Yes, Stars Save!

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

For the past few blog posts, I’ve researched a lot about celebrities that go bankrupt and why exactly they have to file for bankruptcy. In this blog post, I’m going to turn my attention to the celebrities that do actually save their money and what they actually do to have savings and not go bankrupt, like so many others. In the article “Stars Who Save: What We Can Learn From These Modest Celebrities” that was published online at the Huffington Post Living Canada, there are in fact numerous celebrities that save money. The key to their success is simply the way that every other American saves money: they try to cut costs in their everyday lives and also put away money that can be used for their future use.

Let’s take a look at some specific celebrities. Many of them take the majority of the money they make and save it. For example, Zooey Deschanel, according to her divorce documents, saves about 76% of income a year. Jay Leno is also a very good example of this; he makes about 15 million a year and puts most of it in his savings. Warren Buffett, one of the richest people in the world, lives in a 4-bedroom house that he bought for $30,000. This ensures that when they retire from acting or hosting tv shows, they have enough money to be able to provide for themselves. Many other celebrities live this kind of modest life style.

Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, is known for re-wearing dresses (for a princess, this is quite the shock), which saves thousands of dollars. Numerous other stars such as Carrie Underwood and Sarah Jessica Parker save money by cutting coupons and making their children wear "hand me downs". These are just some examples of how they cut costs to ensure that they are not only spending less money, but also saving it.

When I read this article, I was shocked to read that these everyday things that all Americans do to try to save money is also done by celebrities. It never really occurred to me that celebrities take such measures and really try to make sure that they don’t blow all of their money. Because they are celebs, we assume that they becasuse they have so much money they just spend it on whatever they want and whenever they want to. In reality, most of them are just normal people like us; the only difference is the amount of income they make. I now see that a majority of celebs do in fact save their money. There are just a few that are so careless with their money that they go bankrupt, which gives a bad rap to all of the other celebrities.

This article has really made me open my eyes and made me realize that I shouldn’t judge all celebs based on the bankruptcies claims I see in the news. They make more money, but so what? They really aren’t different from the rest of us because they do try to save as much money as possible where they can.

Now that I have researched both celebrities that have gone bankrupt and ones that put a huge effort into saving money, I want to focus more on what taxes do to their income. How much does taxes affect their income and effort to save money? What is this like compared to the average American who is considered be in the middle/upper class today? Hopefully I will learn more about this in my next blog post.