The line between amateur athletes and professional athletes is blurred. It used to be: · One is paid · One is not paid Today it is: · Both are paid · Each are paid in different ways Welcome to the ever-changing world of amateur sports, where players are (finally) compensated for the revenue they bring to their schools. Something that has taken far too long but has provided athletes today with financial opportunities not seen by previous players. Those

"I am sure your phone will be ringing with opportunities." This is what I was told. The phone never rang...I had to pick it up and call. That was my reality. This was the start of my transition out of professional baseball. To understand this you have to know where I was coming from: I had played professional baseball for 11 years. I had started when I was just 18 and now I was 29. I had thought this baseball thing would last forever. So there I was 29 years old, no one calli

The day I had waited 18 years for had come, yet instead of excitement, I felt this wave of unknowns. You know, that feeling you get when a big moment is on the horizon but you also realize the stakes are as high as possible. That was me on draft morning in 2009. Now look, I would say I had a better education on the MLB draft than most potential draftees and I still felt that way. I had three high school coaches who were 10-year big leaguers with one, Andy Benes, having been t

Ok, let's be real: hiring a qualified financial advisor as a professional athlete feels like finding a needle in a haystack. It is estimated there are more than 300,000 financial advisors (loose term) in the United States today. Some are ok Some are bad Some are good Few very are qualified to help professional athletes Look, let's eliminate the handful of financial advisors that are not doing good work. That leaves us with a handful of financial advisors that are good people

You just had one of the best days of your life. You officially signed the big contract. You now have more money than you ever thought possible. More money in a year than most make in a lifetime. What if I told you 78% of professional athletes go broke within a couple years of retiring? I know what you are thinking...that would never happen to me. The reality is, it could be you if you don't plan from the start. In this blog, I am going to walk through the reasons professional

You have the greatest superpower paired with a laundry list of disadvantages. Welcome to investing for professional athletes. Let's start with the good. You have time. The average athlete has their peak earning years in their early to mid 20's. That means you have decades to invest those earnings and let them compound. No seriously consider what that provides you, here is a visual of that power: $2,000,000 invested at an 8% return for decades You know you can't have the good

“You are doing great.” This was the line my financial advisor used to tell me as an 18-year-old kid. I was a kid who had just received millions of dollars overnight, had zero understanding of money, and was craving more. Quite frankly, I was searching for more than “you are doing great”. I wanted the confidence to understand what I could spend or better yet what I should spend. You see even then I knew that money was a tool, all I could think about was running out of it. So,

Picture this, you are on a rocket ship but with limited fuel. It is fun while it lasts but you need to plan now for when the fuel runs out. This is exactly what it looks like for professional athletes. Athlete wealth management is as much art as it is science. It is a combination of understanding the nuances and having deep expertise to help professional athletes manage, protect, and build wealth to last decades. I know this world because I lived this. I was the 9th overall p

When you are dealing with investment portfolios we are talking about matters of opinions vs matters of fact. Our goal when we construct portfolios is to leave as little up to chance as possible. After all, the fewer variables there are the better we can predict the outcome. So how do you eliminate variables in an investment portfolio? You need to simplify your thinking. We simply investment portfolios into 3 fundamental buckets. The War Chest – The bucket that we have for pe

One of the hardest things to do as an athlete is to make money playing sports. Learn the dos and don'ts of picking a financial advisor.