Let’s put the development of Name, Image, and Likeness income in a historical context for a moment.

For most of the history of college athletics, the athletes who generated billions of dollars in revenue for universities, conferences, and broadcast networks received no direct financial compensation. Both athletes and institutions were punished for transacting across this value creation, and this has been disproportionately consequential for Black athletes, who make up large shares of the revenue-generating sports that drove the most value.

NIL changed that. Starting in 2021, college athletes gained the right to earn income from their name, image, and likeness. For the first time, the people whose labor and talent and bodies produced all that value could keep some of it.

The question is what we do with it.

What makes this moment different

NIL income is real income. Not symbolic, not small-scale for most athletes — the NIL market has grown rapidly, and even athletes without massive social media followings or high-profile programs can earn meaningful amounts from local deals, campus partnerships, and community appearances.

More importantly, NIL income arrives at a specific moment in an athlete’s life: young adulthood. Before most major financial commitments. Before mortgages, children, and the complexity that makes financial restructuring harder. This is the moment when financial habits are being established — habits that compound for decades.

The athletes who build on this opportunity are not necessarily the ones who will earn the most. They’re the ones who understand what they have and treat it with intention from the beginning.

The first generation always has the steepest climb

For many NIL athletes — and particularly for many Black NIL athletes — this income represents a family first. They are earning at a level and navigating financial complexity of a kind that their parents and grandparents didn’t encounter at the same age.

When you are the first in your family, you don’t have the informal knowledge infrastructure that people who grew up around this kind of money have absorbed without realizing it. You don’t have parents who explain tax strategy over dinner or aunts and uncles who debate the relative merits of Roth versus traditional IRAs. You don’t have a family baseline of what “normal” looks like for managing this kind of income.

What you have instead is a steep learning curve, a lot of noise from people who want a piece of your earnings, and a social environment — college athletics — that applies significant pressure to spend visibly. This is on top of keeping the main thing the main thing: performing at a level that allows you to continue to build.

What legacy actually looks like

Legacy is a word that gets used loosely. Here is what it means in financial terms, practically:

Legacy is the financial position you are in ten years from now, when your athletic career is over and you are building the rest of your life. It’s whether you have savings, or debt. Whether you own assets, or owe on liabilities. Whether you have an emergency fund, or you’re one crisis away from starting over.

Legacy is also what you model for your community: younger athletes, younger siblings, your own future children. The first person in a community to do something new demonstrates that it’s possible. That demonstration is worth more than most people realize.

And legacy, eventually, is what you pass on. Maybe that’s savings, property, or investments. Maybe it’s the hard-won understanding of how to navigate income, taxes, investment, and wealth-building that you didn’t inherit but will give. Both matter. Both are real.

The decisions that determine the outcome

The path from NIL income to long-term wealth is not mysterious. It is made of specific decisions, made repeatedly over time:

• Setting aside taxes immediately and understanding self-employment tax obligations before spending anything.
• Building an emergency fund before building a lifestyle. Three to six months of expenses, liquid, before anything else.
• Starting retirement savings early. A Roth IRA opened at 20 with consistent contributions builds into a substantial account by 60 — not because of magic, but because of time. Time is the one asset that gets cheaper every year you wait.
• Building credit intentionally. The mortgage you will want to take out in ten years depends on the credit score you are building today.
• Learning the difference between assets and expenses — and building a life where assets grow and expenses are chosen, not defaulted into.

None of these decisions require a financial degree. They require information, a community that reinforces good behavior, and the intention to treat your income like it matters.

Where Onyx fits

Onyx exists because the racial wealth gap is persistent, structural, and real — and because the communities most affected by it deserve more than information. They deserve community: a place where knowledge is shared intergenerationally, where financial behavior is shaped by social norms that reinforce wealth-building, where the shame that so often silences money conversations is named and disarmed.

The NIL cohort is Onyx’s work applied to a specific and urgent context. Athletes who are earning real income right now, navigating real financial complexity right now, with a window that is open right now — and who deserve the community infrastructure that turns this moment into the foundation for something lasting.

The racial wealth gap closes one family at a time. One estate plan, one first home, one Roth IRA, one conversation between a 22-year-old and a 54-year-old who has already built what the 22-year-old is trying to build.

You are earning income now. The question is not whether you can. The question is what you’re building toward — and whether you have a community around you while you build it.

The window is open. Let’s make it count.

Be the first in your family to build something that lasts — with a community behind you. Join Onyx at onyxblackwealth.org.