Jacob Turner's Net Worth is $15M. Now He's Changing the Financial Game for Pro Athletes

We spoke to Jacob Turner in this week's episode of Moneywise.

Jacob is a former Detroit Tigers pitcher who became a millionaire at 18 when he signed his first major league contract. Now, he's a financial advisor helping athletes and entrepreneurs manage their wealth.

Like all Moneywise episodes, Jacob breaks down his net worth, income, portfolio, and monthly expenses and then I, your humble host, pick it all apart.

We also went deep on: how athletes can avoid the financial pitfalls that plague so many professional sports careers, the psychology of sudden wealth, and finding purpose after your peak earning years end.

Below you'll find my summary of the episode along with the entire transcript.

And by the way...this podcast, the concept of it came from Hampton, which is a community for founders and CEOs and people who generally have a really high net worth. I was seeing all types of private conversations about money, and I thought, this should be public. So if you want to be part of these conversations—ones that happen amongst people who run businesses that are doing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue, check it out. But until you join or until you get there, you have this podcast. New Moneywise episodes come out weekly.

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Now, below are the notes and the full transcript.

The Numbers

• Initial MLB contract: $7 million guaranteed with the Detroit Tigers at age 18
• First check: $1.2 million (30 days after signing)
• Peak annual earnings: A little over $2 million in his highest-earning year
• Early spending habits: Only $1,000/month on living expenses for first 1.5 years
• First major purchase: $1,500 Apple MacBook Pro
• Career earnings: Approximately $15 million over 10+ years in MLB
• End-of-career net worth: Between $10-15 million in liquid assets at age 29
• Current business: Moment Private Wealth manages over $112 million in client assets
• Business valuation: Worth a few million dollars today

Starting Wealthy at 18: A Rare Opportunity

Jacob's financial journey began unlike most—with a $7 million contract at age 18. Unlike many professional athletes who quickly spend their newfound wealth, Jacob approached it with remarkable restraint.

"I didn't make any big purchases for about a year and a half, and I was spending probably around $1,000 a month on just normal living expenses, discretionary living expenses, essentially spending nothing," Jacob explained. This restraint wasn't because he had it all figured out—it was because he didn't. "When I think about people that are navigating what I would call sudden wealth, I fell into the best outcome that I could have, which was not buying anything big early, and it gave me time to process what was important to me."

His mother's advice proved crucial: "Jacob, we will help you find the right team of people around you. But at the end of the day, this money is your responsibility and you need to be a good steward of it." This instilled in him a sense of personal accountability that would guide his financial decisions for years to come.

The Locker Room Money Gap

One of the most fascinating aspects of Jacob's story is his perspective on wealth disparity in professional sports. "There's no greater gap than a professional sports locker room," he observed. "You could get drafted, have signed for essentially a plane ticket and maybe $10,000 and be in the same locker room in spring training for baseball as a guy across the way that's making $25 million."

This environment created unique psychological challenges. Jacob witnessed teammates making impulsive purchases: "I saw guys buy Mercedes Benz because Mercedes Benz brought the cars to the dealership and they said, 'I want that one'... I've seen people spend tens of thousands of dollars at the mall after a check came in."

What makes this particularly dangerous for athletes is what Jacob calls the "confidence paradox": "The same confidence that you have to have to be able to play sports at the highest level can also be your biggest detriment when it comes to money... the confidence that got you to where you're at is also the biggest hindrance when it comes to your money."

The Accelerated Financial Life Cycle

Professional athletes experience what Jacob describes as a compressed financial life cycle. While most people build wealth gradually over decades, athletes get "all the money up front" with their "peak earning years from 18 to 25."

"As a professional athlete, you have all the money up front... You get this really cool life experience to be able to say, maybe I made some silly decisions. Maybe I bought this really fancy car and I'm not even a car guy... You can go through that cycle in 6 or 7 years," Jacob explained. This accelerated timeline forces athletes to make mature financial decisions much earlier than their peers.

But there's also a darker reality: "The reality is, with professional sports, Father Time catches up to everybody, and nearly everybody will end their career in a situation that they didn't think that they would end it." This awareness created what Jacob calls "a healthy balance" of caution in his approach to money.

Finding Purpose After the Final Inning

When Jacob retired from baseball at 29, he faced two significant challenges: figuring out how to start spending the wealth he'd accumulated, and discovering what would give his life purpose next.

"When you're a professional athlete, you say your name and you say you're a professional athlete. And people tend to think that's relatively cool. And then when you get done, what do you say?" This identity shift is often overlooked in discussions about athlete finances.

Jacob received advice that became his "guiding light": "You know, my goal is that I always want to be the guy that's around the fire pit, or hanging out with friends, that's always talking about what he's going to do next. What am I working on next? You don't want to be the guy that's talking about what you did 10 or 15 years ago."

This led Jacob to explore various career paths, including a six-month stint at a financial advisory firm where he "would have made probably more money being a Domino's Pizza driver" but gained invaluable experience. He eventually founded Moment Private Wealth, a financial services firm that now manages over $112 million in client assets. 

Evolving Money Philosophy: From Saving to Using

Perhaps the most profound transformation in Jacob's financial journey is his evolution from extreme saver to intentional spender. After years of conservative money management, Jacob has shifted his perspective.

"I've spent more money in the past two years than I'd ever spent previously," Jacob revealed. "I've gotten comfortable knowing what's important to me and what I want our money to do to impact the people that are around me, my family, the things that I care about."

