For Gregory Dennis, learning to manage his own money led to a career of helping others do the same.
Dennis, the new chief operating officer for United Brokerage Services, a subsidiary of Charleston-based United Bankshares, cut his teeth in finance during his stint as a professional basketball player.
"I had a small interest in it prior to that but I started doing it myself and I really got bitten by the bug, so to speak," Dennis said. "That's what I started doing when I retired from basketball."
Dennis played basketball at Charleston High School and then at East Tennessee State. He played for both the Atlanta Hawks and the Minnesota Timberwolves and overseas in Greece, Macedonia, Argentina and Puerto Rico during his seven-year professional basketball career.
When Dennis signed on after college, his agent recommended he start saving and investing his money, so he did.
"He just made a recommendation to go with any agency, so I started saving money through Fidelity," Dennis said. "It's just a lot of reading. A lot of research ... I was basically looking for places to put my money and ways to save."
Dennis said that back then, he wasn't making the millions of dollars that professional athletes make now, but he was making nice money.
"I've been a sports fan all my life and I know I've heard all the horror stories of agents robbing their players blind and stealing money, bad investments and Ponzi schemes, et cetera, et cetera," he said. "So it was just my mindset going in that I wasn't gonna let that happen to me."
After his retirement from basketball 16 years ago, Dennis started working in the financial industry. Before he took the job with United Brokerage Services, he was an independent financial advisor.
Basketball and finance are not all that different, he said. Both are team oriented and require a lot of teamwork and communication, he said. That's what he told players during a recent speaking engagement with the NBA's Development league, where he was asked to talk about the transition from basketball into another career.
Dennis said he tells professional athletes to start managing their money well now by avoiding debt and "paying themselves" - saving first and living off the rest of their money.
"The average career in the NBA is less than five years so it's not the sort of thing that you want to wait [to do] until you're done," he said.
"Start now" is also the advice he gives the average person about saving and investing money. It's often difficult for people to save money early in their careers when they aren't making much, he said. But young people have the benefit of time and compounding interest, he said.
"If you start when you're at the peak of your career, you're giving up 15, 20 years when you could have been saving whatever it was you got," he said. "But the [important] thing is getting into the habit of doing it, no matter how small it is."
Dennis said he's lucky in that he's already done a lot of what some of his clients are saving to do during retirement, like travel. He said Greece in particular was a beautiful place to work.
"It's an awesome place to see and I'm fortunate and glad I did get to see it at that particular time," Dennis said.
Still, after living all over the world, he now resides in Dunbar and wouldn't want to live in any other place, he said.
"Home is home," Dennis said. "You have friends and family here, but for me, though, it suits me because I like the outdoors. I fish and hunt."
And all that time abroad gave him an appreciation for what else the Kanawha Valley has to offer - a low cost of living, not much traffic and short commute times, for instance.
"It has its advantages," Dennis said.
Reach Lori Kersey at Lori.Kersey@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1240 or follow @LoriKerseyWV on Twitter.