DeAndre Hopkins has spent nearly 13 seasons in the NFL and earned close to $140 million along the way. This offseason, instead of training for his next contract, the free agent wide receiver enrolled in finance classes at Clemson University, choosing to study wealth management rather than outsource it to advisers.
Preparing for the Future
Hopkins has already built a portfolio that includes stakes in Therabody, Whatnot, OLIPOP and Beyond Meat, according to Spotrac, which puts his career NFL earnings at just under $144 million. He is also a co-owner of Aruma Cafe, a coffee shop in Tempe, Arizona.
“In 2019 I put money into a plant-based meat company most people doubted. Then it went public and took off. That was Beyond Meat, before the IPO,” Hopkins wrote on LinkedIn. “Plenty of people called it a fad. I looked at it differently. I saw where food was heading, and a brand people would actually get attached to.”
For Hopkins wanted to understand the mechanics of every deal rather than lean entirely on professional managers.
“I’ve made almost $140 million in the NFL. Instead of paying people to manage it, I went back to school,” he said in a different post, adding, “In the offseason, while other guys are training or resting, I take finance classes at Clemson. A 13-year vet sitting in a college classroom, learning how money actually works.”
He tracked that decision to what he witnessed early on.
“It didn’t dawn on me that you have to educate yourself before you hand your money to someone else. I watched teammates make fortunes and lose them because they trusted the wrong people and never learned the game. I didn’t want to be one of them.”
Now, Hopkins says he personally evaluates every investment opportunity instead of relying solely on advisers.
“So now I do the work myself. I read the deals. I ask the questions that make me look like I don’t know anything, because that’s how you actually learn,” he wrote. Rather than blindly trusting others, Hopkins wants to understand every company he invests in. He said financial literacy is essential for anyone earning money, not just athletes, adding that the knowledge he’s gaining at Clemson is laying the foundation to launch his own investment fund eventually.
After earning an estimated $147 million in the NBA, Baron Davis also heeded outside information to make sure he kept his wealth.
In a resurfaced 2015 interview with NextShark, Davis cited the best financial advice he ever received: “A fool and his money will soon part. So since I’m a fool, I keep my money over there, and I just be a fool over here and pay for my foolishness. I use my budget to pay for my foolishness.”
Davis took it a step further, adding, once expected to become an accountant, reasoning that “I knew I was gonna come into a lot of money, and I needed to know how to count it all.”