How and Why Athletes Go Broke (2009)
si.com
si.com
The athlete attempts to do the responsible thing and hires someone they are led to trust with managing their assets only to be ripped off. I'm not sure how financial literacy prevents this from happening when you literally may be lied to about where your money is.
Perhaps major league sports would do well to help train their athletes in the basics of financial management in order to help avoid this situation.
If anything it could help with their recruiting efforts: Show a list of athletes that got screwed by shady advisors; show how they'll connect you with real advisors (at established and more trusted institutions) and education to discern what options are good and what aren't.
Won't make a difference when tyring to get that top QB, but it may for all those guys who're only making $150k-300k.
In my experience in the Bay area with people who suddenly have more wealth than their friends and family ever did, there are two ways that people seem to split. Either they start splendiforus spending because they are "rich" or the start calculating what sort of 'burn rate' they can support drawing down at a rate of anywhere between 2% and 10% of their net worth. Using the 4% number (which used to be the standard before the great recession knocked it back to 2% for more conservative savers).
One of the things that people usually don't think about deeply is that money in the bank pays you, things that you own cost you. A car needs gas, a jet needs maintenance, a home needs gardening. And when you scale up the 'thing' you scale up the cost. As a result if you live what you perceive to be a 'rich' life you may find its sucking your wealth away. There are lots of studies on lottery winners which show this effect.
Wow that's depressing as hell. I've seen the spending side of things, but for a long time out of college I was making more money than anyone I knew and also spending towards the bottom of the distribution. I think I was 25 when my average return started covering my cost of living.
My family didn't have much money growing up (due to medical reasons) and my parents don't really know much about managing money, probably because they both come from upper-class backgrounds where family money just seemed "taken care of". So I have to confess I'm not really sure where the financial irresponsibility of the sorts discussed in this post comes from. I'm tempted to say that it's a simply matter of high time preference, but that's a really self-serving explanation, so I'm not quite satisfied.
Nobody tries to keep their costs below their income? If I was suddenly wealthy, I'd try hard to make sure lifestyle spending was covered by growth in my wealth, not by drawing it down.
Debt also puts people into compromised positions. Having worked around defense stuffs, that's an exploitable position. And people will exploit it. It's not just for government secrets either. Working on a corporate X project to make the latest and greatest self driving car? Have 6- or 7-figure debt? Someone may slide up to you in a bar and buddy up, take advantage of the desperation and get you to compromise your employer's secrets. For athletes, this means getting asked to throw games and underperform.
Nobody is going to have their best interests at heart but themselves. If you want to have money, you have to learn to manage it yourself. There's not really a choice about it.
Also, hire a properly licensed CPA. Make sure to listen to his advice on taxes. Don't give him a financial incentive to benefit if you follow his advice.
If you've got more than $250K, I'd split it up into multiple accounts at different banks.
I think you're mistaken about the first part of your statement:
The FDIC says, "All single accounts owned by the same person at the same bank are added together and insured up to $250,000." (see https://www.fdic.gov/deposit/covered/categories.html )
But you are correct that it can be doubled, tripled, quadrupled, or even greater by opening different account types such as a Retirement Account, a Joint Account, a Revocable Trust Account, etc., at the same bank since each account type seems to get separate treatment (according to the same FDIC link).
Doesn’t sound safe. Index fund would probably be safer. Or savings account.
A million bucks will make the rest of your life easier as long as you don't 1) spend it all and 2) don't make yourself unemployable (injury, bad PR, etc)
Perhaps you are forgetting that an investment still grows while you are withdrawing from it?
Here is a calculator that helps you compute how much you can actually pull from it: https://www.money-zine.com/calculators/retirement-calculator...
If you set the initial variables to:
- Retirement age 40 - Life expectancy 83 - Annual Return 7% (typical of stocks) - zero out everything else (no pension, no social security)
You get about ~$74K a year.
