Scott Morrison, CFP®

$1,200,000. College Athlete. 1099 Income. Here’s what nobody tells NIL athletes pulling real money: The moment your first revenue share or NIL check cleared, you became a small business owner. The IRS doesn’t care that you’re a student-athlete in college. They don’t care that your earning window might be just a few years. They want their cut. Today. Here’s what we did to keep serious money in his pocket instead of sending a check to Uncle Sam: 1️⃣ LLC taxed as an S-Corp Put him on his own payroll and paid him a reasonable salary. The rest? Taken available as distributions. Stops 15.3% self-employment tax from gutting every endorsement check. → Saves tens of thousands of dollars. 2️⃣ Maximize business deductions Training. Recovery. Content production. Travel. Equipment. Agent and legal fees. Home office. The real cost of running a 7-figure brand, finally run through the entity. → Saves tens of thousands of dollars. 3️⃣ Solo 401(k) $24,500 employee + $47,500 employer = $72,000 deferred for retirement. At age 20 with 45 years of compounding ahead, that single contribution can grow to millions of tax free money. And we plan to do this every year that we’re earning 1099 income. → Saves roughly $26,000 per year. 4️⃣ Pass-Through Entity Elective Tax State tax paid at the entity level. Sidesteps the federal SALT cap. → Saves about $30,000 5️⃣ Backdoor Roth IRA $7,500 in. Tax-free growth for life. At 20 years old, this is the highest-leverage account he’ll ever own. 6️⃣ Donor Advised Fund / his own Private Non-Profit Builds a giving legacy. Aligns with his personal brand. Generates real federal deductions. → Saves $15,000–$40,000+, depending on giving level Total tax savings for 2026: $150,000+ This is what we do. Same story every time with NIL athletes earning 6 and 7 figures: → Treating the income like an allowance → Spending before structuring → Trusting the same tax preparer their family used for W-2 income their whole life You’re not a college kid with a side hustle. You’re the CEO of a 7-figure personal brand. Your team should look like one. 📍 If you want to see where you stand with your money, take our Moment Money Quiz and find out in two minutes 👇

$200 million career. $300,000 in the bank. Paul Pierce is now "drowning financially." His Fox Sports income averaged about $119,000 a month. It stopped in August. His costs didn't: $28,000 a month in child support, $20,000 in spousal support, and roughly $48,000 more in monthly bills, including $7,000 on dining out and $5,000 on groceries. That's the part I wish every athlete understood before the first big check. Turning a lifestyle up takes one phone call. Turning it down takes years, and sometimes a judge. The house, the staff, the family you start supporting, the way you eat and travel all ratchet. They go up easily and almost never come back down on their own. So we tell every client the same thing: build the lifestyle slowly. Let your income prove it's permanent before your spending assumes it is. It's always easier to turn it up later. Athletes: for most players, an A+ financial outcome is possible no matter what your on-field career looked like. And that part is entirely within your control.

If your advisor is only talking about your portfolio and the markets, you’re missing out. Most athletes I meet either don’t have anyone providing advice or guidance or they simply have someone managing their equity holdings. Very few have anyone handling the overall the plan. Ask them who makes medical decisions if they're hurt and can't speak for themselves, and you usually get a pause. Ask who can sign on their accounts if they're laid up after surgery, same thing. And if something happened to them tomorrow, a court would end up sorting out a lot of what they've built. So this offseason we're getting three documents drafted and executed: • Revocable trust: your assets go where you want them to without a judge involved. • Financial power of attorney: someone you chose handles your money if you can't. • Healthcare power of attorney: someone you chose makes your medical decisions if you can't. None of it takes long. It just has to get done while you're healthy and have the time, which for most guys means right now. If your advisor has never brought any of this up, it's worth asking why. And if you're not sure what you have in place, send me a message. One conversation and you'll know exactly where you stand.

