The Money Playbook of a NFL-Player-Turned-Financial-Guru: How Brandon Copeland to Manage Money Like a Pro

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3:15I like to think of Brandon Copeland as Troy Bolton from High School Musical, but instead of juggling basketball and musical theater, he's juggled football and finance. Brandon played for the NFL for 10 years on different teams, but his first and his last team was the Ravens, his home team. But before he was tackling competing NFL players, he was tackling investments at UBS. And even when he was at the NFL, he would run into the locker room to check his options trades. Seriously. Today, we talk about how he bucked the trend and turned his NFL money into real wealth, which he talks about in his new book, Your Money Playbook, which you can find in the episode description.

3:51Brendan also tells me how much he actually made his first year in the NFL and what he thinks of the new NFL private equity opportunities. Brendan Copeland, welcome to Money Rehab. Thank you. Thank you for having me. You graduated from Wharton, one of the most prestigious schools for business in the world. You had interned for UBS for a couple summers in college. So that was a job option. But instead, you went to play for the Baltimore Ravens. So how did that happen? Yeah, that was a dream come true to be able to grow up. I'm from Baltimore originally, go to my hometown team, play the sport that I love, get to come out in the stadium that I grew up sitting in the stands with my granddad and my mom at times and to be able to come out of that tunnel and go to battle for my hometown.

4:36I remember graduating from the Wharton School of Business. I didn't actually make my full class graduation because we had to go to Baltimore and do our conditioning test. But all I know is I remember going into that whole scenario, just thinking, wow, this is awesome. But okay, it's time to get real and get serious because they're firing people around here all the time. So technically, I was signed to a three-year,$1.45 million contract coming out of school my senior year, but I saw$24 ,000 before being fired the first time. So it got real, real fast. But like you said, I was able to scrape, scratch, and claw my way to 10 years in the NFL.

5:15So I made that happen. And that's incredible. So$1.4 to$1.5 million for three years. Yep. $500 ,000-ish a year. Is that more than you think you would have made at UBS? oh that's a great question first first first first time i've ever had that question you know i'm a guy who always will bet on himself so i want to say in my mind on paper yeah that was a lot more than i would have ever made a ubs right but the the competitor in me likes to say that i would have made it happen i would have made more ubs yeah you would have for for sure but you're not taking home like 500k right when all was said and done with agent fees and god knows what well even my first year i was practice squad so you're not even making the full rookie minimum salary which was 435 grand at that time and every year it jumps up jumps up jumps up which would have gotten me 1.45 but just in general just so if you're a rookie making let's say half a million dollars, you got 50 % of that money gone taxes.

6:22And hey, don't play in New York or California because you'll have more than 50 % of that money gone when you play in those games. Even if you play in a non-income tax state, you play with the Tennessee Titans or the Miami Dolphins or the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Every place that you go to play, you have to pay those state taxes as well too. So something to keep in mind, 3 % goes to your agent typically. Then you have training fees, you have cost of living, right? You got to have an apartment or a place to stay. Some people have places to stay in season. Some people have places to stay in the off season, right?

6:55They're real true home. And so, yeah, the costs add up really, really fast. But I do know just in simple math from just more of a tax and cost of doing business standpoint before any expenses, there were games that I was playing with the New York Jets where I'd see about 46, 47 percent of my salary after the game. And yeah, that's what made me buy a place in Florida. But but throughout all of it, you were still day trading while you were playing, right? You mentioned Tennessee. So you were playing for the Tennessee Titans practice squad. You were day trading. You said you've gone to the bathroom actually to do some exit trade.

7:36Is that true? Yeah, yeah. Well, I would tell coach I was going to the bathroom, but I go back to the locker room and just be exiting out of different trades that I will make that morning. Did you guys think you were nuts? Did they know what you were doing? Some of them did. The folks whose lockers were closest to me knew what I was doing, but they also saw me winning. They saw me winning in my portfolio. I had a guy in my rookie year. I had a guy come in and bring$20 ,000 in cash and just literally throw it in my locker and say, hey, let me see what you do with a kid. And yeah, I was just like, whoa, I took it home.

8:11I took it home. I went and bet it all on rent. No, I'm joking. I And I ended up coming back to him the next day and just say, hey, I appreciate you, but I'm not going to take this money. You should talk to a financial advisor because I don't know what I want to do one day. And I don't want me taking this opportunity as a rookie in the NFL that could potentially deter some future goals and ambitions of myself. So I did the textbook thing to do. I wish I could tell you I took it and I turned it into 70 million and I put it all in Bitcoin in 2013. team, but I didn't. I think what you did was the responsible thing to do.

