The money arrives faster than the advice does. Here is the order of operations, before anyone gets a chance to sell you something.
Schedule a CallIn order: set aside taxes, build a cash floor, decide your spending number, fund a Roth while your bracket is low, then invest what is left with a timeline attached. Everything else, the business idea, the real estate, the crypto, the thing your teammate is in, comes after those five. Not because those things are bad, but because every one of them gets sold at a loss when a tax bill arrives and the cash is not there.
This page is deliberately unglamorous. The interesting decisions are the ones you get to make in year three, and you only get to year three if year one is boring.
NIL income arrives with nothing withheld. You owe self-employment tax of 15.3 percent on net earnings plus federal and state income tax, and the IRS wants it quarterly. A reserve of 30 to 40 percent of net income is a reasonable starting assumption until a CPA runs your actual return.
The mechanic that works: a separate high-yield savings account, at a different bank from your spending account, with an automatic transfer set the day any deal pays. Money that sits in your checking account gets treated as yours, because it looks like yours. The full mechanics, dates, and a worked example are on the NIL tax page.
Three to six months of your actual living costs, in cash, untouchable. For an athlete this floor does more work than it does for anyone else, because your income is not just variable, it is terminable. An injury, a coaching change, a collective that stops funding, or a transfer can end a revenue stream between semesters.
The floor is what turns those events from emergencies into inconveniences. It is also what keeps you from taking a bad deal because you need the money this month.
Not a budget. A structure. Decide what you will live on monthly, move that amount into a spending account, and let the rest stay where it is. Enjoy some of it, deliberately. The failure mode is not buying things, it is buying things without ever having decided what the ceiling was.
Two specific traps worth naming:
This is the most valuable and most consistently missed move available to an NIL athlete. You are earning meaningful income in a low tax bracket, which is precisely the situation Roth accounts are designed for, and the contributions have forty or more years to compound tax free. The 2026 contribution limit is $7,500.
Eligibility depends on having compensation, and NIL royalty income does not count as compensation. Check the structure of your deals before assuming you qualify. This is covered in detail on the tax page, and it connects directly to our work on Roth strategy more broadly.
Only now, and only with a question answered first: what is this money for, and when do you need it? Money for a house in three years and money you will not touch until you are sixty do not belong in the same account or the same investments.
Two principles that matter more for athletes than for most people:
You have probably seen the claim that 78 percent of NFL players go broke within two years. That figure comes from a 2009 magazine article that never published a study or a methodology behind it, and it should be treated with skepticism.
The rigorous version is more useful anyway. A peer-reviewed study of 2,016 NFL players drafted between 1996 and 2003 found that 1.9 percent had filed for bankruptcy within two years of retirement, rising to 15.7 percent within twelve years. The finding that matters most for you is this one: longer careers and higher career earnings had little measurable effect on bankruptcy risk (Carlson, Kim, Lusardi and Camerer, American Economic Review, 2015).
Read that again. Making more money and playing longer did not protect them. Structure did. That is the entire argument for doing this early rather than later.
The pattern shows up outside sports too. A study of Florida lottery winners found that large cash prizes postponed bankruptcy rather than preventing it. A windfall without a plan buys time, not outcomes.
They will, and most of them are not villains. Family with real needs, friends with real ideas, and professionals with real credentials and a commission attached. What protects you is not suspicion, it is having already decided.
Remnant Wealth LLC does not provide legal or tax advice. This page is general educational information, not personalized advice, and tax rules change. Figures cited are current as of August 2026 and are linked to their sources. Work with your own CPA and attorney before acting on anything here.
30 to 40 percent of net income, moved to a separate account the day money lands.
Three to six months of living costs in cash, untouchable, because the income can stop without notice.
Decide monthly spending in advance, then spend it without guilt. The ceiling is the point, not the restraint.
Roth first while the bracket is low, then timeline, liquidity, and diversification in that order.
Move the tax reserve out. Before a purchase, before a gift, before an investment. Open a separate high-yield savings account, name it something obvious, and transfer 30 to 40 percent of every deposit into it the day it arrives. Almost every NIL disaster starts with this step being skipped.
After the tax reserve and an emergency fund, a reasonable starting point is spending no more than 20 to 30 percent of what remains and letting the rest sit until you have a plan. That is a guideline, not a rule. The important thing is that the number is decided in advance rather than discovered at the end of the month.
Neither, until the foundation exists. Tax reserve, emergency fund, and a spending plan come first, because a business or a portfolio funded before those three exists gets liquidated at the worst possible moment to cover a tax bill. After that, the answer depends on your timeline and how much of your life the money has to cover.
Real estate is a real asset class and a genuinely popular first move for athletes, and it is also illiquid, leveraged, and often sold to athletes by people earning a commission on the sale. It can be a good decision. It should not be your first one, and it should never be a decision made because someone brought you the deal.
The most useful thing you can do is decide the number before the question comes. Set an annual giving amount, fund it, and let that be the answer. It converts an emotional decision into an arithmetic one, and it means no is about the plan rather than about the person.
It is the single best window you will ever have. You are earning in a low tax bracket, which is exactly when Roth contributions are most valuable, and the money has forty or more years to compound. Read the NIL tax guide first, though, because how your deal is structured determines whether you are even eligible.
Self-employment tax, quarterly dates, and a worked $50,000 example.
Continue →Fee-only versus commission, and the questions that expose the difference.
Continue →How we work with athletes and families, and what it costs you.
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