Moneywise and Yahoo Finance LLC may earn commission or revenue through links in the content below.
What do you do if you’re 29 years old, at the prime of your football career and earning tens of millions of dollars? For Jason Brown, the answer to that question would be to give it all up and become a farmer.
Brown shocked the sports world in 2012 when he walked away from a $37.5 million contract with the St. Louis Rams, as the highest-paid center in the NFL, to buy a 1,000-acre plot in Louisburg, North Carolina, now known as First Fruits Farm.
Brown and his wife donated the first yield of their harvest to local food banks, proving this wasn’t just a career shift for the professional athlete, but a personal mission. As the farm’s yields have increased, so too have their donations.
“We are a donation-first farm,” Brown told the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2017. “My wife and I made a covenant with God that whatever we produce on his farm, that we’re going to give our local communities our first fruits of whatever is grown from our farm.”
The leap from touchdowns to tractors may sound radical, but Brown’s story can offer an inspiring blueprint to find your own philanthropic calling without going broke.
If your goal is to give more back to your community, like the Browns, then don’t skip the foundational step of financial stability. Jason Brown’s journey from NFL star to full-time farmer-philanthropist was made possible by years of high-earning groundwork.
First and foremost, you need to have an emergency fund set aside for any surprising costs.
A good place to keep your emergency cash is somewhere easy to access like a checking account. Experts generally recommend having at least three to six months worth of living expenses in your emergency fund, but some suggest a minimum of a year. As with most things finance, it pays to start saving as soon as you can for your long-term financial goals, farming-related or otherwise. From here, the next step is making that money work for you by investing in a healthy mix of stocks and bonds.
Beyond investing in the stock market, you might want to look into alternative assets such as real estate. While the $34.9 trillion U.S. home equity market has historically been the exclusive playground of large institutions, Homeshares is changing the game.