Thoughts From the Finance Factory

I hope this post doesn’t find you too late but summer is finally here and we all know what that means! VACATION! Along with vacation comes the dreaded tradition that too many of us fall into summer overspending.

525,600 minutes! That’s how much time is in 1 year. I could have used twice that amount as I was getting Thorium up off the ground. I can’t believe it has already been a year! What a wild and crazy ride it has been but I have survived year number 1. It has not been without its opportunities, excitement, and challenges and upon reflection I now understand so many of the business lessons I had read in books or heard from other experienced entrepreneurs. I understand them now because I have lived so many of them. In honor of that I am going to share 7 lessons I have learned during this first year of independence.

In Part 1 and Part 2 I looked at the common themes that lead to professional athletes having financial difficulty and bankruptcy. At the core the reasons are the same as most people: they spend more than they make and they don’t have a sound financial plan for the assets they do have.

In Part 1 we discussed the first 5 themes I have found in looking at why professional athletes end up broke. I will continue that discussion here with the next 5 themes.

There are lots of sobering statistics about athletes that develop financial difficulties once their playing careers are over. In the NFL 78% of players are bankrupt or in dire financial difficulty within 3 years of their careers ending (Sports Illustrated March 23, 2009). In the NBA it is over 60% (Sports Illustrated March 23,2009). There are a few big questions that I am going to discuss over the next 3 blogs related to this topic. The first two are around the Why and the third is around What can be done to help?

I have had the pleasure of knowing and working with several professional athletes during my career. They are a very unique group of people that have interesting financial challenges that are not unlike those in the working world except that they pack their career earnings in a very short window of time, usually 10 years or less.

April is retirement awareness month here at Thorium and a large focus of the work I do is helping clients work towards their retirement goals.