This shift came from witnessing clients who had saved diligently their entire lives only to express regret: "Time and time again, I think for people that are in that situation, the common frame I hear is 'I wish I would have done this sooner.'"

Jacob now believes that "nobody gets an award for dying with the most amount of money" and that the goal of money is "that we actually do use it, but just using it in a thoughtful manner and using it in a way where you can still sleep at night."

His current perspective is striking: "If you gave me the option of saying, Jacob, you could either die with $20 million or you could die with $500,000. Which one of those is a better outcome? Without a doubt, I would say dying with $500,000 is a better outcome."

Other Key Quotes

"Just because you can buy something does not mean that you can afford something."

"I would certainly like to see any of the money that I have go to good use while I'm still here, while I can use it, while I could pass it on to the next generation, as opposed to somebody getting a big check when I'm not there, to be able to see the impact that it makes in their life."

"I firmly believe that it takes time. When I think about one of the biggest benefits that you get as a professional athlete, coming into money outside of just the financial component, the biggest benefit is you get to go through essentially the entire cycle that somebody else gets to go through for their entire life."

"With an athlete, you go from base camp to the top of the mountain in 2 or 3 years, right? For me, I went there almost overnight... And then when I got done playing, I felt like I was below base camp in the business that I'm in today."

"I want to try to earn the greatest return I can for the longest time period possible. And if I'm willing to earn a little bit less return to be able to stay in the game longer, I'm willing to do that. I look much more and focus much more on what the downside of the investment is, as opposed to the upside."

Links You Might Like

• Moment Private Wealth
• ESPN's 30 for 30: Broke
• The Italian Job (film)

Full Transcript

[00:00:01] Jacob Turner: I can still remember going to bed the night before I signed, and thinking about the fact that I'm going to sign this contract that's going to pay me millions of dollars. I think it's almost impossible to feel financially prepared as an 18-year-old.

[00:00:13] Sam Parr: A lot of the people we talk about on Moneywise made money young in their 20s and 30s, maybe. But Jacob Turner, he became a millionaire overnight as a teenager when he signed his first contract with the MLB. Sudden wealth is crazy already, but it's a whole different game when it's literally because of a game. Today's episode is a unique one. Jacob didn't come into money because he was doing the business hustle, but he quickly realized that the business and financial knowledge would be necessary if you didn't want to follow the story of the millionaire athlete who loses it all because as an athlete, that fountain of cash can run out at any moment.

[00:00:47] Jacob Turner: And the reality is, with professional sports, Father Time catches up to everybody, and nearly everybody will end their career in a situation that they didn't think that they would end it.

[00:00:56] Sam Parr: In this episode, we'll also step into the financial locker room of pro ball players getting a glimpse at how they really get paid and where their money goes. I'm Harry Morton and this is Moneywise. Scroll through Instagram for 30s and you'll see a whole ton of junk teaching you how to get rich, but none that teaches you how to handle life after you've made a little bit of money. I'm a member of Hampton, a community of CEOs and business owners. The members of Hampton range from new start ups with ten employees to public companies with hundreds of millions in revenue. So we see all types of private conversations and believe that some of them should be made public. Hence this podcast. In Moneywise, we provide advice by speaking to people who've made a lot of money, and they get radically transparent about what they earn, how they spend it, how they invest it. But more importantly, they talk about the impacts that money has on their lives and how they manage those impacts. And so, of course, if you're the CEO of a startup, you've got to check out, join Hamptons.com. You'll be a part of a group of up to eight people who are similar to you. You'll have access to thousands of members, loads of in-person events. It's amazing. Go and check it out. Join Hamptons.com. All right, so before we get into today's story, let's wrap our heads around these numbers. For Jacob, it all started with a $7 million contract with the Detroit Tigers. But it's not like that money dropped into his account all at once.

[00:02:11] Jacob Turner: So the $7 million was roughly a guaranteed amount, and it was split over a certain period of time. I believe the very first check I got was 30 days after I signed that contract. It was for $1.2 million. The biggest thing I remember about it was how much came out from taxes, because as an 18-year-old, I'd never even paid taxes before, never filed a tax return. I didn't understand how taxes worked. And when somebody shows you a percentage of what you're going to pay, it doesn't quite equate in your mind of what the dollar amount that you're going to pay is. So seeing hundreds of thousands of dollars come out for taxes was pretty eye-opening. That was my biggest takeaway from that first check that came in.

[00:02:46] Sam Parr: I mean, that checks out. Remember who you were at 18, how small the world felt. But now this money was opening new horizons for the next decade. Jacob would cash his checks.

[00:02:56] Jacob Turner: In terms of what the peak payout was in a given year, I believe my peak payout was a little over $2 million in a given year.

[00:03:03] Sam Parr: He played baseball and in his downtime, lived as a regular 20-something. Well, except for the meetings with his financial advisers, most of us don't do that so early. But Jacob spent a decade learning to grow his money, and by the end of his career.

[00:03:16] Jacob Turner: My liquid net worth in terms of like assets I was spending was between 10 and $15 million. So if you think about that in terms of I made around 15, I didn't spend a ton of it. I invested it early on. To me, I think that's a great example of the opportunity that anybody has that comes into sudden wealth, whether it's an athlete, whether it's a business owner, whether it's an inheritance. I lived a pretty good life when I was playing, but I ended my career in really a similar spot to how much money I earned.

[00:03:44] Sam Parr: Yeah. And you were 29 at that point. Is that correct? 