The truth about rental property investing that nobody talks about: Most people dream of owning real estate for "passive income." I work with clients who own multiple rental properties. Here's what they've taught me: Real estate can be an incredible wealth-building vehicle when done strategically. But owning 1-2 rental properties? That's often the worst position to be in. You're dealing with: Tenant calls at midnight Maintenance headaches Property management decisions Tax complexity Market timing risks All for returns that barely move the needle on your net worth. The math is simple: One property generating $500/month in cash flow won't change your life. But it will consume your time and mental energy. My advice: Either commit fully or stay out entirely. If you're going in, plan to scale to multiple properties. Build systems, learn the business inside and out, and replicate what works. Or keep your money in index funds and skip the 2am repair calls. The middle ground (a couple of rentals) gives you all the headaches of being a landlord without the wealth-building benefits of scale. What's your take? Have you found the "sweet spot" in real estate investing?

$6.2M signing bonus. $3.3M after taxes. $1.6M spoken for before we touched a single investment. This is the reality of players who don’t hire a team before they get drafted. $6.2M signing bonus. Endorsement money already coming in. On paper, he was set. Realistically? He was one bad decision away from financial pressure before he ever stepped into a big-league clubhouse. What most people get wrong about the early years of a pro career: burn rate wins. Every time. Federal taxes at 37%. State at 5%. Agent fees at 5%. $6.2M became $3.3M net. Then real life started: $1.1M home $120K vehicle $150K to pay off mom and dad’s mortgage $250K in furnishings, travel, offseason training, and living expenses while grinding in the minors $1.6M gone before we ever talked about where to invest a dollar. So we had a choice. Chase returns or build durability. We built durability. We set aside two full years of projected living expenses in high-yield cash and short-term treasuries. Not exciting. But it bought him time if his development stalled. We built the boring infrastructure. Quarterly tax projections, multi-state filing, an entity structure for his endorsements, disability coverage, umbrella policy. The stuff nobody talks about that prevents catastrophic mistakes. The remaining capital went into a globally diversified portfolio. No concentrated bets. No locker-room private equity deals. No speculative real estate. Here’s what the minor leagues actually look like: Income is uncertain. Promotions are uncertain. Careers are uncertain. Liquidity isn’t. If he flames out in three years, the goal isn’t to have maximized returns. It’s to still have options. Athletes don’t fail financially because they didn’t earn enough. They fail because lifestyle creep outpaces flexibility. In the early years, cash flow control is everything. Build the lifestyle slowly. It’s a lot easier to turn that dial up than it is to turn it down.

Most NIL athletes making seven figures will hand the IRS roughly 40% of their income. They don't have to. A college athlete making $1M+ in NIL this year should be looking to contribute to a Solo 401k. Unfortunately, most don't know it exists or how it works. Here's what the math actually looks like: Contribute $72,000 to the Solo 401k. $24,500 as the employee. $47,500 as the employer. That's an immediate tax savings of about $26,000 this year. Real money back in the athlete's pocket instead of in Washington's. Now invest that $72,000 and let it compound. Fast forward 40 years, when the athlete is 60 and long retired from whatever their second or third career was. That single contribution could be worth $3 million. The boat sinkers in athlete finances are loud. Bad cars, bad houses, bad business partners. What moves the needle? Tax-advantaged accounts, smart entity structures, decisions nobody posts about. NIL income is taxable self-employment income. The size of an NIL deal matters far less than the decisions made once the money hits the account. What's your $3 million decision this year?

You'd never let a general surgeon perform Tommy John on your elbow or rebuild your ACL. So why is a generalist managing the money that your elbow or knee earned you? Athletes need a specialist. Here's the standard yours should meet. Does your advisor: - Know what it's like to go pro and relate to what you're going through - Understand how your salary, bonus, and endorsement income are taxed, and when an entity makes sense for your NIL and endorsements - Know how to handle the jock tax across every state you play in, use PTET on endorsement income, and minimize self-employment and federal taxes - Know the right retirement plan for you beyond the league plan, and how to stack it - Know how to manage cash flow from season to off-season, and the best way to pay yourself from your endorsement entity - Know your safe harbor requirements, 110% vs 90%, when your income jumps overnight - Know the insurance your career depends on: disability, loss-of-value, umbrella - Know whether your assets and entity should be owned by a trust - Know how to minimize taxes on your contract, from bonus structure to where you live when you sign - Know how your career, your brand, and your personal finances connect - Know how to invest with both your playing window and your life after in view If the answer to any of these is no, I’d challenge you to make sure everyone on your team is equipped to get you to where you’re going. You need a specialist.

