The headlines are full of celebrities & athletes who blow through their millions and often end up broke. They live an indulgent & colorful lifestyle that quickly catches up with them.
That’s why it’s great to see a colorful character like Chad “Ochocinco” Johnson, who managed to save 80% of his NFL career earnings. To save money he even lived at the Cincinnati Bengals’ stadium his first two years in the NFL!
Great Story … CNN: NFL Receiver Johnson Lived In Stadium
Hopefully some emerging NFL players follow Johnson’s lead. Bleacher Report just had an article bemoaning the fact that 78% of players are broke of under significant financial stress.
Image Credit: Wikipedia
MrFireStation 
There seems to be two paths that people who grow up poor seem to take. One is the path where they try to make up for the material goods they didn’t have when they were young by overindulging AKA over spending. Texas has a good name for this path, “All hat, not cattle.”
The other path is those who have the foresight to save so that they avoid having to relive their poor childhoods, ever again. I remember reading when I was in my 20s an article about are you buying “guns or butter” with your money and decided I would spend my extra money on ‘guns’ which is really financial armaments (investing) versus bling, bling.
Ochocinco’s good financial stewardship in the NFL is likely representative of the US population at large. The majority of people live in fear of missing out (FOMO). Few realize that they can live a reasonable lifestyle, and sock away the rest to feather their nests.
There are some coaches who have put in place mentoring programs for their young men to help them become successful adults. These coaches teach their players to avoid out of wedlock pregnancies, personal finance, and how to stay out of trouble with the law. In many cases they are being the father figure that many of their young players lacked in their lives growing up. Urban Meyer, at the dreaded Big 10 rival is one name that comes to mind. Coach Knight is another example of someone who took pride in having the highest college graduation rate of any major university basketball program during his tenure at IU. Note I didn’t refer to him as “Bobby” and referred to him by his proper title?
We live in a country that needs to have a financial revival.
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Good points. The NFL has a financial literacy symposium for rookie players, but it clearly doesn’t do the job. This article notes that 15.7% of NFL players are bankrupt 12 years after starting their career. That’s 52x higher than the general population (0.3%). Shocking. https://www.igradfinancialwellness.com/blog/NFL-Not-Doing-Enough-to-Educate-Players-about-Financial-Literacy
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Joe Burrow, QB for the Cincinnati Bengals completed an undergraduate degree in Family Finance at Ohio State in three years and was able to transfer to LSU where he got playing time, a Heisman Trophy, and graduated with a Masters. Sounds like he has a great background.
As a contrast, my middle son went to a parochial high school that was salting its football team by recruiting athletes from South Central LA. Most of the athletes only paid attention to athletics and did not take advantage of the education that the school offered. There was one gent named Marvel, who did pay attention in school and was denigrated by the other Black athletes for acting too white and was told, “Who do you think you are? Frederick Douglas?” Quite ironic that they were trying to put Marvel down by calling him Frederick Douglas, who was a stand up historical figure.
Only one student athlete made it to the NFL. It was Marvel, who had an education to fall back on. The school soon after changed its scholarship program with the expectation that all scholarship recipients have to maintain a B average.
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It sounds like in Marvel’s case, there is a horrible cultural issue. That’s hard to escape, but credit to those that do.
Good to hear about Burrow. He’s my Fantasy Football QB. I signed him to an expensive six year contract!
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Cool article. I always thought Chad Johnson was a pretty cool player and now I’m even more impressed. Now with the NIL money flowing to players in college, these lessons are even more critical.
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Good point – the $$$ that college players are now starting to receive is very substantial. Good to see them be rewarded, but they’ll have even less experience with big $$$. Some of the, already earning multi-million dollars a year.
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