Athletes (and everyone else) Need Financial Coaches too

(And real estate coaches!)

Without a doubt, one area of coaching most athletes need help with is managing their financial affairs. A huge number of highly paid players are broke at the end of their careers or within five years thereafter.

Know what the no. 1 thing in life is? Love? Money? Fame? Success? Nope, none of the above. It’s trust.

Every player has people around him or her (agents, friends, family, hangers-on, lawyers, accountants, entourage and sock people) who have can’t-miss business propositions. It’s nothing to blow a million dollars these days on a new failed bar or restaurant not to mention millions more on dubious loans, failed marriages, stupid business models, inflated property purchases in multiple cities…

Sports teams should make a more concerted effort to educate their players in this regard and players should never designate control over their financial affairs to anyone but themselves. Having said that, they need to find financial advisers that actually know what they are doing.

Remember, even if you have $10 million cash in your bank account at the end of your career, invested in t-bills at say 1.1% per annum, this is only $110,000 per year before tax. So if a decent financial planner can goose his or her returns to even just 3 or 4% without doing anything stupid, that’ll make a huge difference to the athlete’s post-retirement lifestyle.

BTW, exactly the same advice applies to the average working person– about life, about trust and about financial planning. 

Now I should add that in some research I did a few years ago, 61 of the top 100 richest Canadian families had all or substantially all their wealth invested in real estate so I believe that real property should form part of anyone’s financial planning. That’s why I wrote, Real Estate Investing Made Simple and why I am doing a free webinar called: How to Get Rich, Slow. It’s also why I do real estate coaching. How’s that for shameless self promotion?

@profbruce