Lessons - How to Secure Your Financial Future | Chris Pronger, NHL All-Star & Entrepreneur

Welcome to Lessons episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot podcast network. These lessons episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests, valued members of the success story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you actionable, insightful takeaways that you can use to upskill your personal and professional life. 70% of a lot of winners lose their money or go bankrupt in five years. So that's 70% of people that know that you're not going to get another paycheck, burn through that money. So think about that for a second. So imagine now you're making that kind of money, and then you think you're going to get another paycheck, you think you're going to get, and that's not just a one time event. Now that's ingrained in you over 15 years. So that's messing with you. You're not, you're not thinking in the right mindset, obviously. Now, I think that you... And here's the second point to that, and here's the follow-up to that. Your whole life, you've been solely focused on your sport, solely focused on being the best that you're a sport that you can be. Most likely not focusing on your schooling as much as maybe you should. And now you're done, now what? You solely immersed yourself in this sport. You spent every waking second grinding at your sport. And now what? And a lot of times your whole identity is built around your sport. Here's Scott, the hockey player, how you doing? It's not Scott. It's not Scott from Toronto, it's not Scott from whatever, it's Scott, the hockey player. Your hockey player? No, no, I play hockey, but that's not who I am. That's not my sole person. So it, and that, the more you hear that over and over and over and over again, it tends to get ingrained in you, and it's so-and-so, the football players, and now you think you're just a football player. Oh, you're just a dumb jock. You hear that over and over again. Now you're just a dumb jock, and you hear these things over and over and over again, and people just send like, all right, maybe I am, because you hear it all the time. And they're unwilling to buck the trend and buck what people's perceptions are. And so, you know, you're kind of just going with the flow, as opposed to trying to break that cycle and being smart with your money and being smart with what you're doing and how you're kind of laying it all out there. You know, everybody wants to take care of their family, everybody wants to take care of their friends, but at what cost? Like, you know, it just, it can, some of the stories you hear, you're like, I can't believe that happened. So out of the guys you played, as the guys you played, pop with, what percentage of them do you think struggle to some extent? Guys you're close with? Yeah, I don't think a lot, a lot of the guys that I've played with, you know, summer struggling. There's no question. Like, the problem is, you don't hear about it, you know, because they're embarrassed, because they don't want to ask for help, because they don't, they're unwilling to kind of open themselves up for criticism, because they made mistakes, they got into a risky deal, they thought they were going to hit the lottery and, or they went to hit the lottery again. You know, you think, oh, I just won the lottery, I made $10 million playing my sport. You should be creating a nest egg and, and building off of that instead, you're risking it all, thinking you want to be LeBron James or Kevin Durant and doing all the stuff that they do. Meanwhile, they're making 40, 50 million bucks of your plan to sport. They can take those risks, and they're making hundreds of millions of dollars in endorsements. You'll look at the cream, cream, cream of the crop and think, I want to be there. They have no chance of getting there. You have to be comfortable in who you are and where you are in order to be a sound investor, you know, and, and look for singles, you know, I tell people, I just want singles in doubles. And if a double turns into a home run, then great, but I just want singles in doubles. And the more you do that over and over again, as you know, you're, you're going to have a lot of success. And too often these people, they're, they're constantly trying to hit home runs. Why I have no idea, they're not satisfied with whatever they've got or they see this guy flying around on a private jet and this guy with a friggin' McLaren or whatever, what he's on a yacht or what? I mean, it, and they're, they, they're jealous, so they start risking it all for no reason. And it's really just the mindset and, and their mind playing games on them. So it's understanding. And it's hard for athletes to, you know, you're, you're competitive. You're driven, you know, that you're using that as a tool to push yourself, but it's, you're pushing yourself that you're taking a lot of risk that you don't have to take. And it's, it's hard for some guys to kind of get out of that competition and, and, you know, to always trying to be better than the next guy and, and, and just being happy with where you're at. Um, you know, there's, there's a lot, there's certainly lots of guys that struggle, there's lots of success stories, there's lots of guys that are struggling. I think you see that in all walks of life, you know, like, it's just as an athlete, it's front center and it's in the paper, it's on TV, it's whatever, it's on social media. Uh, I mean, I see people all the time that, you know, had great jobs and made a lot of money and now they're struggling for whatever reason, you know, whether they're trying to keep up with the Joneses or, uh, you know, trying to be somebody who they're not. And, you know, I think that's, you know, the, the biggest takeaway for me is understanding who you are and then being who you are and not worrying about, you know, living this, whatever dream they're living over there and just live your own dream, live out your own life. Uh, you know, I think that's where a lot of players really struggle because they're, they're trying to be somebody they're not. How did you set yourself up properly? Did you, did you just get lucky with the right advice and mentors and financial advisors when you were still playing or what was your strategy? Yeah, I, I made my first sure mistakes too. What's up? Okay, give, what, what would you give a good, give a good mistake? Give a good mistake. That's always interesting. I have poor investments, you know, like I, I, I, you know, bought a second, why I don't know why, but I bought a second home thinking, okay, well, I'm gonna, I'm in St. Louis, you know, it'll be a good, great place for my wife to take her kids in the winter time. They're young. They can go hang on the beach while we're off for a week playing. And then I get traded, so now I'm like, well, that one wasn't finished yet. So then I'm like, all right, we'll wait over here. I mean, you just, you, you don't logically think things through. And then next thing, you know, you're saddled with two properties that you don't use. You're like, okay, and you have your main one and you're like, hey, why do I need all this crap? And then the market tanks, you're like, okay, great. And it just, you're, you know, you're, you're not paying it, you don't, first off, you're paying attention to all that stuff because that's not your job, you're focused on your job and you're just doing things without really looking at the, with, with unintended consequences. And then you're not, you're not realizing how deep you're into it. You know, and, and you know, you're thinking, all right, this looks like a great idea, you know, you're, you know, you see some of these deals and they're just totally bloated with fees and all kinds of stuff, basically trying to take advantage of your, you know, it's just, sometimes it just, you make mistakes, you know, and I, I tell my financial guy, I'll tell you, listen, out of those mistakes and out of that money that was lost came a really good guidelines for what we want to invest in and then guidelines for who we don't want to invest in and, and, and as you make those mistakes, you're able to really understand what good deals look like and what bad deals look like and, and, and ones that are in your wheelhouse and other ones that they may, you know what, they may be home runs, but they could just as easily go to zero and you have to kind of be willing to, you know, let those potential grand slams go for the, you know, singles and doubles it, you know, you're just going to kind of chip away, chip away, chip away because you don't have to, you don't have to hit the home run. If it, if it happens, great, but the, the premise around the investment is that it's not going to be a home run, it's going to be a really good deal and you're going to make money, wealth preservation versus crazy risk for no apparent reason whatsoever. So, you know, once, once you make those mistakes, you learn real quick, okay, I don't like that too much. I really like that. And I, and I'm not a big gambler. I learned, I learned early on when I was a kid. I started playing in between and I hit the post that I lost the crap load of money and I'm like, as a kid, and I'm like, all right, I'm not, I'm not a gambler either. I don't like this. So I just, you know what, I learned my lesson. All right, that was my, that was my investing gambling story and I'm like, all right, I'm done. I'm not doing that.