Turning your lifestyle up is easy. Turning it down is brutal. I've spent the better part of the last decade making sure my clients don't learn that the hard way. Once your family, your friends, and your mortgage adjust to a number, that number becomes really difficult to adjust. So build it slowly. Nearly every mistake I see traces back to the dial: 1. Not knowing your real cash flow after agent fees and jock tax 2. Covering the gap with bad debt 3. Falling behind on taxes, especially on endorsement income with nothing withheld 4. Buying too much car 5. No emergency fund, in a career that can end on one play 6. Skipping retirement accounts to keep money "for now" 7. Buying a house you can't carry after the checks stop 8. Chasing get-rich-quick pitches 9. Skipping blindspot coverages 10. Not automating savings, bills, and tax payments None of these are complicated. Every one is inside your control. That's more than you can say about anything that happens between the lines. If you're an athlete, parent, or mentor guiding one, and you want someone who'll tell you the truth instead of simply what you want to hear, reach out and let’s talk

Most of the athletes and entrepreneurs we work with are already giving. So the question is rarely whether to give. It's how. Two clients. Both give $100,000 to charity this year. One of them also erases $80,000 of capital gains. The difference? One wrote a check. The other gave stock. And the how is worth real money. Here's the play: 1. Give cash. You get a deduction against your income. That's it. Not ideal. 2. Give appreciated stock instead (held 1+ year). Same deduction at full market value. And you never pay capital gains on the growth. 3. Use the cash to buy the stock back. Your portfolio looks identical. Your cost basis just reset from $20,000 to $100,000. The math: $80,000 of gain × 23.8% (20% capital gains + 3.8% net investment income tax) = ~$19,000 in tax you won't owe when you sell. No wash-sale issue. That rule only applies to losses. Now stack it. Athletes and entrepreneurs share one trait: income arrives in spikes. A contract year. An exit year. That's when a deduction does the most work. Instead of giving $50,000 a year for three years, move $150,000 of stock into a donor-advised fund, an account that gives you the deduction now and lets you send grants to charities on your own schedule. Writing a check is the most expensive way to give. But this isn't about one strategy. It's about knowing your options before December forces a decision. Which assets to give. Which year to give them in. How to structure it so the causes you care about receive more.

How much does an MLB player make for a playoff run? Well, it depends. It depends on two factors. 1. How far his team goes 2. How his teammates vote. Playoff shares are a bonus, separate from salary. They come from one league-wide Players' Pool: 60% of gate receipts from the first 2 Wild Card games the first 3 Division Series games, and the first 4 games of the LCS and World Series. Those are the minimum games each series can last. If the series goes longer, those gates don’t add to the pot. In 2025, the pool was about $128.2M, split by how far each team went: Champion: 36% → $46.15M WS loser: 24% → $30.76M Each LCS loser: 12% → $15.38M Each DS loser: 3.25% → $4.17M Each Wild Card loser: 0.75% → $961K But a player doesn't simply get the team pool ÷ 26. Each team votes on how to divide its pool: full shares, partial shares, and cash awards for staff. The Dodgers split their $46.147M into: 82 full shares 12.5 partial shares $340,000 in cash awards A full share came to $484,748. 2025 full shares, by finish: Dodgers (won WS): $484,748 Blue Jays (lost WS): $354,118 Mariners (lost ALCS): $182,376 Brewers (lost NLCS): $168,853 Division Series losers: $46,865–$52,044 Wild Card losers: $9,347–$11,528 Look at Seattle and Milwaukee. Same round, same $15.382M pool, and a $13,523 gap per full share. The only difference was the vote. So what's a playoff run worth? It depends. Just never on how many games you play.

