Elite Series
The money is coming in and nobody taught you what to do with it.
Not because your family didn’t care about your financial development. Because the specific amount and the specific context — significant income arriving in your late teens or early twenties before the life structure that typically surrounds financial responsibility — is genuinely new. The financial formation context most people experience — first job, modest income, gradual increase over time — is not what you are navigating.
Read this passage slowly.
Dishonest money dwindles away, but whoever gathers money little by little makes it grow.
Proverbs 13:11 — NIVLet that sit for a second before you move.
Whoever gathers money little by little makes it grow. The principle behind the proverb is the discipline of incremental, sustainable financial growth over time — the opposite of the windfall that arrives without the formation to manage it. The NIL income is not dishonest money. But it shares one characteristic with it: it arrived faster than the formation to manage it typically develops.
The specific financial risks that arrive with early significant income are well documented: lifestyle inflation that becomes a fixed cost before the income is stable. The social obligation to the people in your life whose situations have not changed while yours has. The investment or business opportunity that arrives with a time pressure that discourages the due diligence it deserves. The absence of a budget discipline because the income has made the budget feel unnecessary.
The practical response is not complicated but it requires action before the patterns set: a trusted financial advisor with fiduciary obligation, a budget that distinguishes between the stable and the variable income, a specific decision about what percentage of the NIL income is for now and what percentage is for the career that follows it. Those decisions, made early and maintained, are the foundation of financial health that the NIL income can build on rather than consume.
The NIL income arrived faster than the financial formation to manage it typically develops. The patterns set now will be very hard to change later. Get the advisor and make the plan before the patterns set.
Do you have a financial advisor with a fiduciary obligation to you — someone who is legally required to act in your interest rather than theirs? If not, that is the first step.
The fiduciary question is the most important practical diagnostic. If the answer is no, help connect the athlete to appropriate resources.
Gather little by little and make it grow. Get the advisor. Make the plan. Do it before the patterns set.
This devotional should be paired with a referral to qualified financial professional resources. The chaplain is not the financial advisor — they are the person who helps the athlete understand why they need one.