College athletes are earning professional money on an amateur timeline. We build the tax, cash, and investment plan around it, and we are paid by you and nobody else.
Schedule a CallNIL income is business income, not a paycheck. Nothing is withheld. You owe self-employment tax of 15.3 percent on top of federal and state income tax, you are expected to pay the IRS four times a year rather than once, and you can owe returns in states you only visited. Most of what goes wrong in the first two years is mechanical, and all of it is preventable. That is the work.
Remnant Wealth is a fee-only fiduciary firm in Carmel, Indiana, serving athletes nationwide. We do not sell products, we do not take commissions, and we do not negotiate your deals. We plan what happens to the money.
Our founder, David Ledbetter, and his twin brother Ryan both played professional baseball in the Texas Rangers organization. They know what it is to sign at eighteen, not understand what a W-2 is, and wonder whether the money will last. They watched teammates move through signing bonuses in a matter of months.
That is the whole reason this practice exists. The financial problem an NIL athlete faces is not a portfolio problem. It is a sequencing problem: the peak earning years arrive first instead of last, and every decision made in them either compounds for forty years or disappears in four.
This coordinates directly with our multi-year tax strategy work and, for athletes whose families are also planning, our comprehensive wealth planning.
Revenue-share contract, collective payments, and brand deals arriving at once, with nothing withheld and no structure underneath. The first tax season is the usual wake-up call, and it does not have to be.
A high school athlete with offers on the table and a parent doing all the research. Indiana now permits high school personal branding activity as of July 1, 2026. See what the IHSAA rule allows.
A signing bonus creates a single-year income spike, and almost everything worth doing about it has to be done before the contract is signed, not after.
Income drops to zero and the lifestyle does not. This is where the damage actually happens, and it is the least-served part of this market.
Sixty to ninety minutes, no cost, no obligation. What is coming in, what is committed, what you are worried about.
Your actual tax exposure across every state and every payer, the reserve number, and the deadlines you are already inside of.
Reserve funded, estimated payments scheduled, retirement accounts opened, spending structure set, entity question answered honestly.
Deals change, schools change, brackets change. Planning that ends with a binder is guessing about a life that has not happened yet.
Probably not yet. If your NIL income is small, a good CPA and a Roth IRA will cover most of what you need, and we will tell you that rather than sell you something. The point at which advice starts paying for itself is usually when the income becomes multi-source, crosses state lines, or arrives alongside a revenue-sharing contract. If you are not there, we would rather give you the checklist and stay in touch.
Fee-only means we are paid by our clients and by nobody else. No commissions, no product sales, no referral payments from insurance companies or fund families. In a market where athletes are surrounded by people whose income depends on selling them something, the question of who pays your advisor is the single most useful question you can ask. NAPFA explains the standard here.
No, and that is deliberate. Marketing your name and negotiating your deals is an agent's job. Deciding what happens to the money after it arrives is ours. Keeping those two roles separate is how you avoid the conflict where the person finding your deals also controls your account.
Yes. NIL planning is done almost entirely by video, document sharing, and phone, and we are registered to serve clients nationally. Our office is in Carmel, Indiana, so athletes and families at Indiana, Purdue, Notre Dame, Butler, and Indiana high schools can also meet in person. See working with us from anywhere.
Both of you, and we say that plainly at the start. Under 18, the parent is the client and the athlete is in the room learning. Between 18 and 22, the athlete decides and the parent usually validates. We do not run a plan past one of you and around the other.
That is the part most athlete-focused firms treat as an afterthought and we treat as the point. The whole structure is built so the income cliff is survivable: taxes paid ahead, a cash floor that does not depend on a contract, and retirement accounts funded during the years when your bracket allows it. See our athlete transition illustration.
What you owe, when it is due, and a worked example on a $50,000 NIL year.
Continue →The first ninety days, in order, before anyone sells you anything.
Continue →Fee-only versus commission, the questions to ask, and the red flags.
Continue →Schedule a complimentary call. We will walk through what you are actually solving for, whether that is a first tax bill, a first big contract, or what happens after the last one.
Schedule Your Impact CallOr call (317) 969-7499