Welcome to Top Shelf
Hockey players have been underserved by the financial industry for too long. A fiduciary built exclusively for them didn't exist. Now it does.
Why This Exists
I grew up with a rink in my front yard in Litchfield, New Hampshire. I play beer league hockey in Lake Tahoe. I know this world because I've lived in it my entire life.
After leaving the brokerage world and building Wealth In Yourself — a fee-only fiduciary for entrepreneurs and real estate investors — I kept seeing the same problem in a different arena: hockey players getting generic financial advice from advisors who don't understand the compressed earning window, jock tax complexity, or cross-border planning that their careers demand.
The Compressed Earning Window
The decisions that outlast hockey get made during it. Eight to twelve years to earn what most people earn over forty. That math changes everything about how financial planning should work. The strategies that make sense for someone with a 40-year career don't apply when your peak earning years are over before your mid-30s.
Fee Set by Career Earnings. No Conflicts.
Every specialist on your team gets paid for the work they do — your agent for negotiating, your trainer for conditioning. Your financial advisor should work the same way: paid for the planning, not a percentage of everything you've built.
Top Shelf Private Wealth sets its fee by career earnings. No AUM percentage. No commissions. No incentive to do anything other than what's right for you and your family.
What's Coming
This blog will cover the financial topics that matter most to hockey players:
- Jock tax strategy, and where the money actually goes
- Cross-border US-Canada planning
- Post-career transition planning
- Investment strategy for compressed earning windows
- Insurance and estate planning for athletes
No jargon. No generic advice. Just practical financial planning built for the specific complexity you face.
Life-changing money should change your life.
— Josh