I can't tell you how many people let the tax tail wag the dog. It usually starts with a great year. You see a tax projection and suddenly every decision runs through one question: how do we make that number smaller? So you: • Max every retirement account available
• Fund a foundation with a check far bigger than your giving plans call for
• Buy into a private deal where the tax deduction is on slide one and the 10-year lockup is buried on slide fourteen Your tax bill goes down. So do your options. To be clear, nobody likes paying taxes. But our job is to help you pay the least amount of tax over your lifetime, not necessarily every single year. There's a difference. A deduction saves you a percentage of a dollar. You still gave up the whole dollar, or locked it away for years. Here's why that matters for athletes: • Most professional careers are over around 30
• Touching retirement accounts before 59½ generally means a penalty
• You'll likely spend more of your retired life before 59½ than after it That's nearly three decades to fund. A taxable brokerage account is what funds them. You'll pay some tax along the way, but you can get to your money when life asks for it. Don't get me wrong. We max out retirement accounts for plenty of clients, and we help them give, sometimes generously. But only when cash flow supports it, and never at the expense of what needs to stay liquid. Flexibility is key, my friends. The tax bill is one line in the plan, not the plan.

LeBron James pays income tax in a state he's never lived in. So does every other pro athlete in America. It's called the jock tax, and it's one of the most fascinating (and brutal) corners of state tax law. Most people assume you pay state income tax where you live. Athletes don't get that luxury. They pay based on where they work, game by game, city by city. The mechanism is called duty days. States count the number of days an athlete spends working within their borders (games, practices, sometimes travel) and tax a proportional slice of that season's salary. So a player based in Florida, which has zero state income tax, still cuts a check to California every time his team plays in LA or Sacramento. At California's 13.3% top rate, the highest in the country, that's not pocket change. That's real money for one road trip. Here's where it gets interesting for free agency: Sign with a team in Texas, Florida, Washington, or Tennessee, and your home games are effectively tax-free. Sign with a team in California or New York, and you're exposed at some of the highest marginal rates in the country before you've even played a single road game. States with a packed pro sports calendar are essentially competing for a piece of income that was never earned by one of their own residents. It's no coincidence that California and New York sit at the top of the map above, and also happen to host some of the highest-paid rosters in professional sports. If you've ever worked with an athlete who plays 82-162 games a year across 18+ states, you already know how painful this gets in practice.

One of the most important things I tell my clients is this: At the end of the day this is your money. I don't pass judgement on what you buy or how you choose to use it. My job? Provide guidance and objectiveness and present a specific plan as to how you can achieve your goals. Most importantly? My job is to execute on whatever path you feel is best for you.

I've sat across the table from hundreds of athletes and entrepreneurs. Almost every one of them shows up with the same issue. Plenty of money. No system. It usually looks like this: A checking account from college. Three brokerage apps opened on a whim. Two old 401(k)s nobody has touched in years. No clear job for any of it. Organization is the first investment decision you make. The 6-account foundation I build for athletes and entrepreneurs: 1Checking: the operating account Local bank. Income in, bills out. Nothing else lives here. 2High-yield savings: one account per job Emergency fund. Tax reserve. Short-term goals. The tax reserve is the one people skip. It's also the one that hurts. Bonus withholding often falls short across multiple states. A business sale usually withholds nothing. Fund it the day the money lands. A money market fund works here too. 3Your current retirement plan League plan, company 401(k), or Solo 401(k). Consolidate old plans into it if the investments and fees hold up. Every extra account is one more thing to watch. 4One Roth IRA + one Traditional IRA A backdoor Roth needs both. You contribute to the Traditional, then convert to Roth. It's how high earners get Roth dollars above the income limit. Roll old pre-tax IRAs into your 401(k) first, or the conversion triggers tax you didn't plan for. 5One brokerage account Long-term, liquid money. Same firm as your IRAs. One login. One picture. 6529s / UTMAs For the kids, if that's part of the plan. You worked too hard for this money to leave it scattered across apps you forgot you downloaded. Give every dollar a place. Then give it a purpose.

