report
Might be fun to put together a counter catalogue of celebs who did not blow it. Paul Newman & Joanne Woodward leading the boring UMC life in Connecticut. Irene Dunne retiring at 50 to do charity work. The computer zilli0naire (I am blocking his name) who moved the family to Maine so the kids would grow up on a working sheep farm. Actually, I suspect this list would get long quite quickly.Report
I believe Ginger Baker spent several years in the English countryside building furniture.Report
Hand me 50 million dollars and I’ll probaly have 48-47 million 50 years from now.
But that is because I am cheap like an old man and the thing I wish I had the most was the ability to sleep in.Report
One of the few good things I can say about Scott Boras is that he helps his clients manage their money in sensible and conservative ways.Report