Basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has a fascinating piece at Esquire.com
this week in which he shares some of the advice he wishes he could give
to his 30-year-old self. There are a lot of great nuggets of wisdom
from the NBA's all-time leading scorer, including an admonition to learn
French and to cook more often. What caught our eye, though, were his
suggestions that he wished he'd become financially literate at a younger
age.
"I chose my financial manager, who I later discovered had no financial training, because a number of other athletes I knew were using him," he recounts. "Consequently, I neglected to investigate his background or what qualified him to be a financial manager. He placed us in some real estate investments that went belly up and I came close to losing some serious coin."
As Abdul-Jabbar acknowledges, his experience is not unusual among athletes. Countless professional athletes have gone bankrupt
after making tens of millions of dollars over the course of their
careers; baseball star Lenny Dykstra and NFL quarterback Mark Brunell,
for instance, were done in by unwise investments.
"I chose my financial manager, who I later discovered had no financial training, because a number of other athletes I knew were using him," he recounts. "Consequently, I neglected to investigate his background or what qualified him to be a financial manager. He placed us in some real estate investments that went belly up and I came close to losing some serious coin."
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