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5 22 5 Sports and free-time activities 5.1 Text input Why families stretch their budgets for high-priced youth sports (1)  Most American families (63%) spend anywhere from $100 to $499 per child each month on youth sports, TD Ameritrade found. Another 18% pay over $500 to $999 per month. Roughly one in ten (11%) spend $1,000 to $1,999. On the high end, 8% said they spend $2,000 per month or more, or about $24,000 per year. (2)  All that spending on sports affects other parts of their lives, the survey found, with 55% saying they “cut back on entertainment”, 40% saying they “take fewer vacations”, and 23% admitting they have “cut back on money set aside for retirement”. (3) There’s nothing wrong with helping your children realise their sports dreams, learn useful life lessons, get fit and stay out of trouble, personal financial experts interviewed by USA TODAY say. (4)  It shouldn’t come at the expense of your own retirement account or other family funding needs, but that’s often the case, the TD Ameritrade survey found. One in three parents (33%) say they “do not contribute regularly to a retirement account” due to sports-related expenses. 40% say they don’t have an emergency fund. And 60% say they worry that paying for sports “may impact their ability to save for retirement”. (5)  To minimise costs and avoid breaking the family budget, experts recommend cutting back on weekend tournaments, playing for local teams rather than travel teams, not going overboard with private lessons and high-end equipment and, most importantly, being realistic about your child’s athletic future. (6) The increased spending on elite youth sports is driven in part by the fact that 67% of parents have hopes that their investment will pay off in an athletic scholarship, and 34% who think their child-athlete will go to the Olympics or turn pro, according to the TD Ameritrade survey. (7)  Parents’ expectations about how far their child can go are too high, given statistics that show how few high school athletes end up playing sports in college, and how even fewer go on to play in the Olympics or the NFL, NBA or NHL. (8) The odds of playing Division I sports in college are minimal. Only 2.6% of football players, 2% of golfers and 4.6% of hockey players made the jump from high school to Division I. The statistics are similar for women athletes. (9)  Getting to the pros is even more unlikely. The probability of a college player going pro is 1.1% in basketball, 1.5% in football and 5.6% in ice hockey, NCAA data show. (10)  Personal finance pros say that more often than not investing in sports does not reap a financial return. However, experts say that the trend is for families to spend more of their gross income on sports. Many parents consider their investment as temporary with the hope to get a sizeable return if their children are successful in sports. They forget that an investment in your children’s sports career is much different from buying a stock or mutual fund and expecting it to rise in value. For most families there is no return on their sports investment. (Adam Shell, eu.usatoday.com , 5 September 2017; adapted and abridged) 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 85 90 Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv