A wildfire, a wedding and an advisor's real product

Five days before Tyler Skaggs and Carli Miles were to marry in front of 210-plus guests at Calamigos Ranch in late 2018, the wildfires that had put the property at risk forced a call. The guest ranch would not be available: roads impassable, grounds and several buildings burned, and rain threatening mudslides. The room where the wedding was to be held was spared, and the event went on.

For Skaggs, the near-miss was a tangible version of what his advisor, Jeff Fishman of Los Angeles-based JSF Financial, treats as the central fact of an athlete's financial life: those careers can end very abruptly. Fishman, who centers his practice on financial planning for entertainment-industry professionals and also works with professional athletes, told WealthManagement.com, "Like an entertainer, a pro athlete's got to realize that their career can end very abruptly. As planners, our goal is to prepare them for those surprises."

Fishman describes the couple as financially levelheaded—"not a two-outs, bottom-of-the-ninth situation"—and will not disclose Skaggs's investments beyond saying the pitcher is relatively conservatively invested, diversified, with an eye on growth. The two talk fairly regularly, and Skaggs says Fishman helps him break things down like a game plan.

The practice-management lesson sits in the operational scramble rather than the allocation. The threat was a venue, a road, and a five-day notice, not a market shock. Those are the surprises Fishman says his plans are meant to absorb, and the wedding was a dry run for the larger risk that an athlete's income can disappear on short notice. For households whose cash flow depends on a career that can end abruptly, the advisor's real product is the tested habit of planning for events no one schedules; an advisor who can run that kind of rehearsal offers something the quarterly portfolio review does not.