Buying with dividends is the clearest path to wealth

By Donte Whitner

There’s a perception that making it to the NFL translates to generational wealth. That’s not exactly true. The average career is about three years long, which means most players only sign one contract.

For first-round picks, going from college to the pros means a substantial signing bonus that ranges from about $5 million to $24 million – money that’s earned up front. Just because you come into all that new money, it doesn’t mean you should go out and spend it on $100,000 cars, a million-dollar mansion or jewelry that will lose most of its value in a few years.

It’s critical for players to manage their money properly so that they can generate passive income and ensure they’ll be set after their time in the NFL comes to an end. Buying luxuries and physical signs of wealth such as big houses and expensive cars is not the way to do that.

File: San Francisco 49ers’ Donte Whitner celebrates a win during the second half of a NFL football game against the New England Patriots Sunday, Dec. 17, 2012, in FOXBOROUGH, Mass. (AP Photo/Barry Wilner)

That’s not to say players shouldn’t buy themselves a nice home or upgrade their daily car or spend a little bit on a new watch. But those big luxury purchases should come after they’ve begun generating passive income through dividends. Whether it’s a dividend growth portfolio, owning franchises, businesses or investing in real estate, generating passive income allows you to live comfortably in the future.

The late rapper Nipsey Hussle has an album called “Mailbox Money” in which he talks about having income arrive in your mailbox every month with little to no work involved. In other words, passive income. It’s a simple concept that can be sometimes difficult to set in motion because coming into a large sum of money in your 20s is life-changing, which is why guys want to spend it right away.

Professional athletes have to understand the difference between earned income and passive income. When you spend earned income, you miss out on growing your wealth through compounding interest. When you buy a car on earned income, that car loses value the minute you drive it off the lot. Instead, you can invest that money in a dividend growth portfolio, which will grow over time.

To put that into perspective, consider this. When a first-round pick gets a $20 million signing bonus, that’s roughly equivalent to the amount of money a doctor will earn in his or her lifetime. By putting most of that $20 million to work right away and investing it, that player can generate the salary of a doctor – just in passive income.

Whereas if you buy a big house with that money, it may depreciate over time rather than increasing in value like an investment portfolio will.

Related: Donte Whitner- 49ers vs. Cowboys (NBC Sports-Post Game)

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Related: Donte Whitner- 49ers vs. Cowboys (NBC Sports-Post Game)

Working with my business partner, James Paul Luthardt of Kirtland Hills Capital, has opened my eyes to the value of passive income and we’re now trying to do the same for guys currently earning checks in the NFL, who may not be utilizing it the best way they can.

We’re trademarking the term “Buy With Dividends,” putting it on T-shirts and hats for players. “It’s all about the dividends, baby,” a play on the P. Diddy and Biggie song, “It’s all about the Benjamins,” is also a phrase we’re trying to instill in athletes’ minds, getting them thinking about investing their hard-earned money rather than spending it on luxuries right when that first check hits.

Having a 10,000-square-foot house or a Rolls Royce isn’t a sign of wealth. And having been in an NFL locker room for over a decade, I know there’s a competition culture where players brag about what they recently bought. But we need to change the metric of success in locker rooms.

There’s a psychological factor in all of this where players try to compete and one-up each other in the locker room. When someone comes in with a watch, you want a better watch. You see them driving a new car, you want a better car. You see pictures of their new house and you want a bigger, better house. That’s really detrimental to the progress of players in the locker room.

The metric of success shouldn’t be about who has the biggest house or nicest car. It should be about who has the top passive income-producing portfolio in real estate. Because once players generate passive income with their earned income, they can then live the lives they want to. They can buy a Porsche with money they’re earning from real estate investments. They can buy their mom a house with passive income.

I learned lessons the hard way by buying a lot of things that I shouldn’t have. I bought a property with securities lending that I actually lived in, which is a big mistake. If you ever do securities lending against your portfolio It has to be an asset, not a liability – a personal property is a liability and not an asset.

I bought rental properties with cash out of my pocket instead of borrowing against a dividend portfolio. I bought jewelry that depreciated as soon as I walked out of the door, negatively compounding when that money should’ve been in the market in dividend growth making money. I bought cars that I should’ve bought with dividends.

I bought my mom a house with money that I earned from the NFL instead of with passive income. If you do it the right way and buy that home with dividends, you never have to worry about selling it because it was bought with capital that was earned passively.

When you turn that earned money into a liability right away, it’s gone, and it’s not going to compound to build multi-generational wealth. It’s about delaying consumption now for greater wealth in the future.

I was fortunate to be able to play 11 years in the NFL and earn multiple contracts, which isn’t the case for most players. That allowed me to correct some of the mistakes I made while I was playing.

The other major point of emphasis is living below your means. Even if you’re an NFL player making $5-10 million per year, you don’t always need to live like someone with a $5-10 million salary. By living on a salary of, say, $250,000 per year instead, you can use the rest of your earned money to generate passive income in the market or through real estate.

There’s no shame in buying a modest first home or a car that doesn’t run you $100,000. By only using a portion of your salary early on, you can then set yourself up for future wealth by putting your money to work.