Financial Troubles
At the end of 2006, Sports Illustrated magazine estimated Vick's annual income between his NFL salary and endorsements at $25.4 million, ranking him just below NASCAR's Dale Earnhardt, Jr. in a listing of highest earning athletes. There were problems in Vick's affairs with poor financial management, bad investments, and lawsuits. A $45 million dollar lawsuit was pending in a dispute with his original sports agents. Several lucrative endorsement deals apparently soured.
After the dog fighting indictments were announced in July 2007, financial claims against Vick escalated. While in prison, Vick's income was reduced to wages of less than a dollar a day. With affairs severely affected by lost income, legal expenses, litigation, and mismanagement by a series of friends and financial advisers, he was unable to meet scheduled payments and other obligations. Within several months, Vick had been named in numerous lawsuits by banks and creditors for defaulting on loans, some relating to business investments.
The dog fighting property near Smithfield, Virginia had been liquidated earlier, and in November 2007, Vick attempted to sell another of his homes.
As he served his sentence in the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, friends and family continued to occupy some of the other homes in the South Beach section of Miami Beach, Florida and multiple locations in Virginia. In June 2008, when his brother Marcus was arrested and jailed in Norfolk after a police chase, he listed his residence as a $1.39 million home owned by Vick in an exclusive riverfront community in Suffolk, Virginia. Construction of a new riverfront home took place on land Vick owned in another exclusive section of Suffolk. His attorneys later estimated that he was spending $30,000 a month to support seven friends and relatives, including his mother and brother, three children, and their mothers.
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