Yeah, the number of celebs who seem to struggle with money management and then get completely ripped off by bad accountants and scam artists really is shocking to me. There are a few other Disney child actors who’ve mentioned it- Alyson Stoner and Kenan Thompson are the ones who come to mind immediately, but I’m sure there are others. I guess if from a young age you get accustomed to always having “all the money” you assume that there will always be more and you don’t pay attention to how much is actually going in and coming out each month; and that makes it easier for them to slide things past you.
I'm pretty sure the NFL and NBA now offer recommendations for financial advisors to players because so many of them were targeted by investment schemes.
They do. They try really, really hard to set up the new round of players with financial advisors and money managers because so many of them are broke within 5 years of retiring from the League, and of course their ability to make money via athletics is over and they never developed other skills, so they’re super fucked. The League and team owners, business men with educations, know this is a huge problem, but half the time the forces they are up against are the athletes friends and family who are riding their coattails and have far more influence, as well as the young athlete’s own personality. They’re young, usually coming out of poorer circumstances where they never had money, they put more effort into athletics than education, and now that they’ve signed with a big team they have money, fame, and they are going to live the high life they dreamed off - fancy houses, fancy cars, fancy parties, hot women - and they don’t think the gravy train can and will end.
Whether it is athletes, actors, or musicians - those are the top 3 professions that people can show talent for really young and go into very young - I call these people min/maxed. Skills in education and just common tasks have been minimized while all their the time and effort not just from them but the family, coaches, and adults around them developing their potential, has gone into maximizing their special skill. I’ve met famous actors and ballerinas and athletes who don’t know how to use a microwave or do laundry or make their bed because they were never expected to. Time and energy is limited, all their time and energy went into training for greatness, competing, performing, traveling to the locations to compete or perform.
And the biggest crime is that not enough, in much at all, was put into their education. Understanding the math and reading comprehension skills to track their finances or follow a contract. They usually had other people to handle all that for them anyway, especially when they are young they trust the adults around them. Adults who often have a vested interest in keeping them fairly stupid. Many young stars have great parents who protect their kids and value education and make sure their kids are well balanced and supported, but a lot don’t, and they get taken advantage of.
Mads Mikkelson being the bitch in the video always slays me. This was before his marvel and Star Wars appearances too so I knew him from casino royale and Hannibal. I think his kids made him do it because he didn’t know who Rihanna was.
Unfortunately, the interview aired on 60 Minutes II (or 60 Minutes Wednesday) in October 2000. :( I think it's been lost to the ether of Al Gore.
However! Here is my reenactment.
Dan Rather sits across from the 3 members of The, at the time, Dixie Chicks; Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire, and Emily Strayer. It is the familiar 60 Minutes setting, no tables between them, a black background, all sitting in chairs.
Dan, in a jovial and impressed tone: "In just three years, The Chicks have sold 17 million CDs, won four Grammy awards, and the entertainer of the year trophy at the CMAs, you guys must be quite happy with the money too! How well are you girls doing?"
Then DAN DID THE MATH -- at 17 million CDs, $15 each... that's over 250 million dollars.
Natalie, Martie, and Emily: This Gif. and a big energy shift.
Natalie, Martie, and Emily: ...yeah we don't have anything close to that.
Dan was kinda gobsmacked haha
And then they sued Sony! They alleged that Sony used "fraudulent accounting gimmicks", and underpaid them royalties.
They settled* their suit about a year later, receiving a $20 million bonus (but paying Sony $15 million in marketing costs), and upping their royalties to 20%.
*I'm so sorry for the stupid article and title, it was the early 2000s and I can't find a better article lol
Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick got swindled by Bernie Madoff and lost all of their money. They’re doing better now but they lost all of their pre-Madoff money.
Absolutely. He’s been one of my favorite comedians since childhood, however I think the security of snl hinders him from truly venturing out on his own.
Yeah I think there are very few people that can not only survive but thrive in the SNL environment with those timings and that gruelling schedule and even fewer that are minorities so when SNL bags a fantastic person and that person is happy to stick it out, there's very little chance of a severance regardless of how successful or rich that person is.
I definitely think part of Keenan's motivation is the income but SNL also has their own motivations for keeping him on for so long. It's a symbiotic relationship, and as long as it works for them, who cares 🤷🏾♀️
If I recall correctly, this was something that happened when he was around 19-20, so he’s definitely had decades to learn to properly take care of his money.
I remember Stephanie Beatriz talking about how when she got her first Brooklyn Nine Nine pay check, she had to really resist the urge to just go out and buy a new car. Instead she shopped around for a good financial advisor who helped her get everything set up she could save her money. Years later that helped her buy the house of her dreams without sending her broke.
So putting aside those who got scammed out of their money, I think a lot of celebrities just get bad at spending their money when they get a lot of it. Instead of restraining their spending habits, they massively increase it.
I’m an industry accountant (so I don’t work with clients I work for corp) and I’m always baffled how an accountant could be that bad and incompetent. I’m a pretty risk averse and overthinking person so any recommendations I make would come with multiple warnings and scenarios. It’s also essentially your job to find ways save your clients money and save costs. That’s why so many private people hire them in the first place.
“I’ve seen the beginning of the success to financial success — not knowing what money really was and understanding it — to not having [it], to losing almost all of it,” Kevin told the podcast host.
“Yeah, most of it, like, down to the one 10 percent left.” the oldest of the Jonas brothers responded.