[00:03:46] Jacob Turner: 29.

[00:03:47] Sam Parr: So when Jacob left the baseball field, his finances were looking really healthy. He hadn't thrown away his shot. And that's because the whole time he was looking further down the line. So to explain how he turned his vision into reality, we need to go back to the very start. Jacob grew up in Saint Louis, Missouri, with a family who had a pretty sensible attitude towards money.

[00:04:11] Jacob Turner: One of the things that I see a lot is where we come from dictates a lot of what our financial decisions are later in life. So my dad owned a small business. I mean, they did a couple hundred thousand dollars in revenue a year. My mom had an accounting background, so she understood numbers. I always loved to understand how people made money, how people spent money. I can still remember as a kid driving down the street by our house that has a bunch of small businesses still there today. I still live in Saint Louis and thinking, I wonder what these businesses do. Like they have to be doing well. They have these buildings, they have these big parking lots. All these people are coming here. So even from the time that I was growing up, that influence on my life ended up being huge because they were able to talk about money and we understood what saving was. And when I say we, my two brothers and I. So I think it had a huge impact on how I thought about money in the early stages for sure.

[00:04:59] Sam Parr: Were they strict around money as a kid? Do you feel like you had a good foundation? You know? Did you feel confident about money before you made any of it?

[00:05:05] Jacob Turner: I think they were prudent around. Money is what I would say. And I can remember to give you an example. I can remember in 2007, 2008, when the economy started to turn here in the United States. I remember we used to have a cash drawer and in the cash drawer, literally, it was cash and it was for discretionary spending. So my dad used to love to go out to eat, and if there wasn't any money in there on Friday or Saturday night, we weren't going to go out to eat. And that was my mom's way of essentially budgeting without us really having a budget. But the prudent ness that they instilled in me was this idea of just, frankly, living below your means that we don't have to spend everything that we make and that we should be saving some of it for the future.

[00:05:43] Sam Parr: See, the thing is, before he became a millionaire, Jacob already had a very healthy philosophy around saving, and it kind of set the tone for the rest of his life. Which is good because, well, you know, things are about to take a turn. A really incredible turn.

[00:05:58] Jacob Turner: Growing up, I never thought that I was going to be a professional baseball player. That was my dream. Right. But I'm also relatively a realist to understand that the odds of that happening were pretty low. I started playing baseball because I loved baseball, and I had the God given ability to do it at a really high level for me, the way that we thought about it. My parents were very big on school. I understood that if I went to school, I was going to have more options later on in my life than if I didn't go to school and I signed out of high school. I would say I was probably 16 or 17 when I realized that my talent level dictated that there was an opportunity for me to play at the professional level. But to be honest with you, Harry, it wasn't until I was probably 6 to 12 months before the MLB draft that I realized quite the level that I could get drafted at, and I think the financial component was a huge component of it. Like, I will not sugarcoat that. I mean, if I didn't sign for what I would consider a life changing amount of money, I would have went to school.

[00:06:50] Sam Parr: Yeah. I mean, I just can't imagine, like, what does it feel like to be signed for $7 million at the age of 18? I mean, that's kind of a crazy thing to wrap your head around at such a young kid.

[00:07:00] Jacob Turner: When they were doing the negotiation with my agent and signing that contract. I can still remember going to bed that night on somewhat of this incredible high. I think it's almost like a naive high. You're 18 years old. I didn't really know anything about money. I had a couple hundred dollars in my bank account at the time. But then, to be honest with you, it changed everything. But it also changed nothing, because I remember waking up the next day and I remember thinking, wow, I feel the exact same.

[00:07:25] Sam Parr: Yeah. And I guess you just went to practice and got started. So yes, for all intents and purposes, Jacob was the same guy. But it's not so simple because at 18, Jacob didn't know a ton about wealth management and he didn't want to mess things up.

[00:07:39] Jacob Turner: I went from making sure I had enough money in my bank account to be able to pay for gas, to go hang out with my friends to. There's millions of dollars coming in. And yes, my mom had this accounting background. Yes, my dad owned a small business. But even as you think about a financial team, CPAs and financial advisors and estate planning attorneys, my parents had never done any of that. So this was an entirely new world to me to understand. Okay, I can hire somebody to help me with this. And what does that person even do? And who should I hire and what questions should I ask? And frankly, it gave me more anxiety than it gave me excitement at the time because I knew the basics of if I don't mess this up, this could be really good. And I'll never forget a conversation my mom had with me. And she said, Jacob, we will help you find the right team of people around you. But at the end of the day, this money is your responsibility and you need to be a good steward of it.

[00:08:31] Jacob Turner: And I think that was her way of saying, we've raised you the right way for you to understand that you need to be able to make these decisions on your own, like we will help you every step of the way. And this is something that I think is really important for people to understand with money, no matter who you hire, no matter what parents you have, no matter what your experience is, is at the end of the day, the money is still your responsibility. It's your responsibility to to understand the basics of what's happening and why you're doing things, the way you're doing it and what you're spending money on and what you're saving money for. Yes, you can hire great people. Yes, we will help you with it. But at the end of the day, you need to understand what's going on. So it really led me to have what I would call like a thirst for knowledge around making sure how do other people do this? How should I do it? And am I doing this right?