There’s no secret that there’s a direct correlation between roster payrolls and success. But it certainly doesn’t buy you a championship. Just ask every team last year except Indiana. Surely all of these players are utilizing tax strategies to keep as much in their pockets as possible, right? Here's what we did for a client earning $1,200,000 in 1099 NIL income this year. The moment that first check clears, you're not a student-athlete with an endorsement anymore. You're a small business owner. The IRS doesn't care about your eligibility clock. They want their share now. Here's what we built to make sure most of it stayed his: 1️⃣ LLC taxed as an S-Corp Payroll for a reasonable salary, the rest taken as distributions. Stops the 15.3% self-employment tax from eating every check. → Tens of thousands saved. 2️⃣ Real business deductions Training. Recovery. Content production. Travel. Equipment. Agent and legal fees. Home office. The actual cost of running a seven-figure brand, finally run through the entity instead of his own pocket. → Tens of thousands saved. 3️⃣ Solo 401(k) $24,500 employee, $47,500 employer. $72,000 deferred in one year. At 20, with 45 years of compounding ahead, that contribution alone can grow to millions, tax-deferred. We do this every year he earns 1099 income. → About $26,000 saved this year. 4️⃣ Pass-through entity elective tax State tax paid at the entity level. Sidesteps the federal SALT cap entirely. → About $30,000 saved. 5️⃣ Backdoor Roth IRA $7,500 in, tax-free growth for life. At 20, this is the single highest-leverage account he'll ever open. 6️⃣ Donor-advised fund Builds a giving legacy that aligns with his brand and generates a real federal deduction. → $15,000 to $40,000+ saved, depending on the giving level. Total: $150,000+ kept out of the IRS's hands in 2026. Same story, every NIL athlete earning six and seven figures: → Treats the income like an allowance → Spends before structuring → Keeps the tax preparer their family used for W-2 income their whole life The real issues lies in the fact that nobody's chart shows what the individual players are worth to themselves after taxes. As athletes, you get one shot to do this right. There's no second contract for the money you didn't structure correctly the first time.

$18.7M rookie contract over four years. After taxes and agent fees, roughly $10.1M of it ever reaches him. He was 22. Lottery pick, 14th overall. On paper, set for life. Year one alone: $3.9M gross. Federal took 37%. State took, on average, 5%. His agent took 4%, the NBPA cap. $3.9M became roughly $2.1M net, before he'd bought anything. Then real life started: - $1.4M home - Multiple 6-figure car purchases - $200K to pay off his parents' mortgage - $245K in furnishings, travel, and living expenses $2M + spoken for. Nearly his entire first-year net, gone before he'd invested a dollar, with three more contract years still to plan for. So we had a choice: chase returns, or build durability. We built durability. Two years of living expenses, parked in high-yield cash and short-term treasuries. Not exciting. It meant he had room even if year three's team option never got picked up. Quarterly tax projections. Multi-state filing. An entity for his endorsement income. Appropriate property and casualty coverages. The unglamorous infrastructure that prevents the catastrophic mistake. What was left went into a globally diversified portfolio, no concentrated bets, no locker-room deals, no speculative real estate. On a rookie-scale contract, two of the four years aren't even guaranteed, they're team options. A role, a roster spot, a healthy season: none of it is promised. Liquidity isn't optional. It's the whole plan. If the option never gets picked up, the win isn't maximum return. It's still having options of his own. Athletes don't go broke because they didn't earn enough. They go broke because their lifestyle outran their flexibility.

Everyone's sharing this stat because it's fun. $1.79 a second. It's also the exact stat that gets athletes in trouble. Framing pay as a rate trains your brain to treat it as permanent, like the tap just stays on. It doesn't. It's a few more seasons of tape, then whatever's built is what's left. I've never seen an athlete run through career earnings because they didn't make enough. I've seen it happen because someone did the per-second math in their head and started spending like the clock doesn't stop. The number isn't the risk. The framing is. This is the entire premise behind Moment Private Wealth. We don't build plans around what you're making right now. We build them around the fact that the window closes and the money has to outlast it. Rich is a rate. Wealthy is what's left when the rate hits zero. If you're a pro athlete, or you're on the team around one, let's talk.