Even if you started retiring at age 25, you'd still be pulling ~$71K a year.
$25,000 is likely a little too low but $70,000 is way, way too high.
Most people who've done research agree that something like $25,000 to $35,000 a year from $1,000,000 is reasonable for someone retiring extremely young.
As people point out the thing to remember is that your costs change too, your health care costs go up but if your family moves out and you pay off your house your outlays go down. "Downsizing" or reducing the owning of expensive things (especially ones that require maintenance) can really help your burn rate.
An athlete might be 30 years old at retirement and needs to think about a 65-year retirement timespan.
First, start with the 25 number. We're talking about athletes here, they aren't losing their income potential at 40, they're losing it a lot earlier than that. There are 40 year old athletes, but we talk about them all the time because they're unusual, not because they're the norm.
Next, cut the rate of return. Like by half. Nobody with new money is that successful with their finances. That's why we're discussing this.
Now, I wasn't thinking about this too hard when I did the math in my head, but I do tend to round down pretty heavily when doing math for myself for a very particular reason: adjust down for inflation. Way, way down. The biggest fuckup people make when rationalizing their rate of savings or how great an investment their house is: by the time you get to use this money thirty years from now it won't be worth half of what it's worth right now. Present day you thinks 25k a year will pay your rent. 70 year old you will have to move to the middle of nowhere to say that. You won't want to do that. So double your withdrawal rate by 60 and almost again by the time you die.
I wholeheartedly agree that major league sports should provide financial management skills, however the same should also be provided at large corporations.
With Vanguard/Fidelity/Schuab you can make only 45k/yr over your whole career, put the $5500 into an IRA in VFIAX/VOO starting at age 22, and have an retirement income of $58k/yr (not including social security) when you retire. This approximately 1.1-1.5 million in retirement is enough savings IMO, and allows you to pursue whatever career you want, e.g. nonprofit/teaching/part-time with much less anxiety than a traditional pension or more active investment like a restaurant.
Maxing out an IRA is only a 12.2% pre-tax savings rate for someone with a $45k/yr income. This is not difficult at all, however it is important that it starts in the early 20s.
-"One of his advisers pitched the idea as"fail-proof, with no downsides," Ismail recalls. He never recouped his money and has no idea what became of the restaurant."
-(COZ Records) "The guy was a real good talker," says Rocket
-(Cosmetics) "We were not prepared for the sharks in the beauty industry"
-(Retail stores) "The main store opened up in New Orleans, but doggone Hurricane Katrina came two months later". The shops no longer exist.
What strikes me about these examples is they're all supposedly somebody else's fault.
To my mind, what isn't being taught (both to young athletes, and to the population in general) isn't so much personal finance, but personal responsibility.
Individually:
Nothing is fail-proof.
People will say anything to get your money.
Business is cutthroat.
And shit happens.
They probably get "exciting business opportunities" and "help your friends and family" and "spend it all on hookers and blow!" and the "exciting business opportunity" might sound like the best way to keep their fortune going compared to the other options.
Reminds me of the good old Goldman Sachs, who made a killing betting _against_ their clients. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/25/goldman-sachs-...
If I buy something from Goldman then they think the price is too high and I think the price is too low. If I sell something to Goldman then they think the price is too low and I think it's too high.
If they're not willing to bet against me then they'll say something like "sorry trader was off the desk". Or if they're just less willing to bet against me then they'll say "sorry mate wide atm due to volatility".
If I buy a $5 sandwich at a deli, it’s not the case that I think they’re suckers for valuing $5 more than the sandwich, and I doubt they think I’m a sucker for the inverse. Clearly, what’s really going on is that I am hungry and cannot eat a five dollar bill, whereas the deli has way more sandwich ingredients than they need to eat themselves, and they need money for other expenses. We both benefit.
If I have three shoes, I might correctly place little value on the extra, while a person with only one shoe might correctly place a lot of value on it. My selling the shoe for anything more than $0 is rational, and the other person's buying the shoe for anything less than the price of a full pair of shoes is also rational.
