On the latest edition of the award-winning “Listen In With KNN” podcast, radio show host and executive producer Kelsey Nicole Nelson spoke with Northwestern Mutual wealth management advisor and the founder of Secure The Bag program, Didier Occident. The show focused on the foundation of financial literacy in an era of NIL.
For the next 35 minutes, the two dove into the financial aspects of NIL and how important it is for these athletes to create a plan to set themselves up for long-term success with short term money.
Occident was taught to be responsible with money at a very young age, being raised by a Haitian father with a MBA in finances and a mother who was a registered nurse. Another influence growing up for him was the movie “Boomerang” where Occident aspired to be like the hotshot advertising executive protagonist played by Eddie Murphy, Marcus Graham.
Occident had his own learning experiences with improper budgeting in his earlier years of life and these moments helped him understand the value of responsibly handling money.
“My parents told me when I was 21 that they had an account for me that had $12,000 in it. They said it was $20,000 at its height, the market crashed in the early 2000s so it’s down to 12,000.”
He went on to describe the advice his parents gave him he did not initially listen to.
e=”font-weight: 400;”>He said they said, “You should keep it there until it comes back up.”
He went on to describe how he asked for it immediately and they could not stop him legally. He wanted the money and what he thought was a big pay day. Occident said “That was May of 2002 when they told me, and by September of that year, that twelve grand was gone.”
That strong representation was impactful to Occident as he would attend school with a marketing background and work in finances as a part time bank teller. During his time working as a teller, Occident became fascinated with how people spend their money as many people didn’t represent the lifestyles that their bank accounts shared. He realized that there were a lot of people who were worried about looking wealthy than actually having wealth.
“There are a lot of people that came in through the drive thru in BMW’s/Mercedes but you check their account and they were living check to check. And there were alot of people that came in who were day laborers and people covered in paint. People that most people would thumb their nose at and you would see that they had 80 grand or 100 thousand dollars in their account.”
Occident’s life would change in 2008 as he would be working at his old job making $34k a year until the national recession. During the 08’ recession he got a call from Northwestern Mutual looking for advisors. Didier took the interview as he saw nothing else was available during that time.
Occident felt drawn to the role, although he was fearful of maintaining employment at that time as he referenced 85-90% of advisors failed early on.
He said, “My mindset was ‘Hey, this sounds great but I have to face the fact that I’m probably going to fail at this. That’s what the statistics say. So if I want any chance of success at this I have to do whatever they tell me to do.’”
Using that newfound fear as motivation, Occident defied the odds and wrote more new clients in his first six months working for Northwestern Mutual than anyone else in company history. Occident saw that he found his professional calling due to accomplishing such a feat.
That milestone would blossom into a now 15-year career where Occident has won awards like the “Top Under Five Year Advisor” in the southern region of the United States his first five years, making him the first African American in company history to achieve that honor.
Getting the opportunity to have his parents in attendance at the award speech so they could see that this was a real accomplishment he had the opportunity to show them that all their hard work paid off as his financial career gave him a clean slate and the opportunity to fulfill his potential. He was glad to make his parents proud.
When he became a wealth management advisor, one goal of Occident was to attend three Florida State football games a year. As his success grew, he was able to make connections within the Florida State athletics staff. One of these relationships being a former player Trae Hackett who works for the player development staff.
In 2018, Occident was able to start a new passion, he founded the financial literacy program Secure The Bag at Florida State University and has taken it across the country. The idea originated after Hackett asked Didier to come in and talk to the team about finances back in 2014.
“Finally in 2018. I sat down with him [Hackett]. He bought into the vision of what I wanted to do and ideas started flooding out of me. We came up with the name ‘Secure The Bag’ and I put everything I had into it,” said Occident.
His program was able to expand during the pandemic and he now works with nearly 100 coaches, at least 15 programs, including the University of Maryland and University of Alabama, and seven NFL teams, including the Baltimore Ravens. Today, he represents around 80 athletes as they embark on their collegiate and professional careers.
“When you do things for the right reasons, things can grow beyond your wildest dreams. I wake up blessed and I’m happy it’s been so well received,” said Occident in response to the exponential growth of the program.
Occident got tired of seeing players who come to these big universities with the primary goal of going pro, when in reality only a small percentage of them get to that level. And often once their four years are up, these players go back to their tough environments that they worked so hard to get out of.
“We kind of accept this story of a lot of guys that work their butts off in highschool and get plucked from disenfranchised situations. Get to go stand in the light for four years at these big universities and most of them go right back where they came from. That’s the outcome we just accept and I got tired of seeing that as the outcome,” said Occident.
No matter if these athletes end up playing professional sports or not, they all need to know how to manage their money. The importance of the program has evolved over time as during the pre-NIL era it was nice to have these lessons and now programs see “Secure The Bag” as a necessity with the rise of NIL in collegiate athletics.
As Occident said,, “If you can’t manage one thousand dollars, you can’t manage one million dollars.” And with the value NIL deals reaching millions of dollars for some student-athletes. Occident recognizes how his gift of financial knowledge is a perfect way to give back to the community.
Didier is a fan of these athletes finally getting paid for NIL but believes it should be restructured.
“There’s an ecosystem that’s kind of leading these kids astray to go chasing something when they were in a good situation and taking short money. Not all money is good money. I think one of the things athletes need to also think about is if you’re going to two, three, four different schools in four years. What is your alumni network? You might have made two hundred grand more than you would have in the short term but after taxes, after you spend some of that, it’s not going to be that much over the long term..”
Host Nelson agreed on the alumni networking being a major factor these athletes can take advantage of sharing how they present great networking opportunities.
Occident understands young people’s mentality towards saving money and sees the advantage that the athletes have in regards to making an exuberant amount of money in their career but the con to it being that they’re getting this money at the age where they could make ill-informed decisions due to a lack of experience. Through “Secure The Bag” he witnessed players become more serious about their financial literacy at different stages in their career.
“Repetition is the mother of learning. The more you can hear something the more important it is and finance is so behavioral. There’s so many books on finance and what to do but your behavior matters more than anything else,” said Occident.
Occident wants to help turn generational trauma into generational wealth through his program and life lessons
To learn more about Secure The Bag. Check out their website.
To listen to the full show, check it out below.
