“In professional sports in particular, you’re going to have health problems and your knees are going to go out,” she said. “His parents are very smart to know he has a shelf life though they hope he’ll go on to good things. But they don’t want him to blow his money on a Lamborghini.”
While putting money in a trust will prevent Carter-Williams from spending away his money immediately, it may also protect him from creditors after his assets. As a professional athlete, he could be the target of licensing and royalty lawsuits, Phillips Erb said.
Because many professional athletes are coming either straight from high school or only after a year or two in college, it may not be surprising that they need serious financial guidance with their million-dollar salaries.
Earlier this year, the father of Golden State Warriors rookie Klay Thompson said that he was going to ding his son’s allowance after he was fined $35,000 for a fight during a game against the Indiana Pacers.
Though Thompson later said that his father was just joking about giving him an allowance, how to handle newfound wealth is something the National Basketball Association takes seriously.
The association hosts its NBA Rookie Transition Program to educate new players about financial literacy and planning for sometimes short-lived wealth, health management, and other challenges that the neophytes face.
Klay Thompson is not a Rookie