[00:09:09] Sam Parr: Ultimately, that conversation was the catalyst for everything that followed the early money placements, a decade's worth of savings, launching his own business. And we're going to get to that in a moment. But first, let's hear how Jacob navigated his early years. That's right. After a quick ad break. So, okay, the year is 2009. Jacob's 18, and he's off to play Major League Baseball in Detroit. Go, Tigers! He has pocketed his first $1.2 million check. And now we're all thinking the same thing, right? That could be a recipe for disaster. I mean, you're an 18-year-old male with a giant cash injection literally overnight. But actually.

[00:09:46] Jacob Turner: I didn't make any big purchases for about a year and a half, and I was spending probably around $1,000 a month on just normal living expenses, discretionary living expenses, essentially spending nothing.

[00:09:59] Sam Parr: $1,000 a month. You heard that right. Jacob had millions in the bank and he was paying himself one whole thousand. That's pretty astonishing self-control at the age of 18. And what's more, he didn't give himself big pocket money either.

[00:10:12] Jacob Turner: The biggest purchase that I made was I bought a new computer. I think it was like 1500 bucks. It was a new Apple MacBook Pro, but not buying something that was a massive purchase. Whether it was a house or whether it was a new car was the best thing that I ever did. And I didn't really understand the ins and outs of my money or the ins and outs of how taxes worked, the ins and outs of my investment portfolio, the ins and outs of really anything with my financial life. And I don't think there's a time frame on when people should do this. But when I think about people that are navigating what I would call sudden wealth and certainly getting $7 million at 18 years old is sudden wealth. Yeah, I fell into the best outcome that I could have, which was not buying anything big early, and it gave me time to process, even as an 18 year old, what was important to me. What did I actually need versus what did I not need? And I think the benefits of doing that I still see compounding to this day.

[00:11:07] Sam Parr: I've got to imagine some of your teammates were not as well grounded as you, and did not display the same level of patience, let's call it. I just wonder what it was like to kind of watch your teammates go out and maybe use that money slightly differently. Was there any desire to go chase that at all?

[00:11:22] Jacob Turner: There was certainly a desire to do it. People talk about keeping up with the Joneses when it comes to money, and there's no greater gap than a professional sports locker room. So play out the scenario of on one side, you could get drafted, have signed for essentially a plane ticket and maybe $10,000 and be in the same locker room in spring training for baseball. As a guy across the way that's making $25 million. So you have no money? This guy's making $25 million per year, and you're in the same locker room. You're experiencing the same sort of life for that time period in spring training. And I can't think of a bigger gap that happens on a day to day basis. If you think about a CEO of a publicly traded company, they're not sitting ten feet away from the person that has the entry level role or the intern at the company. And in a professional sports locker room, you're seeing it every day. I saw guys buy Mercedes Benz because Mercedes Benz brought the cars to the dealership and they said, I want that one. And I remember thinking in my mind, like, I mean, surely there was no negotiation there. It was just they brought him here. You picked the one you wanted. It was the S550. That's the one that you drove home that day. I've seen people spend tens of thousands of dollars at the mall after a check came in. Because if you think about professional sports, you're getting paid even in this short period of time. Typically it's not over the course of the whole year. It might just be during the playing season. So for a baseball player, that could be 12 checks during the year. So you break down a $24 million contract. You're getting paid $2 million every two weeks during the season.

[00:12:48] Sam Parr: Yeah, that's kind of hard to fathom. See, the thing is, Jacob has always been someone who thinks about money critically. I'm sure you've picked that up already. Early on, when there's a wealth disparity on his team, he examines other players habits. He pays attention to how they're spending. And, crucially, he identifies the risks that come with the sudden everything at once financial freedom.

[00:13:13] Jacob Turner: I think there's a lot of naiveness around money when it comes to professional sports, and I think a lot of it stems from the same confidence that you have to have to be able to play sports at the highest level can also be your biggest detriment when it comes to money, because what I saw a lot was guys that were making millions of dollars and they thought, I will always be making millions of dollars because I'm the best player at my sport, or I believe in myself so much. And the reality is, if they didn't have that belief, they would have never gotten to the situation they were in today. But sometimes when it comes to the financial side of it, that can be the biggest detriment. So the confidence that got you to where you're at is also the biggest hindrance when it comes to your money.

[00:13:57] Sam Parr: Is there a middle ground, do you think? Are there people that display healthy kind of relationships to money, you know, in the active parts of their career as professional sports people?

[00:14:05] Jacob Turner: There definitely are. But I, I firmly believe that it takes time. When I think about one of the biggest benefits that you get as a professional athlete coming into money outside of just the financial component, that you're getting this money at a really young age, you have all this time to compound all that sort of tactical stuff. The biggest benefit is you get to go through essentially the entire cycle that somebody else gets to go through for their entire life. So let me give you an example. If you graduate college and you get a quote unquote normal job, you're going to make a significant amount of money in your 40s, 50s and 60s. But typically in your 20s and 30s, you're building up your wealth. You're building up your skills. You're building up your salary, you're building up your income base. And over the course of that entire time, you typically don't have enough money to make some of the really silly decisions that you might have made if you had that money.

[00:14:53] Sam Parr: What Jacob's not saying here. For those who become wealthy at, say, 30, there's usually a transition period where, you know, maybe you start indulging yourself, making some spur of the moment purchases versus.

