As a freshman at the University of Connecticut, Paige Bueckers blew through her college stipend so fast that she turned to her mother for financial support.
Spending all her money on clothes and food, she had to borrow her mom’s credit card to buy gas and other necessities.
“So she wasn’t really happy about that,” Bueckers, now a WNBA star, told Fortune. “Then [name, image, and likeness] came into place, and then my mom [got] her credit card back.”
Bueckers—the WNBA’s 2025 No. 1 draft pick and winner of the NCAA national championship with the UConn Huskies—had a meteoric rise. The 23-year-old was among the first batch of college athletes to benefit from the Supreme Court-backed NCAA policy change allowing student-athletes to benefit from name, image, and likeness (NIL) deals.
Months after the 2021 policy implementation, Bueckers signed her first NIL deal, a multiyear partnership with apparel and sneaker marketplace StockX. She signed her second deal with Gatorade the same month, becoming the first college athlete to sign with the brand. After the 2024-2025 NCAA season, Bueckers’ estimated net worth was around $1.5 million thanks to NIL deals.
Now a 23-year-old rookie in the WNBA, the financial transition was startling; five years ago, Bueckers didn’t even have a bank account.
“It happened super fast, and I really wasn’t prepared for it,” she said. “Building your wealth in college and starting to really understand finances is something that I didn’t really know, and so I was kind of forced to know.”
Bueckers now earns a regular paycheck, though it pales in comparison to her endorsement deals. In April, Bueckers signed a $348,198 rookie contract with the Dallas Wings, earning $78,831 in her first year, per the league’s collective bargaining agreement.
The same month, Bueckers signed a three-year deal to compete in the 3-on-3 basketball league Unrivaled, cofounded by WNBA veterans Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart. The average salary for the league is more than $220,000, nearly the maximum base salary for the WNBA.
Financial literacy in the NIL era
Bueckers’ eye-opening introduction to personal finance is a trial by fire shared with many young athletes, some of whom experience a whirlwind rise to success only to see their wealth slip away when their tenure as professional athletes ends.
About 60% of NBA stars go broke within five years of retirement, Sports Illustrated reported in 2009. A 2015 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 15.7% of NFL players filed for bankruptcy 12 years after retirement.
That’s not lost on Bueckers, who learned the hard way about setting up savings accounts and investment portfolios.
“It can be gone at any single moment,” she said. “And that’s something that I’m still learning.”
Now she’s trying to spread the word. On Tuesday, Bueckers announced a partnership with Intuit for Higher Education, a program that pairs the business software company with higher education institutions to provide college and graduate students with financial literacy and budgeting tools—including for NIL-focused tax education for student athletes.
Michael Rueda, head of U.S. sports and entertainment at law firm Withers, said the NIL era has changed how young athletes approach financial literacy. Since the landmark 2021 ruling, the $2.3 billion NIL industry has expanded to allow athletes to negotiate deals before enrolling in a school, which are now permitted to pay their athletes directly. As of this month, the University of California, Los Angeles has already paid its athletes $4.8 million under the new rules.
“There is the opportunity to be put at risk by earning all this money suddenly when you’re 18,19, 20 years old,” Rueda told Fortune.
Schools are still playing catch-up to the evolving set of policies surrounding NIL, but there’s also a growing infrastructure of support for student-athletes to help reap the potential benefits of these deals, Rueda said. Athletes have access to agents and lawyers as well as training required from schools, which want to have successful athletes reflect the success of their respective programs.
While NIL policies may be constantly shifting, efforts to improve the financial literacy of athletes have been increasing over the past decade as a result of record-breaking contracts and simply more money pouring into professional sports, according to Molly Cloud, financial advisor and director of sports and entertainment at Morgan Stanley. Younger athletes may be making more money, but there are emerging guardrails in place influencing how they can spend it.
“As much as NIL is still kind of the wild west, there are starting to form some guidelines and goalposts around what makes the most sense for the benefit of the kids,” she said.
