FINANCIAL PLANNING IS LIFE PLANNING
The professional career, the dream of many an athlete, only lasts for a limited period of time, which must be used optimally. Young athletes in particular usually deal with this topic much too late and thus miss the opportunity to start their life after top-class sport in time.
The average professional career as an ice hockey player lasts between 12 and 14 years. However, those who do not start to deal with the topic of finances and retirement planning until the autumn of their career should not be surprised if the time after ice hockey becomes much more difficult than expected and hoped for. And those who have to give up their profession as an athlete earlier than planned as a result of injuries or other negative events are faced from one day to the next with a completely new situation that is often difficult to master.
Many players are not even aware of what financial pressure means because they have simply never experienced it before. Most athletes already have a considerable salary and often their own apartment before they reach the age of twenty. With a good, often rising salary that comes in month after month, a club that offers its professionals even more privileges, and no responsibility for other family members to bear, life is easy, especially since the club ensures a structured course of events with training and competition.
After the career, everything looks different at a stroke. Most of the players are married at this point and have an average of two children to look after. Unless there is a larger financial cushion and a fixed income flows into the payroll account month after month, the savings are quickly gone.
In many cases, the player's feeling of financial insecurity for the first time in his or her life only arises at the moment when he or she realises that there is no new contract. The player has learned to deal with the sporting pressure over the years, but bearing the financial pressure and the responsibility for a family is much harder. Quite a few break down under it.
Ice hockey can earn good or even very good money in Switzerland, but anyone who believes that they will not have to earn a regular income afterwards is making a serious mistake. To achieve this, you have to have a successful career in the NHL behind you, otherwise this idea is pure utopia.
But what can certainly be achieved with good advice is a life after sport that is not shaped and clouded by financial pressure and existential fears. If you want to maintain your often very high standard of living even after the paid competitive sport, then you have to plan everything carefully and early on.
This is exactly where we at Helpstone Sport Consulting would like to start and offer the athletes an optimal life planning. One of the most important points are the regularly recurring meetings with the players, because especially in their young years the personal situation often changes. This is the only way to create the prerequisites for the player to have a good start in life without ice hockey or to keep this sport in a different function after his playing career.