[00:15:04] Jacob Turner: As a professional athlete, you have all the money up front. You know, your peak earning years are from 18 to 25, and you get this really cool life experience to be able to see. Maybe I made some silly decisions. Maybe I bought this really fancy car and I'm not even a car guy, but I thought this would make me happy. But now by the time I'm 30, I realized, you know what? I'm not really a car guy as opposed to somebody else. It might take them 3 to 4 decades to go through that cycle. You can go through that cycle in 6 or 7 years. So the key is making sure that you're fighting that middle ground of you want to be able to spend the money without spending all of it. So then you can go through the entire cycle, and by the time you're on the other end of it, you understand what's actually important to me, because what's important to me is going to be different than what's important to somebody else. And hopefully you still have a lot of that snowball left to be able to use it on the things that are important to you.

[00:15:52] Sam Parr: So sports career has really flipped the script on the typical path to financial growth. You get the chance to make your mistakes and outgrow them, which is great. But then there's the other side of the coin. You're on a really condensed timeline. You've got like ten years, and then after that, well, there's no guarantees. So it does matter how you play it. Jacob spent a lot of his baseball career thinking about that.

[00:16:13] Jacob Turner: My biggest fear was that I don't remember what year it came out, but ESPN had a documentary called 30 for 30 broke, and it went over all these different athletes that came into significant sums of money. And then when they got done playing, the money was gone. We think that my career will go on forever. So if I'm making $20 million a year as a professional athlete, my checks are around $2 million every time they're coming in. And I spent $1 million of that check on something really silly. It's okay. I'm going to get another 1 in 2 weeks, and the next year I'm going to sign another contract. And the reality is, with professional sports, Father time catches up to everybody, and nearly everybody will end their career in a situation that they didn't think that they would end it. And I had a ton of anxiety that at some point I would do something silly and I would blow it. And I think it was a little bit unfounded, because a lot of the decisions I was making were relatively good. But at the same time, I had this fear that like, it could all go away tomorrow. At the beginning, it provided a little bit of a healthy balance for me, because it allowed me to not make some of those silly decisions early on. I felt like by the time I was a 19 year old, so one year into professional sports, I was really doing a lot of it on my own. But on the on the flip side of it, there was a lot of unfounded anxiety around the money. Thinking through, okay, if this needs to last me the rest of my life, and if I don't have another skill that I'm going to be doing when I'm done with baseball, how much money would I actually need to make to be able to live my lifestyle for the next, you know, Lord willing, 60 years.

[00:17:39] Sam Parr: So were you saving pretty aggressively at this point? Were you investing that cash? Like, what were you doing with it?

[00:17:44] Jacob Turner: I was investing almost all of it. And I think this is one of those things that when we talk about, what is that healthy relationship with money? When I first signed, a lot of the thoughts I had around money were really internalized. I never I never really brought them out. I just knew that if I didn't spend a lot of money, that would mean that I would still have some of it in the future. And I can remember always going to the individual that I was using as my financial advisor at the time and and asking like, how am I doing? And he would always say, oh, you're doing great. And I was doing great because I was saving everything. I started investing money in 2009. So I'm the world's greatest market timer. But the question that I was really asking wasn't how I'm doing. It was, how could I better utilize this money? And I didn't quite understand that. That was the question that I was asking at the time. But now as I, I look back on my life and I look back on my relationship with money that I have today, the goal of money is that we actually do use it, but just using it in a thoughtful manner and using it in a way where you can still sleep at night. Nobody gets an award for dying with the most amount of money.

[00:18:52] Sam Parr: Jacob throws in that comment pretty casually, but don't be fooled here. It took him years to reach that conclusion. I mean, personally, the whole question of spending well is something I think about every day. Anyone who's running a business can relate. I'm sure there's this fear that you could have this really great, healthy company, but at the back of your mind, there's this nagging feeling like maybe you're one step away from making a really bad decision or investing in the wrong thing, and then it's done. The way around that is to put your fear to use. And Jacob's case. Getting wealthy so suddenly it made him look at his career pragmatically. He doesn't sugarcoat this.

[00:19:26] Jacob Turner: Most athletes don't get to end their career on the terms that they wanted to. You might see a tour around the country for a guy like Derek Jeter or David Ortiz, you know, baseball players that are at the top of their game, but they're in the 0.00001% of athletes that are out there. Most people think that when an athlete retires, that they have all these people calling them, oh, well, you're a professional athlete. There's a bunch of people that probably want to use you for your name, image, likeness, skill set, whatever in their business. Well, the reality is, unless you are a really big baseball fan, you're not going to know who Jacob Turner is a month, a week after he gets done playing. And that's that's true for most professional athletes, right? So when you think about that concept, a lot of athletes get done playing and the phone stops ringing. So that's compounding the fact of you're trying to figure out what's next. You might have some transferable skills, but if you think about any business, they're not going to hire you just because you were a really cool professional athlete. They want to hire you because you can do something to advance their business.

[00:20:28] Sam Parr: So at 29 on the edge of retirement, Jacob has two things on his mind.

[00:20:32] Jacob Turner: First, how do I start spending all of this money that I've saved this entire time? For the last ten plus years, I've been seeing this account balance go up, because every single year I'm making money. I'm saving towards it. I'm investing it. When you don't have that steady income anymore, you're richer on paper than you've ever been. Yet for me, I felt poorer than I've ever been because I didn't have a paycheck coming in.

[00:20:57] Sam Parr: The second thing Jacob was thinking about was the unknown part of the equation.

