WHY DO ROUGHLY 60% OF FORMER NBA PLAYERS GO BROKE WITHIN 5 YEARS OF RETIREMENT?
It’s a pretty damning statistic on the state of the NBA, and no doubt other sports will have players who go broke extremely quickly after retiring.
Unsurprisingly, if you give someone a lot of money without properly guiding them and teaching them how to invest, save and most importantly, say no, you’ll probably end up seeing them struggling financially.
And that’s exactly what we saw in this 2009 article. Despite it being somewhat outdated, the premise still holds strong today.
According to the article, the athletes /ex-athletes are “sucked into bad investments, stalked by freeloaders, saddled with medical problems, and naturally prone to showing off, many pro athletes get shocked by harsh economic realities after years of living the high life.”
It’s also important to keep in mind that a lot of the money earned, in a fairly small time frame, so mix that in with bad business decisions and a lack of financial knowledge, and you’re in for a rough ride…
Is anything being done about this? Well. The NBA has introduced financial literacy classes for Rookies entering the League and also has a fund set up to help former NBA players going through rough times, i.e. with paying rent or feeding their families.
Lots of ex-players say the one thing they had learned early on was learning to say “no”.