I am not a hard core Tennis fan, but even I am familiar with the name of Boris Becker. In 1985 he became the youngest person to win the Wimbledon at Age 17.
Boris Becker was in the news recently for a reason that is not connected to Tennis. He was sentenced by a British court on charges of Financial Fraud. The sentence is for a whopping two and half years.
I was intrigued and started digging into the details.
50 Million Dollars
Based on the BBC reports Boris has had a life-time earnings of over 50 Million Dollars. That is not a trivial amount. For the majority of people a Million Dollars is a target amount for securing one’s retirement. Boris had 50 times that amount.
Riches to Rags
Starting off from a relatively unknown town in Germany, Boris achieved fame and fortune and has now lost it all. The trajectory of the descent from his retirement in 1999 follows a familiar path. His earnings from being a professional player diminished but his life-style did not adapt to this lower earnings phase of his life.
This, along with poor financial decisions led him to become desperate and commit financial fraud.
Take-aways
The main focus of this site is to help you, the reader, achieve FIRE. The more important aspect that I have not covered yet is ‘staying’ FIREd. I have written about how, through the magic of compounding one can get to save a Million Dollars to achieve FIRE. I think the opposite is also true.
If one over-withdraws from the retirement portfolio then the corpus can rapidly deteriorate and create a situation similar to the one that Boris is in.
Boris is 54 and broke in addition to being disgraced with no prospects of income earning opportunities.
The main take-away is simple, being mindful of the life-style choices. Which means designing the life-style to suit the post-FIRE income levels rather than the pre-FIRE income levels. It is easier said than done and Boris’s story is a cautionary tale of financial decisions going wrong.