It isn't perfect because in finance everyone's goal is to make money so it's a little more complicated, but there are similarities.
You might have a situation where ex-ante both parties are making the right decision, but one party would have rather not traded ex-post.
I might have some oil exposure so I want to sell oil futures. Maybe you think oil is going up because it's above some moving average so you show me a better market than the exchange for my size. We trade. If a minute later oil is higher than I will have wish that I waited a minute to sell and you'll be glad that you bought.
I'm not saying it's zero sum because we both willingly went into the trade and it's even possible that you'll make money on a 1 minute time frame and I'll make money on a 1 year time frame or I'll receive some other benefit.
This would happen all the time in a product that I used to trade at a non-bank financial firm. I had one way of valuing it and the banks had another way. We'd trade when we disagreed.
Legally, there's very little preventing your advisor from telling you to perform trades that make you poor and the advisor's buddies rich. A lot of the aftermath of the 2008 crisis boiled down to "It might not have been moral, but it sure as heck wasn't illegal".
Usually when you trade with a bank desk you know that they're betting against you because they're the ones on the other side. If they weren't doing that then you'd always have to wait for a customer to take the opposite bet, but the market might move by the time such a customer appears.
Generally you don't want people in Honest Goldman's Sound Financial Advice Inc to know what people in Goldman's Shady Shell Fund Ltd are doing and vice-versa.
Well, other than the new Fiduciary Rule, though the Trump Administration handling of the implementation of that rule seems to have everything up in the air, from the coverage I've seen.
Their incentive is to trade as much as possible. This is awfully tempting, even for the most ethical broker.
I recommend basic financial classes for everyone k-12, everyone should have the right to basic understanding of personal finances and basic economics.
Dave Ramsey videos on YouTube.
It gives a simple conservative investing strategy, and refers to other great books for the details.
Available here: https://www.etf.com/docs/IfYouCan.pdf
"The richest man in Babylon" was also a good read for me early on. It's told in a story format.
"Your money or your life" is also good for the principles although it's a little outdated.
This was all in 8th grade public school in Virginia around 2001. I thought this was normal, and it saddens me to realize the inequality in education across the nation.
I certainly did not have it myself, and my K-12 years were from 1985-1998 in Indiana (public school). We had an accounting class. We had a government class that taught how a bill becomes a law and all that. We even had a home economics class where we learned how to make pillows and pigs-in-blankets. But no personal finance whatsoever, and certainly no economics until college.
I distinctly remember approximately 15 minutes of relevant personal finance education in all my primary school years, when one math teacher went off-curriculum at the end of a class to show us the magic of compound interest. (It blew my mind)
Everything else, from balancing a checkbook (no that wasn't taught in accounting) to filling out tax forms to how credit cards work was either taught by my parents or self-learned through social context.
You do realize how many poor college students have been taken in by credit card offers that used to be right on campus to sign up gullible freshmen, don't you? Fortunately I think that has fallen out of practice (it got enough publicity that colleges now realize it makes them look bad, I think). But for how many years have millions of 18-year-olds fallen into this kind of trap?
You think any of those people had personal finance classes? I seriously, seriously doubt that. I think the vast majority of Americans (until recently) did not have any such formal education on how to navigate money in the real world.
I don't have any idea the prevalence of this kind of education in other countries, though.
> You think any of those people had personal finance classes?
Yes, I'm almost certain some of them did. All the education in the world won't make good decisions for you when you once you set out in your own. We've been teaching kids sex ed for decades but we still have STDs and unwanted pregnancies.
You really never had any other math teachers assign problems related to compound interest, investments, credit cards, savings accounts? I was in school just 2 years later and these problems were very common in the math books we had.
