The first question a family asks me about an NIL check is usually about the number on it. I understand why — a number is what the highlight reel trains you to look at. But the question I wish every household asked first is quieter, and it comes before the first dollar is ever promised: whose name is on the paper. By the time the check arrives, a family has usually already put names on a lease, a car, and a bank account. A name on a lease is a promise to pay. A name on a title is a claim to what happens later. Sorting all of those out on a hurried Tuesday, in the parking lot of a leasing office, is exactly how a family ends up agreeing to something it never meant to.
This is not a lender page and it is not a mortgage rewrite. That mortgage essay is about the house the family buys years from now. This one is about the smaller pieces that come first: the apartment near campus, the car that gets the athlete to practice on time, the account the NIL money lands in. In a lot of households those three things carry three different names, and when I ask why, the honest answer is usually that nobody ever wrote it down. That is the whole problem, and it is also the whole fix.
Start with the lease, because that is where the names matter most
When your athlete moves near campus, someone signs the lease. It can feel like a formality, the way a ticket taker's nod feels like a formality — until it isn't. The lease sets who owes the rent every month, who is legally responsible if it stops being paid, and who the landlord calls first when a faucet leaks at 11 p.m. on a Saturday. A family often assumes the athlete's name should be the only one on it, because the athlete is the one who actually lives there. That assumption, repeated across a few semesters, is where a lot of unhappiness starts.
Here is the reality, and I want you to write it down before anyone signs anything: the person whose name is on the lease is the person the landlord can come after. If the athlete's name is the only name up there and the money stops coming, the athlete is the one on the hook, no matter who promised to cover it. If a parent's name is up there, then the parent is responsible for the rent even after the season ends and the athlete has moved on to a different city. Almost none of these situations are wrong. A guarantor can be exactly the right call for an eighteen-year-old. A parent preferred to carry the load directly can be right too. The mistake is deciding not by principle but by whatever the leasing agent happened to say that afternoon.
A lease is a legal promise, not a statement of who is winning
Families sometimes read a lease as a small celebration, proof that their athlete has made it onto the stage. It is not that. It is a contract, no different in kind from the ones we walk through in how to choose an NIL agent, except this one has a specific address and a specific monthly number attached to it. The same discipline that keeps a family from signing a representation agreement in a parking lot — read it at home, with the lights on, before anyone owes anyone anything — is the discipline that should govern the lease.
When I sit with a household before a signing, I want them to be able to answer each of these out loud, from memory, before the pen touches anything:
- Whose name appears as the named tenant, and whose name, if anyone's, appears as a cosigner or guarantor.
- What the monthly rent is, what happens if a payment is a day late, and what the penalty literally says in the document.
- How long the lease runs, whether it renews automatically, and what the deadline to give notice actually is.
- What happens to the security deposit, and what the move-out inspection checks and charges for.
- Who is responsible for utilities, internet, and repairs, and who a parent calls when something breaks.
Every single one of those should be answered in writing before anyone signs. If a leasing office will not put an answer in writing, that is not a red flag to argue with — it is information. It tells you, in the calm of a Tuesday afternoon rather than the rush of move-in week, what kind of landlord you are dealing with, and it lets you make the next decision with your eyes fully open.
The car wears a second set of names
The car is where a family's discipline usually slips, because the car is emotional in a way paperwork never is. The athlete needs to get to practice; the family wants to help; the dealership wants a signature before the lot closes. Before anyone signs anything, write down the same three names you wrote for the lease, only now they can split three ways instead of two: whose name is on the title, whose name is on the loan or the lease, and whose name is on the insurance.
It is completely normal for those three to be held by different people for a while. A parent might hold the loan because the rates are better. The athlete might be on the title because the car is, eventually, theirs. The insurance might sit under a parent's policy because that is what the household already has. Any one of those arrangements can be the right one. The mistake is never being able to say which of them is true because nobody wrote it down.
There is a real benefit to doing this deliberately that is easy to overlook: a car financed in the athlete's name, paid on time, month after month, is one of the cleanest ways for a young person to build credit early. There is a whole piece on building credit as an athlete household worth reading before that first auto payment. But beyond the credit score, the record of whose name is where matters in its own right. The insurance company keeps their record, the lender keeps theirs, and the shop that fixes a fender keeps theirs. The family should be the keeper of the complete copy.
The NIL check lands in an account, and that account has an owner
The lease and the car are mostly about spending money. The bank account the NIL money lands in is about keeping money straight, and it deserves the same three-name conversation, in the same calm voice. Whose name is on the account, who is a signer, and who can see the balance. If an athlete's NIL check goes into a parent's personal account, that is a decision a household can absolutely make — but it should be a decision they made on purpose, not a habit they fell into because it was the path of least resistance.
I am not here to lecture anyone about whose money it is, and this essay is not that lecture. It is a request that the household decide out loud, the same way it already decides who covers the grocery bill and who takes carpool on Tuesdays. The household keeps its own record of the NIL money for the same reason you keep a folder for the car title and the lease: because in the moment you need to know, you do not want to be guessing. This is that same folder, just with three tabs instead of one.
Write it down as a one-page household fact sheet
The version of this that actually survives contact with a busy season is not a binder, and it is not a law firm packet with forty pages and a ribbon. It is one page, in the family's own words, with three short sections: the lease (whose name, who pays, who the landlord calls), the car (title, loan, insurance), and the account (owner, signer, what is allowed to come out). That page is not a document for anyone else. It is a private map for the household, no more and no less.
Update it on a simple rhythm: whenever the school changes, whenever the season ends, and whenever anyone signs anything. That is the whole system, and it is enough. The families who do this well are not the ones with the fanciest spreadsheets. They are the ones who can, at any random dinner, answer without looking anything up who is responsible for what.
The goal was never that every name be the same. Different names for different things can be exactly right. The goal is that every name is on purpose, and that the family — not the leasing office, not the dealership, not whoever happened to be quickest with a pen — is the one who knows whose names they are. That quiet, unglamorous piece of record-keeping is what makes the money feel manageable when the season is going well, and it is what keeps a bad Tuesday from becoming a bad year.
None of the decisions above require a big team to get right. What they require is a household that sits down at the kitchen table, writes down the names, and revisits the page when life changes. That is exactly the conversation we have when a family first reaches out to us, before any agent is hired and before any contract is signed. Introductory conversations are complimentary. Reach us at info@athlete-gm.com or (845) 920-1600, and we will walk the page with you. No pitch deck, no pressure, and no set of names you do not understand.