[00:21:01] Jacob Turner: What am I going to do? The first two questions that somebody asked you is what is your name? And then they ask you, what do you do? Yeah. And when you're a professional athlete, you say like your name and you say you're a professional athlete. And and people tend to think that's relatively cool. And then when you get done, what do you say? You say your name and you say, well, I used to be a professional athlete, and I got some really good advice from a friend when I got done playing. And he probably doesn't even realize how impactful this message was for me. But he said, you know, my goal is that I always want to be the guy that's around the fire pit, or hanging out with friends. That's always talking about what he's going to do next. What am I working on next? You don't want to be the guy that's talking about what you did 10 or 15 years ago, and that's been my guiding light since I got done playing. I always want to be the guy talking about what I'm working on today and what I'm striving for next.

[00:21:51] Sam Parr: How do you think that through?

[00:21:53] Jacob Turner: To me, the answer first and foremost starts with what do I really want? And the analogy I always use the example is there's a movie called The Italian Job, and in the Italian Job they do a bank heist. They they rob the bank, they get a bunch of gold bricks, and everybody's got these cool ideas of what they want to do, whether it's a speaker system or a house in Spain. And there's one guy that hasn't thought at all about how he wants to spend it, and he says, well, I'll just do one of each one of those. And I think that's how society lives a lot. We see what somebody else has and we say, well, I'll just if I get enough money, I'll just take one of those, I'll take the big house and I'll take the fancy trips and I'll take the fancy car, because that's what you do with it, right? So my encouragement to people is, first and foremost, you really need to spend time and consider what do you really want? What are the things that bring you the greatest joy in your life that really have an impact on you?

[00:22:45] Sam Parr: That goes back to what we were saying earlier. The life cycle of a sports career gives you the opportunity to come full circle, experiment, figure out what you're good at, and then get on your next path. Because without that path, life can be pretty unfulfilling. I've met a bunch of people who have successfully reached the goal of retiring to a tropical island, kicking back by the pool with a cocktail in their hand at 38 years old. I've dreamed of doing the same. It sounds pretty great, but all I can say is, having spoken to a bunch of them, there's very few of them that are still doing that by age 40.

[00:23:14] Jacob Turner: As long as they can keep the snowball in place, they can circle back in 7 to 10 years and have had almost 20 to 40 years of life experience in just that one decade. When it comes to money and understanding what is important to me, what do I actually want to spend it on? So for me, it always starts with what is actually important.

[00:23:31] Sam Parr: Totally. It's funny, at the beginning of my career, that wasn't clear to me at all. Really, the dream was to put my feet up and chill and go, oh, isn't this great? I've got all the money and I don't have to do anything anymore. But I'm increasingly learning as time goes on how important it is to have like, exactly as you say, some purpose. What was that transition into, like, quote unquote regular life like for you? And what was that transition and decision making process into kind of starting your business?

[00:23:56] Jacob Turner: The middle stretch of my baseball career from years, let's call it 3 to 8. I used to think if I could get enough money where I could just join a country club and I could play golf every day and I could hang out with my family, that would be that's what I want to do. Much to your point. Like, I just want to kick back. And then I just realized as I started to get towards the end of my career, I would go crazy if I was doing that. But what I started doing was I started reaching out to everybody that was in my network that would go for a walk and talk with me around a park that would go get coffee with me, that would go to lunch with me. And I just asked him how they got to where they're at. So these were all people that were quote unquote, successful people that I wanted to be like in the next stage of my life.

[00:24:41] Sam Parr: Jacob met up with 20 to 30 people during that time, and he was very open about not having it all figured out through his own experience. Jacob knew a bit about finance and money management. He'd always been interested in the business world, but that was as far as his ideas went. There was still some digging to do, so whenever he met up with successful people whose careers inspired him, he'd say.

[00:25:01] Jacob Turner: If you could do it all over again, would you do the same thing that you're doing? And it's the same question that I think anybody that is working in any business can ask themselves. If you look down at the corner office, the most successful person at your business, do you want their lifestyle because it's most likely going to take their lifestyle to get whatever success they've had. So a more specific example. When I got done with baseball, I thought I wanted to go into investment banking. I met with an investment banker. He told me what the route was to get there. I had the ability to take those steps if I wanted to take those steps. But one thing he said was just to be clear, there's no shortcuts. You're still going to have to work 15 hour days, probably six days a week, for a significant period of time to get to the stage that you want to get to, and there's going to be no way to shortcut that. And I thought, well, I don't really need to do that from a financial standpoint. And I to me, I don't want to sacrifice the things I would have to give up, which would be time with my family, which would be watching my kids grow up in order to do that. So it really redirected my path to say, yeah, I thought I wanted to do that because I love how the world works. I love understanding how businesses make money. I love how understanding how people spend money. But when I met with those people, I learned quickly there was a lot of people that I met with that were successful that would say, well, if I had to do it all over again, I don't know if I would go this route.

[00:26:25] Sam Parr: See, the thing about knowing what you want is it makes you consider your priorities in his next life. Jacob wanted to dedicate time to his career and his family. He didn't need to launch headfirst into his next thing, so he narrowed his options down to a couple of different avenues and spent time in the field to test things out.

[00:26:42] Jacob Turner: I reached out to somebody who was a friend of mine that had started a financial advisor firm here in Saint Louis, Missouri, and I essentially said, I don't know if you have a role and I don't really need to make any money. I just want to understand the inside of this business. At that point in my life, I really was doing a lot of the financial stuff for myself on my own. I had been doing it somewhat on my own for a little bit of time, still had people around me helping me. But what I wanted to understand was, what is the inside of this business look like? And is this something that I want to spend the next 20, 30, 40 years, Lord willing, in my life doing? So for six months, I learned skills and I learned the ins and outs of the business. And I did not make very much money. I would have made probably more money being a Domino's Pizza driver, but I learned an incredibly valuable amount of skills, and that was probably the most valuable six months I've had since I got done with baseball.