Nor was I ever taught anything about savings accounts, tax-deferred retirement accounts, stock investing, etc. Although I hear stock investing in particular does come up in a lot of schools because it's "fun". But I never had any teachers let us play the stock market for fun, I totally would have been into that. I was never even shown a tax form in school, let alone had it explained.
I was able to do my own taxes because my dad showed me how. My mom showed me how to balance a checkbook, although that rapidly became useless knowledge when I could start monitoring my account online on a daily basis :) The rest I just kinda figured out, or didn't. My dad told me credit cards were bad but never explained them, ended up getting in debt, have been out of debt for a few years and now use credit cards responsibly -- "pay off in full to get the cashback, never pay interest". Nope nobody ever told me that either.
I do remember the first time I considered buying stocks that I literally had no idea how to do it. Like - who do I give my money to in exchange for a piece of a company? Absolutely no idea. I feel like the Internet has pretty much solved that problem though.
Kinda sad how it works out that the ones that needed it more didn't have access. A little microcosm of America I guess.
There was a high school elective course about personal finances, but because it was an elective and sounded boring, none of my friends took it.
I don't think it is especially hard to learn how to invest, but I suppose getting to the point where you know the right questions to ask might be hard without knowing people who know the basics.
Oh, I think they probably know the basics.
They know how percentages work well enough to know that they could take all that money and put it strictly into safe investments, and get a considerable, steady cash flow from that, on which a more than comfortable life is possible.
Any rank and file financial advisor at a local bank branch could set them straight on the basics, if they want.
Come on, just half a percent earned on $100M is $500,000; total no-brainer.
That's boring though; they want to substantially multiply their wealth. They want to take their dough and blow it sky high. E.g. guy who has a $100M million put away thinks he can turn it into a $1B empire.
It's like another sport; scoring another goal.
In some ways, taking the risk makes sense (just not to the point that you go broke). Say you have that example $100M, and you could earn 0.5% on it for the rest of your life. Well, whoopee; why would you? You could simply draw 500,000 a year from that for 200 years, even if it earns nothing. (Let's ignore inflation and all that for simplicity.)
So you can see why the lower-yield safe things are not attractive if you have a lot of money.
I think these guys just fall victim to a "go big or go home" thinking. Plus they probably think that they have so much money, they don't have to keep tabs on exactly how much.
Also, while they have those high paying contracts, they think that their income can always save them.
This is silly. Living within your means is like doing the dishes or the laundry. When someone "doesn't know how" or "needs to learn how" it's not that they're missing or failing to comprehend information. Even if they lack it, it's trivial to acquire. The relevant entities are discipline, habit, and values. This is not something you can learn in a lecture, only by doing.
If you're just clueless about personal finance, the worst thing that happens is you pay for tax prep services (something many of us do anyway to save time).
Going broke or getting up to your eyeballs in debt is either an arithmetic error (don't try and tell me schools don't teach subtraction), a failure of self-control (if your income should be enough for you situation), or a symptom of insufficient income for your situation. I'll venture a guess that most of the time, it's the latter.
Living paycheck to paycheck is a very real thing, and it only takes a minor circumstance to cause massive debt. You don't even need a credit card to find yourself up to your eyeballs in debt.
The recommended mix of investments for 20+ million assets is apparently "5%to private equity, 7%-12% to real estate, 50%-65% to a mix of public securities(stocks, mutual funds and the like) and the rest to alternatives such as gold and hedge funds.".
[0]http://time.com/money/4809060/fiduciary-rule-financial-advis...
[1]https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ebsa/ebsa20171127-0
Seriously: the recruitment of minors for major league with giant cash benefits should require them to sign a consent form for arms-length management of their capital for some time period, and give them the income stream not the capital.
after all, its often how the money is being controlled that wound up being their notional capital in the first place
No, thanks. It's their money, let them have it. If they want it to be invested on their behalf, that's fine. But it should be their choice.
How would you like it if your employer told you that instead of paying you your wages, he was instead going to contribute to an investment fund, and you'd receive the income from that fund rather than receiving the money directly?
