Bankrate:Have you ever received a good financial tip from an athlete?
Mike Greenberg: No. I did receive a good life tip from an athlete that involved money, though, and it was from Deion Sanders. At the height of his fame and popularity, he was playing for the Cowboys in the Super Bowl, and I was covering it. At that time, all the buzz was about this incredibly expensive car he had bought, I don't remember what it was. Reporters were asking about it, and he said, "You know what? I worked really hard this year, and I wanted to treat myself to something." And then he said, "And you guys should all do the same thing." It was very noncondescending. He said, "You guys don't make the amount of money I do, but you work hard. Every once in a while you should go out and treat yourself to something, buy yourself something that's a little more expensive for yourself than you should. You'll appreciate it." When I got back to Chicago, I bought myself this leather jacket that I really liked that cost a lot more money than I probably should have spent on a jacket. The reality is, that jacket was my favorite article of clothing for about five years, long after I had forgotten about the cost.
Bankrate: Anything else you can share as far as how you are planning for your retirement and long-term financial future?
Mike Greenberg: It's funny, because recently, I did the first completely unselfish thing in my entire life -- I bought a whole bunch of life insurance. That was a financial decision I had never really thought about before. All of a sudden you wake up one day and realize, I've got two kids, and if I should get hit by a truck tomorrow, this is potentially a major problem. All of a sudden, in one day, I went from just being concerned with, "I want to have money to take nice vacations and go to Europe this year," to much longer-term thinking. The way I try and handle my own finances is, I have a bunch of money invested in the discretionary account I told you about, and my goal is to let that go and never touch it. I don't ever use that money. Now, I feel if I break even on what I bring in, my investments are growing without my having to interfere with that. So that's what I consider my long-term financial plan. If I never touch that money, and I have this money in these 529's which hopefully will pay for, if not all, then most of my kids' education, then the money I have that is growing, which will hopefully go untouched for the next 20 years or so while I'm still working and maybe even longer than that, should be more than enough for my wife and I to retire on. So that's the financial strategy I have now. I'm fortunate enough to have been able to put away and invest enough money; I have a fairly sizable chunk there. So if I just live at a zero balance, I'm doing OK.