In Jay Z's Recent Song, "Off That", he makes it well know that he is a level above the spending trends and styles of his competition. He claims to be over the trends of "making it rain", Timberland boots, rims and tints for the car, and expensive neck chains, while remaining focused on making money through business and investing. Jay Z invests in a clothing company, a record company, the New Jersey Nets (soon to be Brooklyn), Real Estate, and other interests. As you will read below, Antoine Walker should seriously consider putting this song on repeat on his Ipod.

In all of the articles that I have written, I have focused on financial literacy, and more specifically, the typical financial mistakes that highly paid athletes make.

In summary, highly paid athletes need to focus on what has made Jay Z a wealthy man:

  1. Living within a budget (not spending everything that they make) and realizing that this high level of income will not last forever.
  2. Investing everything that they can in income producing assets, such as stocks, bonds, certificates of deposit, income bearing savings accounts, businesses, and real estate.

I was looking through my archives and found a saved article from October 2009 written by J.E. Skeets, titled, “Former Celtics Star Antoine Walker is Broke and In Debt”. Read through this article and ask yourself these simple questions:

  1. Did Antoine Walker live within a defined budget and realize that his income would not last forever?
  2. Did Antoine Walker invest in any income producing assets?

As you will see, the answer to each of these questions is a resounding no. Just to put this into perspective, if he had spent half of the $60M during this period and invested the other half ($30M) at an 8% return in various income producing assets, he would still be earning $2.4M per year. A shame isn’t it? A recent Outside the Lines feature Million Dollar Mistakes with Mark Schwarz details Antoine Walker's disastrous financial situation. Read this article to find out exactly what NOT to do. 

If you don't want to end up like Walker, I suggest you pick up a copy of Money Players by Marc Isenberg now, before it's too late.