As a freshman at the University of Connecticut, Paige Bueckers blew through her college stipend so fast that she turned to her mother for financial support.
Spending all her money on clothes and food, she had to borrow her mom’s credit card to buy gas and other necessities.
“So she wasn’t really happy about that,” Bueckers, now a WNBA star, told Fortune. “Then [name, image, and likeness] came into place, and then my mom [got] her credit card back.”
Now a 23-year-old rookie in the WNBA, the financial transition was startling; five years ago, Bueckers didn’t even have a bank account.
“It happened super fast, and I really wasn’t prepared for it,” she said. “Building your wealth in college and starting to really understand finances is something that I didn’t really know, and so I was kind of forced to know.”
Bueckers now earns a regular paycheck, though it pales in comparison to her endorsement deals. In April, Bueckers signed a $348,198 rookie contract with the Dallas Wings, earning $78,831 in her first year, per the league’s collective bargaining agreement.
Buecker’s eye-opening introduction to personal finance is a trial by fire shared with many young athletes, some of whom experience a whirlwind rise to success only to see their wealth slip away when their tenure as professional athletes ends.
That’s not lost on Bueckers, who learned the hard way about setting up savings accounts and investment portfolios.
“It can be gone at any single moment,” she said. “And that’s something that I’m still learning.”
“There is the opportunity to be put at risk by earning all this money suddenly when you’re 18,19, 20 years old,” Rueda told Fortune.
Schools are still playing catch-up to the evolving set of policies surrounding NIL, but there’s also a growing infrastructure of support for student-athletes to help reap the potential benefits of these deals, Rueda said. Athletes have access to agents and lawyers as well as training required from schools, which want to have successful athletes reflect the success of their respective programs.
“As much as NIL is still kind of the wild west, there are starting to form some guidelines and goalposts around what makes the most sense for the benefit of the kids,” she said.
