04-13-2016, 01:19 PM
(04-13-2016, 12:43 PM)Au165 Wrote: Many have been through actual financial advisors, not their cousin Ted. Some of them were very legitimate franchises and such that just didn't work. Some were good investments on paper, but bad management of the company sank their money. Any venture capitalist will tell you that almost 75% of the companies they fund eventually fail. You win by having one or two really win, but these sports guys can't afford to take a couple losses like these big firms can.
This was just based around the investment in companies comment someone made earlier. The reality is if they wanted to live off 60k a year they could take all the money and move it into a safe low return investment strategy. However, they are human and it's tough for any human to change their standard of living severally after becoming accustomed to a certain way. I'm not talking spending millions a year, but to go from spending 200k a year to 60k a year is a big lifestyle change. They tend to have to take on riskier investments to try and maintain a high standard of living.
It is not unique to football players really, look at the population as a whole. Most are grossly under prepared for their requirement.
I agree that they are completely unprepared for life in many cases. I think part of that is on the NCAA and the NFL, but I also think a lot of it is on them. You're on a college campus, take some finance courses. A very good friend of ours is a Financial Advisor who has two current and one former Tampa Bay players as clients. The client who is retired spent about 10 years in the league. His wife actually took finance courses in college because they knew they were going to have a short window to make money and wanted it to last. They live in Orlando, and besides investing in stocks and bonds own a decent amount of commercial real estate downtown. Both of the current players spend like mad... "send $10k per month to my cousin that I grew up with". I know that Marcos would also tell them not to invest in any type of franchise.
My main point was that if you play 3-4 years in the league, and you were not a first round draft pick, then you need to make plans for life after football. You can't support everyone you ever knew (they should respect you enough not to ask) and you can't "retire" at the age of 26. There are A LOT of opportunities afforded these guys... take advantage of them. Regardless, never ever go on social media and talk about money... the bulk of society cannot even fathom what these guys make, so all it is going to do is breed contempt.