8:49It was. Did you feel like you were doing that as a backup plan while you were playing? Was that like your insurance? No, great question. I think it was for me, football is a means to an end and football gives you the, for me, I always looked at it as a startup capital to change my life and my family's life and to start businesses and to go invest in my own dreams and invest in myself. And so you get an opportunity to make money. I have sat at UBS and I've sat at Morgan Stanley and I've sat at hedge funds and I've watched people literally trade what we're happy to be earning. I watched them trade it and go make more with it.

9:32I've also watched them lose it too. And so for me, I just understood that I need to have my money growing. I need to have my money working for me. And it was a muscle that I was able to flex and work on while being in a position to go out and earn money in a totally different way. And one thing that I've learned over my career is like, if you can make it, if you can invest in a way where you're not 100 percent needing it, banking on it, then it allows you to invest with a clearer mind. It allows you to say no to things. There are some people who are investing in real estate and they need this deal to go right.

10:11Now, I want all my deals to go right. Don't get me wrong. But when you have to get a deal to go right in order to keep the lights on three months from now, seven months from now, next week, now you are making yourself susceptible to make mistakes. Because now you're starting to look at things that don't look that good, but you're like, I don't know. Maybe I need this. That's true with anything, right? Like trying to get a job if you come, if you really need, like you have that thirsty energy. Absolutely. And so to be able, so to get back to your question, to be able to be in a position where I didn't need to, but I was using it to learn and to be able to learn in a comfortable state.

10:54I always figured I knew football was going to end. I wanted to work and train these muscles and train my memory and train my stomach for investing and for trading and for the markets while I didn't necessarily need it to feed me and my family because I knew at some point it would end. So my grandfather played for 11 years in the NFL. His name is Roy Hilton, played with the Baltimore Colts from 1965 through 76. His last two years were with the Giants and the Falcons. And I share him because one, he's one of my heroes, my mom and him. But two, when you can grow up and you can see your hero who played your sport at a different time, but you can see that it ends, that he had three knee surgeries.

11:42He couldn't lift his shoulder past here. He shook when he wrote and signed his autograph because of all the things that he dealt with, I understood that, okay, this opportunity I have in the NFL will not last forever. And I need to maximize it in more ways than just out there on the football field. So that's what led me into trading. Why do you think so many guys don't have that realization that it's ephemeral, that it's fleeting? You hear this as a stereotype. Do you think it's true? Yeah, I think, I don't know whether it's true or not. I think not everybody gets a chance to grow up with a granddad that takes you to school and takes you out in the backyard and does all those things with you and promotes you more as a human being than a football player right like literally after games he would ask me how'd you do and it'd be ah man i missed a tackle in the third quarter blah blah he's like no no did you have fun right even all the way up through the league which is crazy to say the flip side of that is in order to be really good in the nfl in order to last I'll say it.

12:50I mean, I typically don't talk about this like this about my NFL career, but in order to last for 10 years in the NFL, the average is 2.8. I think it's 2.3 now after the pandemic, maybe a little less. You have to be a little bit psycho, frankly. And when I say psycho, I say it with all due respect. Please don't hunt me down. If you do hunt me down, that's okay. But when I say psycho, like you have to be able to walk out on Sunday morning, whether I'm in the middle of the season dealing with a hip injury, dealing with bruises, dealing with stiffness in the knees. I got to go out of the tunnel and I have to literally physically take grown men who are fighting for their families, fighting for their lives, their livelihoods.

13:36And I have to take my hands and I have to move them out the way. that takes a lot of just mental training and coaching to go from like, Hey, like, Hey, let's have a good time to just, okay, this is real now. Right. And to then come down from that. Right. And to tell yourself, I'm just a human being. This will be done one day. This will be done one day when literally you have to work all week to be able to just mentally train yourself. I'm going against Tom Brady this week. Oh, what do I have to tell myself to be in the right mind? it's just it's tough to balance the psychology of like get yourself up to go out and be a superhuman but then also be humble and tell yourself you could end it all on one play because it's it's tough to really be able to do that against the san francisco 49ers or any insert your favorite team there so i always think that that's like the challenge and it's not a what was me at all for anybody listening.

14:34It's just more of like, that's why a lot of guys get caught. You don't know when your career is going to end, but you also, you're in the midst of maximizing your opportunity today. One other thing I'll share with you is I remember, and I'm a pretty, I'd say cognizant human being, but I learned about a 401k from the NFL Players Association who came into the locker room with me as a Baltimore Raven as a rookie. And they were sharing all the benefits that they had gone out and negotiated for us. Hey guys, if you put X amount of dollars into your 401k, you're gonna get it matched up to this amount, which over 100 % matched, which is phenomenal.

