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Earlier this year, NFL fullback Khari Blasingame helped the Philadelphia Eagles defeat the Chiefs to take a Super Bowl championship. But before he made the salary of a title-winning pro player, he had to learn how to set a budget so he wouldn’t overspend trying to keep up with the lavish lifestyles of his teammates.
The minimum salary for a rookie in his first year was $465,000, but Blasingame didn’t make nearly that much as an undrafted free agent. On the Financial Freestyle podcast, he explained his financial mentality going into the league and how he budgeted for a salary outside of the NFL in order to avoid going broke.
“I wanted to get as much money as I could in the door, and I wanted to live as if I made $80,000 pretax,” he said. “I was looking at consulting salaries and different sales salaries … and I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to live as if I’m making this. So if I don’t play a year after this, I still have a couple of years in reserves.’”
Read more: How to budget: Your complete guide to budgeting for 2025
One of Blasingame’s goals was to prepare himself for a time when he was no longer playing football, a prudent approach considering that the average career length in the NFL is around three years.
“I wanted to make sure I had enough breathing room between the time that I ended playing — which I didn’t know what it was, so that caused me a little bit of anxiety — and between when I found my next gig, and I didn’t want there to be a big drop-off mentally,” he said.
“I wanted to have a lifestyle that’s like, ‘You know what, whether I play here for another year, another two years, or three years, I’m going to have this lifestyle as if I’m making $80,000 pretax and this is what I’m going to live off of.’”
Blasingame credited his father with instilling in him the importance of saving. When Blasingame got a little bit of graduation money — “nothing but maybe $750 to $1,000,” he said — his father encouraged him to save and invest by connecting him with his financial adviser to put it in a mutual fund.
“I’m very thankful that I had two great parents who really instilled in me hard work, saving money,” Blasingame said. “My pops … I told him, … ‘Look, I want to go to college. I want to go to the NFL.’ He was like, ‘All right, bet. So if you’re going to go to the NFL, … you need to know how to manage your money,’ because he would always say, ‘If you can’t manage your own money, you don’t deserve to have it.’”
Those early lessons got Blasingame interested in learning more about finance, and they ultimately carried over when he began earning money from the league.
Read more: Here’s what the ideal budget looks like for a $60,000 salary
That didn’t mean Blasingame wasn’t cognisant of some of the more extravagant purchases his fellow NFLers could make, though. Watching teammates make even more than the baseline rookie salary was difficult at times, he admitted, and he even said that the flashy car he bought early in his career was ultimately a bad investment.
But as he switched teams and continued his way through the league, his sights have always been set on maintaining that baseline lifestyle.
“When you look at the guys who are making my yearly [salary] in one check, you start to look at some of the things they do, and it’s like, OK, that’s why,” he said. “I think that’s the mistake that most guys make, is that they want to do the same things that those guys are doing without that type of money.”
“I think just already having that baseline, it just kind of allowed me to be like, all right, I got this, I got this extra money above, these goals that I set for this year, what do I want to do with it? And then that caused me to like, all right, let’s go learn something,” he continued. “I had a financial adviser [and] was looking at some of the stuff that he was doing. I was like, you know what? I just learned a little bit more.”
Every Monday, Financial Freestyle host Ross Mac talks with key guests to discuss their wealth-building journeys and what it takes to build a lasting financial footprint. You can find more episodes on our video hub or watch on your preferred streaming service.
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