The Court’s decision was not surprising. In an earlier case, Helvering v. Davis (1937), the Court had ruled that Social Security was not a contributory insurance program, saying, “The proceeds of both the employee and employer taxes are to be paid into the Treasury like any other internal revenue generally, and are not earmarked in any way.”
We would likely have a national riot if Social Security was just yanked at once. But if my own life is any guess, the age to qualify for "benefits" keeps going higher and higher. It's theft by attrition, and backed as not theft by courts.
I do not agree with CATO's eventual policy of "privatization" at all. The other choice, which was not posited, was to earmark the funds, keep them segregated from the general fund. Then do the right thing and set Social Security as a guarantee at the same age for everyone. And, remove that cap.
(1) https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/is-there-right-...
You have to take in consideration a few factors governing the original social security age limits. IE Life expectancy was significantly less. People live on average quite a bit longer now, addressing that reality isn't a bad idea.
The other thing to consider is the money we're paying in now isn't being saved for our benefit later. It's being used to pay the benefits of current retirees. Not to mention the money that current retirees paid into the system 20, 30, 40 years ago is a pittance to what they're drawing now.
I mean I like the idea of social security. A lot of people do, it's become ingrained in our national expectation. But in the same token, a lot of people don't have realistic thoughts about it. And we're going to need it to evolve with the realities of our culture. Longer lifespans, real cost of living, etc are all real issues that can't be ignored and expect Social Security to chug on perpetually.
In effect the payroll tax was spun up in the 80s and used as government revenue via special bonds. But as the surplus as waned due to increased payments, the cap didn’t move and the government’s spending power to bridge the gap was reduced by our post-2001 perpetual war.
And to the extent that it's not (e.g. National Insurance): it should be.
You get some choice where its invested, but in short, you can't spend it on anything that benefits you materially here and now. 9.5% minimum is taken out of practically every non-casual working position.
In general, it's defined contribution, not defined payment (barring some of the older pension plans which are going to have some tough decisions ahead).
Flaws of the system aside, I'm generally in favor of the idea myself.
Choice is a hot button item. You value this specific choice above others. I value their long term welfare above choice in this matter.
First of all, these are not minors - they are over 18. Secondly who the heck are you to decide that you should be in charge of what they can and can't do with their money?
Someone who doesn't have responsibility can't be forced into it.
Which would suggest that responsible parent won't put children into such system.
So, yes, it does appear you're talking about right and wrong.
The comment I was originally responding to said teams "should require [athletes] to sign a consent form for arms-length management of their capital" which I absolutely don't agree with because they are adults who can choose for themselves. And yes, it's personal because it's their money and their choice to either spend it or do something else.
I don't care what or how they do it, and there's no inherent wrong or right involved. It's their paycheck and they can do whatever they want with it... but taking away their agency in the first place doesn't solve anything and certainly doesn't magically teach better decision making in the future.
Going with the principle of charity: I apologize for assuming you were using "personal responsibility" as a bludgeon.
So this looks great at first right? It's like a lotto winner taking the lifetime payments instead of the lump sum. The problem is you can take loans against that money very easily, or you can sign the contract over to someone else very easily. Want to invest $300,000 in your friends restaurant because you think he's a great chef, just take a loan against 10 years worth of your guaranteed income stream.
Maybe a ten percent retain and the moral of the story is you are a former millionaire who now has a small stipend to remind you how stupid you are.
This might be anecdotal, but I feel like we don't hear these athlete bankruptcy stories as often about hockey players. Why? Because they're all white, not black. Putting a kid through junior hockey is expensive and hockey players tend to come from privileged homes with much better financial education than young black football players. They get just as many knocks on the head, but they get better advice from their father's accountant, and they make it to retirement with some money left.
Making them sign away control of their money sounds like a new version of the old story of infantilizing black people by removing their adult rights, "for their own good".
http://ftw.usatoday.com/2016/11/columbus-blue-jackets-jack-j...