15:16But even as a rookie in the NFL in the middle of training camp, I remember thinking, wow, that's amazing. Oh, wait, they're cutting people in a couple of days. If I don't go out here in an hour and a half and make a tackle on Jacoby Jones, God rest his soul. He recently passed away, but Super Bowl champion wide receiver. I'm not going to be here. That 401k isn't really going to matter to me. So I love it. Sounds really good. I should be cognizant of it, but I got to lock back in and focus on today because I might not be here tomorrow if I don't. So I think it's just the psychology battle that keeps a lot of players in the moment of now where it gets a little tough to think about five years from now, 20 years from now at times.

15:59It's not an excuse. No, I mean, that's the best explanation that I've ever heard with it, because you hear about a lot of guys just spending all their money, not having it when when their career ends. But do you think there is a similarity between money management and football? Right. I don't know. I know a lot of finance analogies, not a lot of football ones. So if you can have some grace with me, like people have to be on the offense and the defense when it comes to finances. Absolutely. Who's out of curiosity? Do you have a team? Who's your team? My husband's is the commanders. The commanders.

16:33Okay, cool, cool, cool. So the commander now it's mine. There you go. Absolutely. So, so in, in your money playbook, our book, we, we talk about this, but the, there are a lot of similarities between football and money management. The commanders, before they go into a game, before they go into battle, they spend all week game planning. They spend all week prepping. They spend all week scouting their opponent for the week. And when you relate that to money management, I like to call in the question, what are we doing as individuals to game plan, to scout ourselves, to understand our money, understand our strengths and our weaknesses, and understand ourselves better so that we can be better prepared for the obstacles that life is just inevitably going to throw at us.

17:23For example, do you have a budget? Have you sat down and spent time intentionally writing out your why and what money means to you? What you want to be able to do with your money a year from now, three years from now, five years from now? And by doing those simple things, one, by writing out your why, now you're strategically mapping out who you want to be, what you work for, why you have discipline and where you want your life to end up, which most people haven't done. But how can you ever achieve something if you haven't sat down and really visualize it and wrote it into existence? But two, you also avoid becoming a hamster on a hamster wheel.

18:01And what I mean when I say that right now, we're in a hustle culture. We're in a, oh, let me make money. Let me make money. Let me making money, but it's an aimless goal. You're not chasing fulfillment. You're not chasing happiness. You're chasing money. And so by you tying those things down to those goals, it's going to help make your steps strategic. The budget is so important as well, too. I know how many pennies I spend on a monthly reoccurring basis. I know exactly how much it costs me to live. And I think by everybody figuring that number out, one, every time I do that, I end up making money because I see a subscription that I, hold on, no offense to Apple TV, Apple TV.

18:44Ah, man, I got that for the morning show, but I don't really need it anymore. Let me go ahead and cut that subscription. Oh, I'm spending on this app over here. Come on, let me cut that. And anyway, I always sell people, if you're from the Northeast and it's still snowing in the place that you're in, it'd be like you trying to heat your entire house in the winter, but you don't know that you have basement windows open. And so you're working really, really hard to make money, make money, and you're heating up your house. I'm heating up my house, heating up my house. And then the whole time you're just actually secretly working against yourself because you haven't actually mapped out where all your dollars are going.

19:25And that's backwards. That's inefficient use of your time. And so by doing those game planning exercises of a budget, writing down your why those things are extremely important to making sure that you're just taking intentional steps with your money management and that's just the beginning it's a leaky bucket yeah and if you i think a dream without a plan is just a wish and wishes are amazing but they don't pay the bills and so i think that i have a t-shirt with that somewhere but right if you if you're you say i just want a million dollars nicole and brandon the question is what do you want to do with that million dollars?

20:03I don't know. Maybe you need more than a million dollars. Maybe you need less than a million dollars. You figure out the life you want and then reverse engineer to get the money to live that life, not just an arbitrary number that you think sounds really good.

20:21Hold on to your wallets. Money Rehab will be right back. And now for some more Money Rehab.

20:34In your book, Your Money Playbook, you talk about four financial strategies. I want to double click on the fourth one, which is the promise of legacy. So unpacking topics like insurance, wills, estate planning. Do you and your wife talk about estate planning? It's not a fun, sexy conversation, but it's an important grownup conversation for sure. Yeah, absolutely. We're actually having our third child here in the next couple of weeks. So it's very much top of mind for us in terms of making sure that our children are taken care of. Thank you. Third boy. Third boy. So, yes, they're uncomfortable conversations, but they're important conversations because we both need to be making sure that we're working towards the same goal.

