Financial Literacy

The great desire to achieve financial freedom- which can be interpreted as having the financial resources to afford the lifestyle you wish- can be met by making your money work for you. Investing is one of the key ways to achieve this desire since it allows you to grow your wealth by generating additional income streams to support your lifestyle.

The spending habits of many athletes render them unable to save and invest as much as they should, while still active. Approximately 25% of NFL players report financial difficulties in the first year after retirement and, within two years from their last game, 78% of all NFL players are divorced, bankrupt, or remain unemployed. The real issue is not their spending patterns per se, but rather their approach to money and their failure to realize the implications of their current behavior towards their finances upon their long-term financial well-being.

Living in a material world where we aspire to have and experience the best things in life, the temptation of making impulse purchases on credit can be a trap. Making purchases on credit is a major part of everyday life to the point that it is being frequently abused and may be transformed into excessive unmanageable debt. 

Almost 78% of professional athletes go broke within three years after retirement[1]. Such stellar proportion is a call to action for every professional athlete out there, to educate and surround themselves with competent financial advisors who will create a solid roadmap to financial freedom. Finding the right balance between spending, saving, and investing is a very tricky task and most financial advisors out there will have an opinion about which allocations between the above three comprise the “magic formula”. Truth be told, there’s no such thing as a “magic formula” and the exact percentage of your income that should be allocated between spending, saving, and investing depends on the individual’s risk appetite and goals. There are some basic rules and thresholds which should always be kept in mind when deciding what portion of your income should go into which basket.

The term “financial freedom” means something different to each person.  Many define it as being able to have the lifestyle they want and knowing they can afford it financially, without worrying about paying bills and making ends meet. Financial freedom means that instead of having to work to generate income, you will have your assets working for you and these assets will be generating the income you need to support your desired lifestyle.  In order to attain this goal, it’s important to begin investing as early as possible so that you generate passive income streams instead of having to work for every penny.

Usually, when we hear the word “environment”, the first thing that comes to mind is our ecosystem. However, there is also the artificial environment that we create within our societies that encompasses anything that involves human and social interaction and affects our decisions and our personality.

Athletes particularly the most successful and famous ones have an army of advisers behind them, regulating their every move and advising them on various aspects of their lives ranging from investments to public conduct. Nonetheless, a certain degree of financial literacy is still vital irrespective of how many advisers an athlete has at their back or who those advisers are. At the end of the day, nobody cares as much about your future as you and you should never delegate the handling of your interests entirely to your advisers. Hence, the relationship between financial literacy and your team of advisers should always be seen as complementary and not as substitutive or mutually exclusive.