These Celebrities Actually Provide Decent Financial Advice
They’re… just like us?

It’s Bloomberg Businessweek’s Showbiz Issue 2017, and they asked eleven celebrities to discuss personal finance:
11 Celebrities on How They Spend Their Money
You’d expect these to be stories about splurging and living the high life—they’re celebrities, after all, so that should mean they have more money than they know what to do with, right?—but the majority of these interviews focus on understanding your contracts, knowing where your money goes, and living within your means.
Here’s Lee Daniels, for example, talking about how you have to earn a lot of money to spend a little money:
What do you wish you’d known about money before getting into showbiz?
That half of it goes directly to the government. And another 20 percent goes to your representatives, so that’s 70 percent of your income right there. You’d better make some money, honey! You’ve got to put $15 of that $30 away for your retirement.
Jenny Slate explains why she recently panicked when she bought a new TV:
Is it a fancy TV?
It’s like $300, but I was just like, Do you need a TV? I’ll never forget how it felt to be a stand-up on unemployment. I grew up a privileged person, but it embarrassed me to have to ask my parents for money, and I don’t want to do that again. I save to the point where my business manager is like, “Jenny, please buy a house.”
Although some of the celebrities, like Priyanka Chopra, talk about spending their money on land and luxury cars, the majority of the stories are like Slate’s: being a celebrity means you get to buy your prosciutto sliced fresh at the Whole Foods counter, instead of having to buy the less expensive, pre-packaged kind. Or Elisabeth Moss’s: being a celebrity means you have to buy more clothing so the paparazzi won’t catch you in last year’s outfits. (Rhea Butcher spoke about this problem on Gaby Dunn’s Bad With Money podcast as well, as you might remember.) There’s also more than one conversation about paying a lot of taxes.
It could be that Bloomberg Businessweek profiled a bunch of financially-savvy celebrities. It could also be that being a celebrity doesn’t pay what it used to, and living the Whole Foods meat counter life might be as good as it gets.
Or it could be that working in the entertainment industry is work, and just because someone is recognized for that work doesn’t mean that they get to stop worrying about money. (That’s the myth of celebrity, after all—that once you hit a certain level of fame, everything you need is taken care of and you don’t have to worry about anything.)
Either way, it’s good to know that becoming famous might not solve all of our financial problems. That makes the rest of us feel better about ourselves, which was probably the point.
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