Could it be that black kids as a group just isn't that interested in playing hockey?
But if priced low-to-high the senior skates on that site start at $64.99 and go up from there. Assuming that the lower cost skates are not worth it, you get what you pay for and all that, what's wrong with the middle tier skates that are in the $100-$200 range? How long do they last once a kid's foot doesn't outgrow it every 3-to-6 months?
You also have to invest in padding, helmets, gloves, socks, and so on.
I didn't consider the maintenance aspect; the need for sharpening makes sense though.
Cheap skates are like cheap running shoes. Yeah, they get the job done until the ill-fitted skates don't offer proper fit and support. Your kid is fine for a month, then they have welts from the cheap insoles and twisted ankles from no stability.
Just wanting to skate at the rink is one thing, practicing and chasing pucks on top of learning edge control demands proper equipment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_on_Ice_(film)
And consider this criticism of the somewhat rosier picture portrayed in that film:
https://hockeyinsociety.com/2017/03/06/soul-on-ice-the-day-t...
If you want a direct non-racial example of this: white hockey player origin distribution, Canadian and Scandinavian-born versus US-born. Guess where the ice is? :)
Baseball is another sport where black participation has declined in the US and the general assumption is that it's similarly because it's harder to find places to practice baseball in modern American cities (while still much more common in Latin America). Hence http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/official_info/mlb_official_story_head...
Organized youth sports are expensive (in the US at least), and hockey more so than others. You need a lot of equipment which your kid will keep growing out of, and then costs for ice time. Ice time is likely less expensive in big hockey regions (I have no idea), but it's always a cost. A competitive youth league team isn't practicing on a frozen lake.
Although, someone pointed out elsewhere that good skates can be expensive and requires maintenance. I didn't consider costs of keeping skates sharp. But I'm still curious as to why high-quality expensive equipment is required specifically for hockey when it seems to me that every other sport has a large number of kids with substandard equipment. Do hockey players not use hand-me-downs or used equipment?
Minors don’t choose where their parents live. If you’re getting drafted at 19 yrs of age, you’ve probably been playing since you were a kid. If you don’t live in a region with abundant natural ice, it will cost you money to skate.
Frankly, your comments comes across as the same type of empty criticism as that which often comes up when people complain about government: “If it’s really so bad, why don’t you just move to another country?” Easier to blame someone for where they live than to consider the challenges of relocating. Both criticisms are deliberately dim.
I don't understand all this negativity I'm getting by just asking questions. A person couldn't possibly propose a solution to a problem without asking questions first.
Any broke Formula 1 race drivers or tennis players? That's where you'd really look for athletes coming from wealthy families, I think.
Mandatory contribution of 10% of their income into an investment account and that has a maximum annual withdrawal of 1% until age 55.
If they otherwise destroy their finances, they'll at least be able to afford a place to live.
Personally, I think the unions should help guide these guys. New money leading to bankruptcy is a universal story, not unique to any race.
Athletes are particularly vulnerable to scammers, as they spend a lot of time isolated by coaches with a small group of people. Self dealing trusted advisors and that isolation makes them vulnerable.
When do you educate somebody about how to control millions of dollars of assets, in the moment of giving them autonomy over them? If you want to propose education, then its rational to propose the control over the money before and during education is there, no? or, do you propose letting them blow the million on drugs and sex, and then teach them how to sustainably hold onto it, when all they have is a debt hole?
In my defence, weak though it is, there was no moment I actually intended to refer to specifically black sportspeople. If more black people in sports in America are financially uneducated, the bias in outcome would be there. I am pretty sure immature spending behaviour is colourblind and in all seriousness I meant this across race and culture: I think huge cash incentives for young people should be constrained to last. I'm not a libertarian.
They also had to agree not to spend on drugs, strippers, excessive houses, etc.