[00:27:39] Sam Parr: Getting experience as a financial advisor. It touched something in Jacob juggling assets, making sustainable financial plans. It's what he'd been doing for a decade. So that turned into his second life. Jacob went on to found his own firm moment Private Wealth, a financial services provider for athletes and entrepreneurs. Jacob's focus is to educate the talent he works with to fix the gaps in the wealth management he'd seen in the locker room all those years. And the interesting thing is, the business got him to improve his own relationships to money. That's in a minute after a word from our sponsor. Tell me about the business. Like, how did you start it? What was the capital? Did you just plow your own money into this thing? Like, what was that start up process like?

[00:28:21] Jacob Turner: For me, how I started the business was a little bit out of necessity. At the end of that six months, I realized I do love personal finance. I like being able to help people with it and understand it, and navigate a lot of the same complexities that I navigated for the previous decade. But I also realized that from a financial standpoint, trading my time for money probably didn't make sense. So working more as a team member and an employee in that sort of setting, it wasn't something that was going to give me that same purpose that I was craving. So I thought about what are the opportunities that I have, and I think this is one of the things that I did differently because I had the financial capital I had versus if I didn't have any money, what I would have done. I wanted to do something in business, but I wanted to do something that if it blew up, it didn't ruin my financial situation.

[00:29:10] Sam Parr: So with their business, Jacob and his wife took a calculated risk and in time it paid off. Now they manage over $112 million of client assets. But building up that client base and that revenue, it took patience.

[00:29:23] Jacob Turner: The business is worth a few million dollars today. It allows us to serve a lot of the people that are navigating a lot of the same questions that we're talking about here today, and to me, that gives me a ton of purpose. The tagline that I tell people is we work with people that bet on themselves the athlete, the entrepreneur, the business owner that they've said, like, I'm going to put my chips on me, and now I need to figure out how I'm going to maximize all the sacrifices that I've made. So it's been an incredibly rewarding process. And I think for me, as I think about purpose, even at the next stage of this business, is we have the opportunity, in my opinion, to take the business as big as we want to take it. The same conversations that I have with our clients of how big they want to take their business, and what those sacrifices look like, and what the person in the corner office looks like, is the same questions that I asked myself today.

[00:30:11] Sam Parr: Another question Jacob still asks himself is what does affordability really mean?

[00:30:17] Jacob Turner: Just because you can buy something does not mean that you can afford something. So the example that I always use is a house. If you could buy a house, you could put a down payment on a house and you could afford the monthly payment. That doesn't mean that you can actually afford that to continue on forever. And I think this is one of the biggest struggles that athletes have, or really anybody that's coming into a lot of money, whether it's entrepreneur selling a business, if you build your lifestyle too fast and your lifestyle becomes too big in the future, and there are too many recurring expenses that go on with it, you have to be able to ask yourself, yes, I bought this lifestyle, but can I continue to afford this lifestyle?

[00:30:56] Sam Parr: Yeah. How does your current salary from the business compare to what you were earning in the MLB, and what's that kind of how does that feel like?

[00:31:02] Jacob Turner: Right now, we earn enough money for me to be able to live my lifestyle today. And the thing that I would say about the money that we earn now, and when I say we, I mean, my wife and I, we I couldn't do what I do without her is it is incredibly rewarding, almost more rewarding for me to build income and wealth in this business outside of baseball, as it was with baseball, because there is a sense of me with baseball where I worked really hard to get drafted, where I got drafted, I put in all the time and effort. I made the sacrifices that a lot of people weren't willing to make as a 16 or 17 year old kid to be in that position. But I also had an incredible amount of God given ability. If I did not have that God given ability, I could not have done the things I did. The analogy that I use is with an athlete. You go from base camp to the top of the mountain in 2 or 3 years, right? For me, I went there almost overnight. I was this unknown kid. I get drafted super high. I felt like I was at the top of Mount Everest. And then when I got done playing, I had so many struggles. I felt like I was below base camp in the business that I'm in today. A lot of it was just, let's start at ground zero, and it's been really fun to be able to slowly build something that's completely outside of baseball. That has challenged me almost in more ways than professional sports challenged me, because there's been more problems that I've had to solve that I just didn't know were even a problem until they were a fire that you couldn't ignore.

[00:32:34] Sam Parr: After his baseball career, Jacob has also gained control security. Sure, when he was playing baseball, he did have some level of financial safety. He could pay his bills without question. He could treat himself to nice things. There was an emotional benefit to that. But long term vision, the confidence that you will stay financially secure, that wasn't there at all. Presumably you feel more in control of this now than you did in your career, right? Because, like, you're one injury away from that paycheck just disappearing. Right.

[00:33:02] Jacob Turner: I do feel like the anxiety has reduced one because there's income coming in, but two, to your point, Harry, I feel like there's a little bit more control in professional sports. I felt financially secure in the sense that I knew my bills from a day to day basis. We're going to be paid for. But in terms of feeling financially secure for the rest of my life, I would say that took an incredible amount of time. There are so many things that were outside of my control, and there's certainly a lot of things that are still outside of my control when it comes to the business world. But to me, I certainly feel like there's levers that I can pull. There's things, there's dials that I can turn that if I want to go more. All in, in certain aspects, it's going to create a higher level of wealth or income in the future that in baseball, I didn't have the same control over some of those dials.

[00:33:49] Sam Parr: With this fresh sense of empowerment comes a new attitude to investment.

[00:33:53] Jacob Turner: My investment thesis is really simple. I want to try to earn the greatest return I can for the longest time period possible. And if I'm willing to earn a little bit less return to be able to stay in the game longer, I'm willing to do that. I look much more and focus much more on what the downside of the investment is, as opposed to the upside. The other thing that's changed for me with investing is I invest in things that I understand. I've come across a lot of people that have been successful investing a million different ways. And the reality is you can invest a million different ways. You could invest in the stock market, you could invest in real estate, you could invest in privately held businesses, you could be a venture capital investor, or you could invest in art, and you could have success in all those different aspects. But the people that have the most success investing understand what they're investing in and why they're investing that way. So my investing journey started out in a very boring fashion. I owned a lot of very diversified investments, mostly in the stock market. But the more I've gotten into the business world, there's been more and more investments that have shifted into privately held businesses. Now, to give a compare and contrast, I don't invest it at all in venture capital. It's not because it's not a good investment. I don't understand it. And if I don't understand it, I'm not going to be able to make the right decision when the opportunity comes to me. But if somebody puts a cash flowing small business in front of me. I can understand what that PNL looks like. I can understand what the risks are of that. I understand what that business is.

[00:35:22] Sam Parr: Since launching his own venture, Jacob gets an insider look into other people's finances, which you know is very on brand for this podcast. Except the difference with Jacob's clients is they share more of their personal finance situation with him and his team than anybody really. I'm not joking. Sometimes Jacob knows more about his clients lives than their spouse. And what's more, he gets to see what's coming next. He learns a lot through the process. And, you know, there's one thing that keeps coming back.

[00:35:47] Jacob Turner: I saw time and time again people that are later on in life, 60, 70, 80 years old, they've spent their entire life saving. They've done a great job being a diligent saver. And maybe they've built up $1 million nest egg, a $5 million nest egg, a $10 million, $100 million whatever number, it is enough money for them to live their lifestyle comfortably. And time and time again, I think for people that are in that situation, the common frame I hear is I wish I would have done this sooner.

[00:36:15] Sam Parr: This. It's the vacation with their family, the golf membership, the car they've always wanted to buy, and to tell the truth. Hearing that from other people who are so successful, it's changed Jacob's stance on money. Remember in the early years how Jacob was paying himself $1,000 a month to live on? The way he was so reluctant to spend for fear of ruining his chances?

[00:36:34] Jacob Turner: Well, I've spent more money in the past two years than I'd ever spent previously. I've gotten comfortable knowing what's important to me and what I want our money to do to impact the people that are around me, my family, the things that I care about. Because I would certainly like to see any of the money that I have go to good use while I'm still here, while I can use it, while I could pass it on to the next generation, as opposed to somebody getting a big check when I'm not there, to be able to see the impact that it makes in their life.

[00:37:09] Sam Parr: Yeah, I understand the idea of legacy and why that can be important to folks. But like, I just it seems like such a waste to not see the benefit of it.

[00:37:18] Jacob Turner: Even inheritance, you think about it, the average person that's getting an inheritance, that's passing it on to the next generation. If we do the math on it, let's say that the average life expectancy is around 80 years old. Don't hold me to that number, but it's around 80 years old. Well, that would mean that the next generation is probably somewhere between 40 years old and 60 years old. So chances are that person is relatively financially stable at that point. And if I were to pass away at 80 years old and I pass them on whatever inheritance that would be, what impact would that have on their life? It might have an impact on their net worth, but I can tell you that the nominal impact would be far less than if I would have been able to give even a quarter or a 10th of that money when they were coming out of school, and they were putting a down payment on their first house, or they were putting a security deposit down on their first apartment.

[00:38:10] Sam Parr: I think that's a really important point. What Jacob is saying here is it's not just about having or losing it all. It's about being able to do something with the assets you have while you have them. You grow your money sustainably to witness its impact. If you're not here to see the benefits, what's the point? That's where Jacob's at.

[00:38:28] Jacob Turner: Now, I wouldn't say I'm quite in the camp of wanting to die with zero, but if you gave me the option of saying, Jacob, you could either die with $20 million or you could die with $500,000. Which one of those is a better outcome? Without a doubt. I would say dying with $500,000 is a better outcome.

[00:38:53] Sam Parr: Big bold statement, right? But it goes to show Jacob's gone a long way since that day in 2019 when he first got signed. I just think the restraint he was able to show when he was 18 years old is pretty rare, honestly. Like, I can't imagine that I wouldn't have spent so much money on stupid crap when I was 18 years old to think of the discipline and the focus that he had so young. I think that's something we can all learn from. I mean, I personally think that there's space to be a little frivolous with money, especially early on. I think it's important to kind of gain your experiences and get to know yourself in other ways. But Jacob's story is just admirable. He's built an amazing wealth, an incredible life for him and his family. I've got so much respect for it. It's awesome. And his focus on purpose is a primary driver versus accumulation. That's the thing that I really took away from this conversation because, you know, what is wealth? But the result of pursuing a goal that you really believe in. I think if you focus on your purpose rather than wealth as the end goal, ironically, your odds of success go up. And not only that, but you're you're enjoying the entire journey. It's not just dependent upon getting to the final end goal. And okay, now I can be happy you're doing something that you believe in and that you're enjoying, and you can enjoy that entire process, and the outcome actually matters less.