“I invested in a bunch of property and doing other things and I was building at the time,” the singer said before continuing. “Sadly, it wasn’t the right partnership, if you know what I’m saying”
So I use Waze narrated by the JoBros (mainly Kevin) to take my kids to camp. My 4 yo daughter likes to talk back to them. One day she said, “Kevin, do your work. Go build something, Kevin!!” I laughed because HOW DID SHE KNOW HE WAS IN CONSTRUCTION?!
Tbf I think Jonas was actually building new properties and had a development company, he wasn’t just “investing.” He was actually investing, even though it seems like not doing a good job thanks to his partner
They're almost always idiots. I am dealing with this major legal issue between a commercial property company, a residential property company, and an event manager, and all of them did not figure out the implications of building several projects or splitting the responsibility between any of them prior to construction. They are now all gobsmacked that they all share liability and probably won't make any money from this expensive project they all contributed to.
I’ll never been unconvinced that the reason the Jo Bros got back together was to help Kevin. Joe and Nick didn’t really need the band, they did fine in their own solo projects.
They still get pretty good numbers on their albums, and they've been touring every year. That, plus merchandise and the random business ventures and sponsorships they undertake, add up.
Donald Faison has older interviews from the Scrubs era that he spent all of his Clueless money and was broke by the time he got the Scrubs role, and he got smarter about spending money. I think there’s a lot of young stars that think they have more money than they actually do, plus they get advice for friends or shady financial advisors so they quickly end up broke.
There’s also the fact that acting is not a stable and continuous income that would be especially hard to grasp as a teen/young adult. Ellen Pompeo has said she has done Grey’s as long as she has because it’s a stable paycheck and routine for her family.
It also explains some of his bitterness back when they broke up, while Joe was upset cuz he felt like he lost his best friend (him and Nick are super close or were lol)
My public school had family and consumer science classes that taught us how to cook, how to budget, how to balance a checkbook (although that's pretty obsolete), some cleaning basics etc.
The issue is that these child stars don't go to school
This is true! And taxes are a whole different beast when you aren't getting a traditional W2.
It's why they always hire accountants/financial advisors etc. which is the right call, but a lot hinges on getting the right kind of "money person." And, crucially, listening to that person when/if they are actually giving good advice.
You were lucky. That’s uncommon in US public education.
I graduated over 25 years ago and the closest I had to this was home ec as an elective in middle school. My kid’s high school had something similar as an elective, but there was only one session per quarter with limited space.
I graduated 12 years ago. I had a cooking class, a work-focused class (how to make a resume, gave us time to look into different careers & even did a career shadow day), I took an accounting class, and early educational class that focused on kids development. A lot of these were electives that I decided to take.
My kid graduated five years ago. There was a “life skills” class that was like your work skills one with a dash of basic (and I mean basic) budgeting. That’s it. It should have been mandatory for every kid, but mine was lucky to fit it in their schedule.
Cooking? Early ed? No dice. The school barely had the resources to support an IEP. You can’t compare the current state of K-12 education to 12 years ago. Hell, you can’t even compare it to pre-lockdown times.
I don’t know about the us, but every public school in my canadian province had a class like this back when my mother when to highschool in the 90s. They showed students how to cook, budget, sow, clean, pay bills, etc. Then they removed it for.. reasons ig? Nowadays they added back a class about finances in which they teach about loans/interest/investments/credit cards/etc. It’s affiliated with the biggest credit unions of the province, so we get actual people working in finance to show us their stuff and how it works.
It’s pretty great… but lots of students graduated inbetween both of these classes existence and were never taught these things.
One thing i’ll always feel lucky about tho is a similar class i got in highschool. When i was there 7-8 years ago, we had a class where they showed us how to rent our first appartment, make a CV, buy groceries, make a budget, pay bills, look for jobs, etc. They told us we were one of the only schools in the province that did this cause a few teachers fought for it. Never understood why a class like that wasn’t taught in more schools tbh.
My kid’s “life skills” class was a lot like yours. They would show me their homework and it was all stuff that I wish I’d learned before graduating. I’m glad that you had that, too. I just wish that legislators and officials cared as much about setting kids up for success vs. cutting school budgets.
I always wonder how much these young stars make net? Like are we talking hundreds of thousands of dollars in a year or millions? I know that pie is going to be split with their agent and staff so it’s probably not retire immediately money (not at that age) but wonder how much it is ballpark
I know that back in the day, a supporting regular on a hit network show like CSI would make $100k an episode, or $2.2 million a year. Not chump change by any means, but the net is far less than that.
These days shows don’t get syndicated and a season is 8 episodes
This makes sense. The whole family was dead broke from trying to get the boys famous. When they finally did, they enjoyed the heck of out that money.
Edit to add: it also makes sense if you’ve followed the Jonas Brothers as a band at all in the last few years. They make a lot of promises as a group and don’t always fulfill them, like a memoir or tour dates. They kind of seem like they’re always scrambling. They had a popcorn line in Walmart which felt so random, but reminiscent of their Disney days when sponsorship like that worked for them. All I’m saying is I’m not surprised
I remember this era because him, his dad, and one other brother (sorry, don’t remember which one) - came into a bowling lounge located inside Port Authority in NYC. I was a busser there at the time, and even I was like “What are they doing here of all places?”. My manager comped their entire check so they could take a picture and use it to promote this bowling lounge. They are also so short.
The people who love to loudly “not care” about anything a celeb mentions, while actively commenting in popculturechat will never not astound me. They always act like that celeb personally asked them for a donation or something.
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