For professional & junior athletes
Your career is a window.
The plan decides what it pays for.
Fee-based fiduciary planning in Stuart, Florida for NHL, NBA and NFL professionals, junior and NIL athletes — and the families behind them.
Financial planning for professional athletes is unlike planning for anyone else: peak earnings arrive in your twenties, compressed into a career measured in years rather than decades, taxed across every state you play in, and watched by people selling risky ideas. Davies Wealth Management builds financial planning for professional athletes around exactly this shape of career. As a fiduciary, we are required to act in your best interest when providing investment advice — and our compensation is transparent and disclosed, so you always know how we are paid.
This page is the front door to everything we do for athletes: the problems a plan has to solve, how the work changes from hockey to basketball to football to NIL, the structured first-hundred-days program we run for new professionals, and honest answers to the questions players and parents actually ask. Read it straight through, or use the table of contents to jump to the part of the career you’re standing in right now.
Financial planning for professional athletes — on this page
- Financial planning for professional athletes: three problems to solve
- How planning differs by league
- The 100-Day Rookie Financial Plan™
- The L-shaped wealth curve
- Jock tax, residency and the Florida advantage
- In conversation with Denis Potvin
- Families and the inner circle
- Planning the after-career
- What working together looks like
- Athlete resources from our team
- Frequently asked questions
The playing field
Financial planning for professional athletes: three problems to solve
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The compressed window
Most careers end long before traditional peak-earning years begin. The money earned early has to fund the decades that follow — which changes how much you save, where you hold it, and how it’s invested.
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“Jock tax” complexity
Athletes owe tax where they play, not just where they live. Florida’s lack of a state income tax is a real advantage — but not a free pass, and cross-border careers add another layer.
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Visibility risk
Public earnings make athletes targets for bad deals and pressure from their own circle. A written plan — and an adviser required to put your interest first when advising you — is the defense.
League by league
How financial planning differs by league
The three problems above show up everywhere, but each league gives them a different shape — and a plan that ignores the league’s mechanics misses real money.
🏒 Hockey: cross-border careers and the pension question
Hockey careers routinely cross the U.S.–Canada border, which means two tax systems, currency questions, and treaty rules layered on top of the usual jock-tax math. Two-way contracts make income genuinely unpredictable from month to month, so cash-flow planning has to be built for swings rather than a salary. And the NHL’s pension and benefits package is one of the strongest in professional sports — understanding what vests, when, and how it coordinates with personal savings is a core piece of every hockey plan. Our NHL pension explainer and pension calculator cover this in depth.
🏀 Basketball and 🏈 football: contract structure is the plan
In the NBA and NFL, the difference between a contract’s headline number and what a player actually keeps comes down to structure: how much is guaranteed, when bonuses pay, and what happens if the roster changes. Financial planning for professional athletes in these leagues means building the household’s permanent financial base out of the guaranteed portion and treating the rest as upside — not the other way around. It also means preparing for the league’s tax reality: away games in high-tax states claw back part of every road paycheck.
🎓 NIL: a business before the first professional contract
A college athlete with name-image-likeness income is, in tax terms, running a small business — usually with no bookkeeping, no withholding, and a compliance officer watching eligibility. Financial planning for professional athletes starts before the pros here — the NIL plan is about doing simple things correctly from the first dollar: separating accounts, setting aside tax, documenting deals, and keeping the structure clean enough that it never threatens eligibility or a future professional signing.
First hundred days
The 100-Day Rookie Financial Plan™
The first hundred days after a contract or NIL deal set the pattern for everything that follows. Our structured program in financial planning for professional athletes walks rookies and their families through banking, budgeting off an irregular paycheck, tax setup, protection, and the first investment decisions — in the right order.
🏒 Hockey Edition
Entry-level contracts, two-way deals, cross-border pay and the CHL-to-pro path.
View the Hockey track →
🏈 NFL Edition
Rookie contracts, bonus timing, and building a base before year two.
View the NFL track →
🎓 NIL Track
Name-image-likeness income in school: taxes, eligibility-aware structure, first savings.
View the NIL track →
The shape of the money
The L-shaped wealth curve
Most professionals earn along a slope: income rises through their forties and fifties, and retirement saving is a long, gradual climb. An athlete’s earnings look like an L rotated on its side — a vertical spike in the twenties, then a long horizontal tail that has to be funded by what the spike left behind. That shape changes every decision in financial planning for professional athletes. Savings rates that sound extreme for a normal household are simply arithmetic for an athlete. Investment risk has to respect the fact that there may be no second spike. Lifestyle decisions made at 24 echo for fifty years, because the tail is long and the spike doesn’t repeat.
The good news: handled early, the same shape is an enormous advantage. Money invested in a player’s twenties has decades to compound — time that traditional earners never get. Financial planning for professional athletes is ultimately about converting one steep spike into a lifetime of level ground.
