Providing financial advice to the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Kobe Bryant or George Clooney may sound exciting.
It is. At first.
But 2 a.m. phone calls, the need to tutor clients in money management 101 and your pleas that they not spend their entire signing bonus in one week are all things that can get tiring.
Yes, there may be glamorous parties, but the ultimate payout for working with an actor, entertainer or athlete tends to be less profitable than it is with the average client. Because celebrities, even the easiest ones, are usually more labor-intensive.
"They are a little more demanding; they are used to having things their way," says Todd Morgan, a senior managing director and founding member of Bel Air Investment Advisors in Los Angeles. "They are more work than the traditional clients and not as profitable as the rest of the business."
So why work with them?
Sometimes the answer is simple. Advisors in L.A. work with celebrities just because that's where the TV and film industries are, and people who work in those industries likely make up the client pool.
Others have personal reasons. Andre Mirkine, associate vice president of investments with Wells Fargo Advisors in Connecticut, says he wanted to advise athletes because he was one himself: He played Division 1 soccer and was a professional freestyle skier. When an injury ended his skiing career, he decided to become a financial advisor.
For Jason Cole, a certified financial planner who heads the New York office of Abacus Wealth Partners, the desire to work with athletes started when he worked as an accountant and got a job auditing the books of the Philadelphia Eagles.
"While I was there, I was so excited every morning to get up, be at the facility and experience being in that atmosphere," says Cole, who decided to combine his love of numbers with his love for working with people into a career as a financial advisor to athletes.
Thomas Carroll, the senior vice president and managing director of the sports and entertainment specialty group at SunTrust, the bank and financial advisory, has a somewhat different perspective on the profitability of this type of work. That's because SunTrust does more than just manage assets. It also gets fees from mortgages and other financing, insurance products, credit cards, lines of credit and cash sweeps.