For the NFL rookies

Glad to hear you are learning on how to handle your finances better. Here are a few other tips:

1. You can sustainably draw 4% per year against your liquid investments, for the rest of your life. Any dollar that you don't spend in the year you make it can go into liquid investments, like a low cost index fund or low-risk savings.  For an NFL player who is able to save $5 million, this will be $200,000 per year in spend.  Sure beats the 80% of NFL players who end up filing for bankruptcy.

2.  You can employ the same strategy as Fischer Black, who is probably the last generation's financial genius.  After all of his many notable achievements, with his own money he simply put half of his money in a stock fund, half of it in low risk savings, and rebalanced it back to 50-50 once per year.  This approach took very little time, exhibited low volatility, and forced him to buy stocks low and sell them high.  You can do this yourself without paying an investment advisor.  You might perform better than 99% of everybody else with this approach.

3.  New cars and other highly depreciating assets are a good way to burn through your money.  Keep that spending to a minimum.  Buying a home (hard asset) for your parents is a much harder way to lose.  I've taught this course at my church; might be worth going through at some point.  Good advice on spending well.