Adrian Peterson broke and auctioning most of his possessions

I have a relative who works on the player education side for young players at an MLB team.

I asked her the same question, and she explained that many of these young players, especially from the caribbean, have too many people in their lives offering to "help" them with their finances. Players will ask for $50k+ checks to be handed to them because they've never had a bank account, or even worse, mailed to someone who may or may not be an agent.

They'll have a bunch of people who they trust, and those people will "manage" their finances, and as long as there's a checking account with enough money to pay for their day to day, they're not looking at savings or how much money is going in/out of various accounts and investments.

That said, AP should have a had a little more common sense as a 20-something college educated player versus a 17 year old kid from Cuba, but clearly not.

Easy. He made $100 million on paper. After taxes, agents, managers etc, cut that figure in half. Then start adding up all of his stupid spending, alimony, child care, entourage leeches, etc and that will get eating up quickly. We have seen this before many times so it shouldn't be surprising to anyone.

On a side note, he has a pretty good chance of having one of his multitude of children becoming an NFL star, and I'm turn, they can let him sponge of them. 

We live in America. It's the land of millionaires who think they're middle class, Millionaire who think they're billionaires and 40% of the population is within one paycheck of poverty.

$100M is easy to spend when you think you're entited to a $50M mansion.

Unfortunately many young athletes may not share the same values/principals to personal financial management as most people who have the access to financial advising or learned from family and friends in the same socio-economic environment.

Chances are, if you came from underserved or underprivileged communities, the terms "financial advising" were never on your radar because you never had any funds to advise about. And while AP eventually retired very late into his career, he obviously had a litany of legal and personal troubles (self-inflicted troubles, mind you) he had to take care of and those cost $$ along with whatever lifestyle he and his family were used to. Hire a financial advisor, you say? You better know them well and trust them down to every penny or they will turn your assets into liabilities real quick.

So yes, blowing $100 million seems hard to do for the average person and throwing $5 million away into a rainy-day investment fund might be a formality to you or me but there are plenty of cases of folks coming into money who have absolutely no idea how to manage it and often end up worse than where they started. I'm sure AP made some piss-poor decisions financially to add to his situation buy it's not as hard to conceive as one might think.

It's why you never hear about the people who win the lottery and make sound financial decisions to create wealth for their future generations. We only hear about the people who win the jackpots, only to be out on their asses 5 years later after squandering it all in a blink of an eye. 

Arik Armstrong posted a picture of his 49ers paystub to Twitter/X. He showed 4.1m in YTD gross earnings but only 2m net. So basically, take literally 50% and give it straight to the tax man. Still a hell of a lot of money to blow through though. 

Extended family and hanger-ons, and the inability to so no to both. 

Hookers & blow.  Rinse and repeat.

I don't think she understands compound interest. 

Idk, I thought it was fine. She didn't actually make any incorrect statements in there. She admits that only $70 or whatever is from interest. It's a little odd to not follow up with a more impressive example though. Like, at historical rates of return for the S&P500, investing $5,000/month for 40 years nets you ~$30,000,000, and over 90% of that is interest.