All 4 big professional leagues in the US have pension plans [0] that, while not making them rich, will at least provide enough money to survive in the event they blow all their earnings. It's not quite as extreme as what you propose, but there's definitely some deferred income.
[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/nfl-nhl-nba-mlb-retirement-pe...
Edit: downvotes, really folks? You don't see the parent's typo?
The problem is everyone they've ever known comes out of the woodwork and is hitting them up for money or pitching some great investment. That's the hard part. Saying "no" to these people.
But it's not really taxes that are the problem. ESPN's "Broke" documentary covered it well and it's a combination of many factors. Financial literacy is high on the list. One story told in the documentary has a rookie cashing his $500k signing bonus at a check cashing store because that's the only thing he knew to do with checks. When you're underbanked, simple things like t-bills or index funds and even checking accounts are a part of a completely separate world.
The second is lifestyle. When you're new to the league, everyone is buying expensive cars, jewelry and other frivolous purchases and there's pressure to keep up. And since you're traveling with your teammates, they're your social circle as well, so expensive meals out, clubs and other distractions on the road end up costing money. And being known to have lots of money makes you a target, both for people you knew before going pro and for women who see child support as a ticket to a better life.
And the common pattern is that players live it up and don't save much in the first half of their careers and then realize that there's going to come an end to the high income stream and that they need to make it last the rest of their lives, only to find that simple, stable investments aren't going to get them to a point where they can provide for everyone they feel responsible for once they're out of the league. So they end up chasing long-shot investments that almost always result in a total loss, making the problem even worse.
Some of this isn't much different from most people in other professions. The main difference is that athletes have their prime earning years during a time in their lives where they're still financially irresponsible. I know most of my friends didn't save much during their early-to-mid 20s. We spent way too much going out to bars and clubs, bought toys that were way more than we should have been spending and basically lived paycheck-to-paycheck despite the fact that we could've been saving a bit. These guys have that same period, just with a lot more money. But whereas the rest of us get to keep earning until we retire in our 60s/70s, often with the highest salaries coming near the end, these guys have their prime earning years end, often abruptly, usually well before the age of 40.
Maybe we need better financial education in the public school system?
Critical thinking dovetails with that, and would probably make it harder for ideological, religious, and political figures to “win hearts and minds.” In my experience parents want their kids to believe whatever they believe, politicians want vacuous morons, and ideologues only want to propagate their ideology. Giving people general tools to sort through the mess of competing ideas seems to appeal less than using the opportunity of education as a means of inculcation.
In short most people and groups want their own version of reality instilled as early as possible, and no others. A relative minority want critical thinking, financial literacy, and sound scientific principles instilled. It’s harder to take advantage of the prepared mind after all, and so much profit and power is gained through shallow blandishments and lies.
Credit cards and student loans, medical bills and mortgages. People who make sound financial decisions don’t roll over debt on their cc’s, or allow for a housing bubble. They might be swayed by arguments that single-payer healthcare wouldn’t lower costs.
They might even question the value of spending trillions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
No, it means a man explaining something condescendingly to a woman based on and conveying a negative, gender-based presumption of the target’s understanding and/or capacity for understanding.
While its most egregious when the matter is something where the target is an expert (and especially where the speaker is not, and is relatively clueless), that's not the essence of the term.
No amount of education can force behaviours into people. Logic is not a shared resource.
Clearly, given that this is your second round of reduction to the absurd.
Besides, there’s knowing, and accepting. See AGW.
Edit: to clarify, people can be strongly influenced to disregard what is known in favor of what “feels right” or serves their perceived interests. Simply instilling knowledge in the absence of the ability to critically examine said knowledge is insufficient.
Robert Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter have been telling everyone who will listen since at least 1997.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Dad_Poor_Dad
re critical thinking
Years ago, one candidate for my state's Superintendent of Public Instruction aggressively opposed adding critical thinking and problem solving to the curriculum. It'd distract from all that useful standardized testing. She won. Served two terms (8 years).
https://www.johntreed.com/blogs/john-t-reed-s-real-estate-in...
https://toughnickel.com/personal-finance/Robert-Kiyosaki-May...
