The Finances of Athletes and NFL Players with Hillary Seiler

Money Tree Investing

Money Tree Investing Podcast

Stockmarket, Valuestocks, Investing, Finance, Passiveincome, Wealth, Business, Personalfinance

4.6 • 658 Ratings

🗓️ 3 October 2025

⏱️ 97 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Hillary Seiler joins us today to discuss the finances of athletes and NFL players. She shares her journey from personal financial struggles in college to building a career helping athletes, students, and employees improve their financial wellness. She shares how supporting friends who went pro in the NFL led her into creating financial literacy programs for professional teams, eventually expanding into universities and corporate America. She talks the lack of financial education for athletes, the misconceptions around their earnings, and the systems now in place to protect players from going broke.

We discuss...

Hillary is a financial education coach who began working with pro athletes and later expanded to universities and corporate America.
She was inspired by her own financial struggles during her mother’s illness, which gave her perspective on money management.
The NFL now mandates financial education sessions for rookies and younger players to prevent bankruptcy and poor financial decisions.
Many athletes face misconceptions about their earnings, with most NFL players earning far less than the public assumes.
Financial downfall is often tied to lack of education, poor money management, divorce, and being targeted for bad investments.
Hillary teaches athletes to evaluate deals by requiring full business plans and consulting financial advisors before investing.
Support systems and career planning are critical to helping athletes adjust to life after sports and avoid identity loss.
Studies show Olympic silver medalists often stay motivated while gold medalists can struggle with depression and identity loss after reaching the pinnacle.
Professional athletes and military veterans face similar challenges when retiring, often losing their sense of purpose.
There has been debate about requiring athletes to save in pensions or annuities, but concerns remain about limiting free will.
The NFL and NBA encourage saving with strong 401k matching programs, but players cannot access funds until age 45.
The Pro Athlete Community (PAC) helps retired athletes manage money and avoid financial pitfalls.
Despite education programs, some athletes still make costly mistakes or fall for scams, learning lessons the hard way.

For more information, visit the show notes at https://moneytreepodcast.com/the-finances-of-athletes-hillary-seiler

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Money Tree Investing Podcast. Stock market, wealth, personal finance, value stocks, invest in your life. Hello, Smart Money Tree Podcast listeners. Welcome to this week's show. My name's Kirk Chisholm and I'll be your host. So today I'm joined with Hilary Siler. How you know you, Hillary? Hey, hey, what's going on? Good to have you in the show here. For those of you don't know, Hillary. Tell us a little bit about your background before we begin.
0:25.7	I'm a financial education coach, have been for the last decade, and my specialty is working with pro athletic organizations, universities.
0:33.1	And recently, in the last, I'd say, five years, we started working with corporate America, helping small to mid-cap businesses, improve their employees' financial wellness.
0:41.2	Nice. So how'd you get started in this space? It wasn't something I ever imagined. If you would have asked the 20-year-old me what I would be doing at 38 years old today, I would not have said teaching anybody about money. I would have said, I'm probably going to work in the financial services in some
0:55.7	capacity, but I don't know what it is. And it all happened because of some football players at
1:00.6	Oregon State University where I went to school. I had a pretty easy, honestly, most of us can't
1:05.6	say this, and I'm glad I can. I had a really easy upbringing. Kirk, when I say that, money was easy.
1:10.5	Life was pretty easy.
1:11.7	And when I hit 19, the world decided that it wasn't going to be easy for me anymore. And I went
1:15.9	from having my college education paid for because my parents did all the right things for me,
1:21.3	to my mom falling sick. And the introduction of my sophomore year was me taking out 30 grand
1:26.7	in student loans and getting a full-time job because her medical bills were so severe that my college fund was depleted.
1:32.3	And so I quickly learned at the value of a dollar and started looking at money a little bit differently.
1:37.7	And as I was going through that illness journey with her, which lasted about seven years before she passed, the guys that I was really good friends with
1:45.0	on our finance program at Oregon State happened to be football players. And we happened to be
1:49.1	next door neighbors. So we kind of went through this three-year thing together, sophomore to senior
1:53.6	year. And by my junior year, they kind of figured that things weren't going so well. They knew my
1:58.1	parents. My parents would try to come to football games, very small community at Oregon State. And so everybody knew everybody. The guys helped me out. They actually kept my fridge pretty full for about two full years because they knew I didn't have enough money. Sometimes I had to choose between rent and food or I'd have to choose between walking to work or driving to work. There's just a lot of different things that were going on in my financial life. And they helped me out a ton. So when they would draft up to the NFL, fast forward now,
2:23.4	I was helping them make decisions like, how do I buy a car? Should I invest in real estate? Who do I
2:28.6	trust with my money? How do I get a credit card? Should I use a debit card? How many bank accounts
2:34.0	should I have? And all of these questions were flying at me at 22 while I was working in banking. I was just trying to figure it all out myself, started helping them. A couple NFL teams got word of it. And a few years later, they asked me to design a program. And here we are. That's awesome. I've always been amazed.
2:53.1	Growing up, I played sports, played hockey and baseball.
	...

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