Swedish Twins
Daniel and Henrik Sedin, Swedish twins who played their entire 18-year career with the Canucks before retiring last year, know about heady career trajectories. The longtime Royal Bank clients went from getting about $100 a game in a Swedish league in the late 1990s to earning about $1 million a season with their first NHL contract, a three-year deal in 1999. Their salaries reached $7 million a season in their final years.
“It’s easy to say a lot of players make a lot of money, but for the most part players make league minimum or up to a million and a half, maybe $2 million,” Henrik Sedin, 38, said in a phone interview. “If you play for three or four years, you’re not going to be able to live the rest of your life doing nothing -- and that’s the case for the majority of players in the league.”
The Sedins are a wealth manager’s dream: They had long careers and lucrative contracts, yet are restrained in their spending. Their biggest indulgence came when they each spent around C$150,000 ($110,000) on motorboats for their oceanfront home in Sweden that they didn’t really enjoy, and sold a year later at a loss.
“We grew up in a family that never really talked money -- we didn’t think that way,” Henrik Sedin said. “We were never guys that bought anything luxury or stuff like that.”
Still, the former captain relied on Royal Bank’s acumen to help on complicated financial issues, including putting together a mortgage for an apartment in Stockholm and transferring the money abroad ahead of a tight deadline.
Out-of-the-ordinary demands from sports stars have been the norm for Royal Bank’s David Vander Voet during his 13 years as a private banker in Toronto.
“I’ve played real estate agent, I’ve taken delivery of cars, I’ve delivered paperwork and so forth to weird places, to hotels. I’ve gone down to the depths of locker rooms, gone to the practice facilities,” he said in an interview. “You make yourself available to them, at their schedule.”
‘A 911’
Vander Voet works with “brand-name athletes” as well as hockey executives, agents and retired players. He typically manages around 150 households, and currently 20 are in sports, including active players in the NHL, MLB and NBA. His first client as a private banker was a newly acquired Toronto Maple Leafs player, and he’s since built relationships with young athletes and their families, from their junior hockey days, to American Hockey League debuts, and on to the NHL.
Young players tend to be “a bit boring” in their demands, Vander Voet said, unlike some players taken on later in their careers. “I have clients that I’ve inherited when they’re close to retirement, when it’s been more of a 911 instead of a 411. It’s been a bit of a tire fire and we’re trying to get them right again.”
Like his colleagues, Vander Voet won’t disclose client names. He’s dealing with one player eager to buy a C$10 million house, and once had a Raptors basketball player who was paying C$8,500 a month in rent for a condo and even more for Toronto parking stalls for his cars and those driven by his entourage.