Happily, I'm sure if I looked a little harder, I could find other, more reputable, people advocating financial literacy.
Instate tuition for top public universities is not that high, and helps you gain skills and even more importantly build a network that is certainly worth the investment.
Sure, there are many soft fields where job opportunities are sparse. But, a degree @ state tuition is certainly worth it for a good number of majors.
Wait, could you explain what that means.
I thought private universities did not receive any government assistance at all. Do you mean subsidized loans to attend such universities ?
If so, I can understand. That might not be the wisest thing for a government to do.
Quotes from the show "I had more mortgages than HUD" "I had 30 to 40 cell phone contracts" "No athlete wants to earn a few percentage points in bonds. They wanna go for the big dollars, Open restaurants, clubs and car washes! They conquered sports now they will own their next endeavor"
Worst stat from the show: 60% of athletes are broke within 5 years and 70% are divorced within 3 years.
Shocking stat: There is (was?) a website that tracks athletes as they go from town to town so women can go hook up with them.
Many of these quotes are from the big money makers in various sports (NBA, NFL, MLB). They also interview the ones that were able to maintain their money. Like Jamal Mashburn who told his mom that he was going to set her up with a new house and car and before he could finish she told him to save it and take care of himself first.
I mean those all sound like athletes either getting scammed or getting in over their heads with business endeavors.
I can't manage to copy and paste it from the article, but one section talks about these guys hiring friends and family, not for their expertise, but as a favor. This inevitably goes bad places.
The old boys club is about knowing you well enough to vet you on two things: 1. How trustworthy you are generally and 2. What you are good at.
Having connections matters and if you can't establish those connections, you will go nowhere fast. But when it is at all healthy, establishing those connections is about vetting you. These athletes never got the memo. They haven't learned that the reason you hire someone you know is because you can literally trust them with your life, not because they need charity. If they need charity, give them charity. Don't entrust your millions with them.
Second, I really appreciate the section where they talk about divorce and that it often happens after retirement in part because these guys can no longer avoid the hard conversations. A lot of marriages seem to only work in X circumstances and to fall apart if circumstances drastically change. The two people are compatible as cogs in X machine, but the personal relationship isn't really that strong. They don't adapt well when that situation goes away.
I was there for a different reason: to figure out whether my browser was to blame for all the typos in this 9-year-old article ("Old habits diehard" being the one that set me on the quest.)
Athletes have high earnings for short periods of time, but often prefer risky "flashy" investments (e.g. nightclubs) and aren't typically knowledgable regarding anything having to do with basic finance.
Many of these athletes are semi-literate. And this has been going on in boxing, for time immemorial, for the same reason.
A means has to be found to better attack the perpetrators.
https://www.bankrate.com/retirement/retirement-benefits-of-p...
1) Increase your income
2) Increase your expenses
3) Lower your income, keep your expenses the same
I'm no sure if that's all true of if it's anything more than correlation, but it makes some sense as a hypothesis.
According to whom?
>I'm no sure if that's all true of if it's anything more than correlation, but it makes some sense as a hypothesis.
As I said, I could be wrong. But we know that other fields like management, fashion, music, etc are dominated by risk takers. It may not be true of sports or all sports, but you could imagine that a risk taking basketball player, football QB or running back, soccer forward, or similar players tend to be risk takers.
Again, I could be wrong.
> Sometimes,though, a jock just can't shake the temptation to try to hit the jackpot. Butowsky believes that "there's something in an athlete's mentality"that drives him to swing for the fences financially--usually at his own peril."The solution to the problem is, without a doubt, education," the adviser says. "Change won't happen until grown men start wanting to learn."
People are crazy. But it's fun to watch them get so good at stuff.