21:14Yes, sometimes it will uncover some discrepancies in who you think should be managing the money when you're gone or who should be taking care of the children and things like that. But those tough conversations are the ones that are going to make sure that you and your family are straight for, I don't want to say eternity, but for as long as possible. I think that the importance of legacy, while it is a wills, estate planning, are those tough conversations that not a lot of people generally want to talk about because most people don't want to talk about their death. It's also about teaching your children how to deal with money and teaching your children how to manage money.

21:59We talk so much about generational wealth, but what good is it for me to give my children a bunch of assets and a bunch of money and not teach them how to go fish, not teach them how to deal with the money, not teach them how to deal with the pressure. And so those are the other things that are, I would say, more important than the details. We talk about all of it in the book for sure. But one of the things I've been encouraging my friends to do is like making sure they're emphasizing, like bringing your children to work, letting them listen in on calls, letting them listen in on tough calls as well, too, because guess what?

22:39If you're leaving them this opportunity and these options, well, you want them to be comfortable handling it. And there's going to be times in their lives where a lot of these lessons we're not going to learn in school. So there are going to be times in their lives where they're going to think about. I remember sitting on sitting in the room when Nicole was having this conversation and it was a tough conversation, but this is how my mom handled it. So I know how to deal with this now, 20 some years later. Right. And that is the greatest gift in the world that we can give to our children as well, too.

23:13Yeah, because they're watching everything that you're doing. When people say I want financially responsible kids, the first question I ask is, are you financially responsible? how many crickets do you get? Because they're watching you. They're watching how you deal with money, how you go to the store and talk about money, how you talk about shopping or saving or whatever. And if you're stressed about it, they'll totally pick up on that. You also talk about optimizing opportunities for generating multiple streams of income. It's been said, all the stats that the self-made millionaires have about seven streams of income.

23:48How many do you have? Oh, that's a great question. I have a few of them. I don't know if I think I'm over seven at this point. Well, you probably have some dividend income. Yeah, I have dividends. I don't want to put all my business out there, but I have dividends, real estate, production, financial education. The book now is a new one. So yeah, we have a few out there. Yeah, I think that it's extremely important to create other revenue streams. Ultimately, I think that what we all have seen during the pandemic and also now more than ever with AI and companies having to lay off folks, as they used to say, they used to say one income stream is too close to none, two is too close to one.

24:33And ultimately, I think whenever you can go into an opportunity and start to strategically think about, okay, well, are there other ways that I can benefit from this thing in completely legal ways, right? So if you're investing in Apple, right? Well, now maybe you look at not only owning the stock, but maybe you also are looking at some call options on Apple as well too. That's a simple thing to think about. And I'm not telling anybody to invest in Apple, disclaimer, consult with your financial advisor, all of that type of stuff, right? Don't sue me. Investing involves risk. Exactly, exactly. But but pretty much again, I think that unfortunately, most jobs and careers aren't necessarily built to see you win as an individual.

25:24They're there to make the company win, make their shareholders happy and make their shareholders proud. And the more you need them, similar to the NFL, the more you need them, the more desperate you will be and the more likely you will be able to do whatever I ask you to do. And so however you decide to create another revenue stream, whether it's Uber driving, whether it's DoorDash, whether it's Airbnb renting out in a room in your apartment, I just think that is extremely important not to get so caught up on one stream of income that you lose sight of the other opportunities that may be sitting under your nose.

26:05Even thinking about just, hey, I have cash sitting over here in this normal basic checking account. I probably should put that in a high yield savings account because I don't plan on touching it. Well, now I'm making a smarter investment decision. One thing going very, very long on this topic, but one thing I always tell people to a lot of sometimes I'll go to a room of people. I'm like, hey, who's ever invested before? And sometimes there's no one in the room that's invested. And I'm like, OK, cool. Well, I'm here to tell you that everybody here has invested before. What do you mean? Well, if you have a dollar to your name, you have invested.

26:42Whether you choose to leave that dollar under the mattress and get a 0 % return, put it into your checking account and get a 0.001 % return or 0.011 % return, whatever, or put it in a high yield savings account and get 4 % to 5 % right now, or put it into a CD or put it into the stock market. right? Those are all generating returns on your dollar. And that's an investment decision. Yeah, even a zero return is a return. Zero percent return is a return. And that's your choice. Yeah, the 5 % high yield savings account, the easiest additional stream of income you could possibly make. So no excuse.