Where the money goes
Jock tax, residency and the Florida advantage
Professional athletes are taxed like traveling businesses: most states (and Canadian provinces) tax the share of income earned in games played on their soil — the so-called “jock tax.” A season’s tax return can touch a dozen jurisdictions, each with its own rules, and getting the allocation wrong in either direction costs money.
Residency is the lever a player actually controls. Establishing genuine Florida residency means the home-state share of income — signing bonuses, endorsement income, investment income, and the home-game slate — escapes state income tax entirely, because Florida doesn’t have one. That’s why so many professional athletes make Florida home. But residency is a facts-and-circumstances test, not a mailbox: it has to be established properly and lived consistently to hold up.
Our approach to financial planning for professional athletes covers the whole tax picture — multi-state filings, residency, the timing of bonuses, and how cross-border careers interact with U.S. rules. See our guide to cross-border planning for players relocating to Florida.
From someone who lived it
In conversation with Denis Potvin
Hall of Famer Denis Potvin sat down with Thomas Davies to talk about financial planning for professional athletes from the inside — what actually happens to a player’s money across a career — the locker-room pressures, the deals that find you, and what he wishes every young player understood about the years after the game.
The people around the player
Families and the inner circle
Athlete money is family money. Parents are often the first line of defense for a young player — and the first people asked for introductions by everyone selling something. Spouses manage households through trades, relocations and seasons apart. Siblings and old friends watch the lifestyle change. None of that is a footnote to the plan; for most players it decides whether the plan survives.
We work with the family deliberately: parents are welcome in planning conversations for young players, the household plan is built around the realities of an athletic schedule, and requests for money from the wider circle get a structure — a defined giving budget and a polite, consistent way to say that everything else goes through the plan. It’s much easier to protect a relationship when “no” comes from a written policy instead of a person.
The same applies to the professional circle. Agents negotiate contracts; we plan around what the contract actually pays. Accountants file returns; we coordinate so the filings and the plan agree. A good inner circle works because everyone’s role — and everyone’s compensation — is out in the open.
The long tail
Planning the after-career
Every playing career ends — usually earlier than planned, sometimes overnight. That makes the after-career the quiet center of financial planning for professional athletes. The plan for the years after the game starts while the paychecks are still coming: structuring savings so income continues when the contract doesn’t, coordinating league pensions and benefits with personal investments, and deciding deliberately what the second act looks like — broadcasting, coaching, business ownership, or something entirely new.
The transition is also where families feel the change most. Household cash flow, insurance that used to come through the league, and the shift from accumulating to living off what was built — all of it lands at once. A written transition plan, reviewed while still playing, turns the scariest year of an athlete’s financial life into a scheduled event.
Based in Stuart on Florida’s Treasure Coast — financial planning for professional athletes who build their off-season and after-career home base here.
Go deeper
Athlete resources from our team
Written and recorded by our team, and kept current — start with the piece closest to your situation:
- NHL player pensions explained — what families should know
- NHL pension calculator (2026)
- Turning an NHL pension into retirement income
- Cross-border planning for players moving to Florida
- What contract structure means for your finances
- NBA career finances: how long careers really last
- Life after sports: planning the second career
The process
What working together looks like
1 · Discovery
A no-cost conversation about where you are: contract, income, obligations, family, and what you want the money to do. No products, no pitch.
2 · The written plan
A plan built around your league’s mechanics, your tax picture, and your career stage — cash flow, protection, investing, and the transition, in one document.
3 · Implementation
Accounts, structures and protections put in place in the right order, coordinated with your agent and accountant so nothing falls between roles.
4 · Season by season
Ongoing reviews timed to your calendar — contract years, trades, off-seasons and the transition — with the plan updated as the career actually unfolds.
Throughout, the standard stays the same: fiduciary advice when we advise on investments, transparent fees, and disclosed compensation on any insurance work — so the athlete always knows exactly how everyone at the table is paid.
Straight answers
Frequently asked questions
Why do professional athletes need a specialized financial advisor?
How is Davies Wealth Management paid when working with athletes?
Can you work with a junior or college athlete who has NIL income?
Does living in Florida mean an athlete pays no income tax?
What does financial planning for professional athletes include?
How is working with an athlete different from a typical wealth management client?
When should an athlete start financial planning?
Do professional athletes need a fiduciary advisor?
Can Davies work with athletes who don’t live in Florida?
What should a family do in the first weeks after a son or daughter signs a contract?
Start the clock
Talk to us about your career’s plan
A conversation about financial planning for professional athletes costs nothing — and the earlier the plan starts, the more of the window it protects.
Prefer to start on your own? Download the free athlete playbook.
Davies Wealth Management, LLC is an investment adviser registered with the State of Florida. Registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training. This page is for educational purposes only and does not constitute individualized investment, tax, or legal advice. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal.
We can help you make the most of what you have!