I disagree whole-heartedly. IME, the only correlation between good and bad money management and growing up is how well your role-models handled it. And that doesn’t even always apply.
I know of plenty of trust-fund kids that are lucky someone else manages their trust fund.
Well, that’s sort of what I was getting at. If you grow with at least a few people in your life who are solidly middle class – and able to stay that way because they have reasonable attitudes about money – then there’s a good chance that you’ll be socialized into (some) appropriate money-managing behaviors. This hypothetical Sapp Jr.: his father sucks with money, but he went to good schools and lived in nice neighborhoods. His friends all come from families with money, and he can glean from those families how one is supposed to handle wealth. Moreover, having cash isn’t new to him, so, unlike a poorer person, he won’t be gobsmacked when he suddenly has a large sum in his bank account.
Obviously growing up with money correlates with being good at handling it, but causation runs both ways. Yes, part of it is that you’re learning from your parents, and if they’re good with money they’ll be more likely to have some of it. But, also, being poor tends to instill in people poor money-managing habits. Partly this is just a lack of experience and the skills that come with it. It’s also partly a matter of perspective: if you’ve always experienced money as something that hits your checking account (or, shudder, the check cashing store) and then is immediately bled away so you can pay your bills and scrape by, then you might grow to (subconsciously) see money as inherently transitory. It’s perishable, so you’d better make the most of it before it vanishes.
And besides, the strategies and attitudes that make someone near the poverty line “good with money” don’t necessarily translate well into making an affluent person “good with money.” The two are hardly completely separate, but nor are they completely similar.
That, also, is sort of what I was getting at. Someone growing up wealthy is likely to understand the value of having a legitimate professional handle their money, even if they, themselves, couldn’t multiply 1.07 by $10,000. Some 19 year old who just got made a Top 10 NBA draft pick, OTOH, is distressingly likely to trust his paycheck to broke, dumb-ass Uncle Bob, because, shit, I don’t know about this money stuff, and he says I need someone I can trust to look out for me.
(All of these are generalities, nothing is set in stone, etc. Among my friends, the one who’s most knowledgeable and responsible with money comes from “shanty Irish” [his term, not mine], and is more-or-less pathologically fastidious about money because he’s so horrified by what his family does with it. So, you never know.)
I remember reading a negotiator for one of the players unions saying how hard it was to convince the players to push for a pension system. They’re all young guys making huge salaries - why should they care about a pension? He said they don’t understand that many of them are going to be living on that pension as their only income someday.
There was a study done on winners of a lump sum of a million or more. The results? IIRC, 95% were back to the same income level that they started at within 5 years.
Most rich people are rich because they do things with money that other people don’t. How many times have you heard someone answer the question ‘What would you do with a million dollars?’ with ‘Well, I’d give some to charity, buy a house, take my dream trip to Europe…’? Basically all the time. How often do you hear ‘Well, I’ll pay off all my debt, invest the rest and arrange life to live off the interest from my investments without using the principle’. Never.
Now, take an average person and make them famous. Add in ‘friends’ that suddenly have a rich buddy and women (or men) who like rich stars and it isn’t surprising that they end up broke.
Slee
what is it with these guys that don’t pay their taxes? Is it that someone else is managing their money and they don’t think about it? Or is it that they just figure “ah, screw it… they won’t catch up with me, and if they do, I’ll declare bankrupcy.”
Clearly, I don’t understand how to milk the system for all its willing to pay out… The guy is making $45 k a month and he’s not able to pay his bills? Wow.
I can’t feel sad for him, but I do feel for any kids he has. But that’s it. Not crying for the wives and/or girlfriends out there getting a check if they didn’t manage it correctly for their kids.
And I don’t think that any university should be required to teach personal finance to these guys. I’m not sure how many of these guys would understand enough of it at that age that it would be worth it anyway. Unless it was part of a player’s major, the university shouldn’t force everyone to understand finances. Let the NFL do that, if anyone.
Dave Ramsey has worked as financial advisor to a number of athletes, and talks about this all the time: the behavioral issues involved with a someone making $5 million going broke really are the exact same ones as someone making $50,000 getting in over their head. Millions upon millions of Americans are no better at living within their means than Warren Sapp is.