Budgeting and money management are important skills to learn, and many people who learn them early in life follow the same financial habits as they grow up, even if they become fairly wealthy.
Here are 16 celebs who grew up with little and remain careful with their money now:
1. THEN: Shania Twain grew up as one of five kids, and she sometimes went to school hungry. She told “Nightline,” “It’s very hard to concentrate when your stomach’s rumbling.”
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She was envious of her classmates’ lunches but too embarrassed to ask for help. She said, “I would certainly never have humiliated myself enough to reach out and ask for help and say, ‘You know, I’m hungry. Can I have that apple that you’re not going to eat?’ I didn’t have the courage to do that.”
NOW: Penning an advice letter to her 26-year-old self for Refinery29, she wrote, “Be frugal. Save for a rainy day.”
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She continued, “At 26, I never knew where or when my next job was going to be. I made my clothes last as long as they could, just stretching everything out as much as possible. I would get creative with mending and buy different dress sizes and men’s items with designs. I was always reinventing my clothes, cutting jeans, sewing buttons, painting something different on my shirt or something like that. It’s a good way to have an individual style.”
2. THEN: Cardi B told Global Grind, “I have real good parents; they [are] poor. They have regular, poor jobs and whatnot.”
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She continued, “They [are] real good people and whatnot; I was just raised in a bad society.”
NOW: She told Sway’s Universe, “I’m very cheap, I don’t care. Sometimes ya might see me with the jewelry, but I’m always looking at my account.”
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Cardi added, “I’m not the one that wanna take jets everywhere. I don’t care. I’m really cool in Delta first class. That’s $30,000, $20,000, on what? My ears still pop,” she said.
3. THEN: Eva Longoria told BuzzFeed News, “We didn’t have any money growing up. I grew up at the Boys & Girls Club, I grew up at the Salvation Army folding coats for their winter, I grew up at soup kitchens every Thanksgiving. That was just the way it was.”
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She continued, “My family is a very selfless family because we benefited so much from all these community programs that my mom was like, ‘We have to give back.’ And the only way we could do that was by volunteering. We pay it forward.”
NOW: Even as her star rose, she prioritized her financial well-being over a flashy lifestyle. She told BuzzFeed News, “I was saving my money from the [‘Desperate Housewives’] pilot because I didn’t think it would get picked up. … It was a great pilot, but I started to look for my next gig.”
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Additionally, when she attended her first Cannes Film Festival in 2005, she wore an affordable dress that she purchased herself. She told People magazine, “I was like, I’ll just wear this one, this knit gold, that feels right. Nobody would’ve known it was a $40 dress.”
4. THEN: Born to parents who were only 18 and 20, Tobey Maguire bounced around different relatives’ homes as a kid. He told Parade magazine, “The truth of the matter is, I realized at a young age that I was responsible for myself. … Growing up the way I did, I had a very serious ambition to make some money, to have some security and comfort in my life.”
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He also said, “I feel like you could drop me anywhere in the world, anonymously, and I’d figure out how to survive. If you stripped away everything I’ve got — the money, the fame, the possessions, everything — I know that I’d find a way to get along because basically, that’s what I’ve had to do all my life.”
NOW: He told Parade, “When I first started being successful at this, financially speaking, I was very conservative with my money. That was definitely a product of where I came from. You know those Lotto winners who win big and then blow through all the money? That would never happen to me.”
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Maguire said, “I just never wanted to put myself in the position where my spending was so huge that I had to keep making movie after movie.”
5. THEN: Jessica Alba told Glamour UK, “I grew up in survival mode. It was almost sort of what I was born into. My parents didn’t have a safety net; they were living paycheck to paycheck. And so the mentality of ‘tomorrow’s not guaranteed’… For me, I was like, ‘I got to do everything I can to keep my head above water.'”
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She continued, “I think because no one had any expectations that I would be successful, how could you fail? I wasn’t set up — no one was like, ‘Oh my god, you’re going to be…’ They were just like, ‘Here’s your life.’ And I was like, ‘This is some bullshit. I want a better life than that. I don’t want to be in survival mode all the time.'”
NOW: As a parent herself, she teaches her three children about saving and sustainability. She told SheKnows, “Honor grows out of clothes, and then it gets passed down to Haven instead of Haven buying brand-new stuff every time. And Hayes even inherited some of Honor and Haven’s clothes.”
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She said, “I do a lot of, like, sharing and trading with those types of things, like clothes or other home items. We try not to make anything just go to waste.”
6. THEN: Cameron Diaz told Stella magazine, “I had amazing parents; they were awesome. We weren’t privileged — very much the opposite. My family would collect cans to turn in for extra money, because $20 meant something to us.”
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She added, “But we were very happy.”
Diaz also told Stella magazine, “I come from a frugal upbringing, so I’m not just going to throw my money away.”
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She continued, “I love to be close to my family and friends, so I spend money on plane tickets, having feasts, buying a ton of groceries and cooking, or going out for an amazing meal, knowing I don’t worry about how much the bill costs.”
7. THEN: Jessica Chastain told the Irish Times, “I did grow up with a single mother who worked very hard to put food on our table. We did not have money. There were many nights when we had to go to sleep without eating. It was a very difficult upbringing.”
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She added, “Things weren’t easy for me growing up … Because of my mother, I do always try to think about how something must be for someone else. I’m not so interested in myself. I’m interested in other people.”
NOW: She told Marie Claire, “I used to have a lot of anxiety about how I was going to stay afloat, because as soon as I graduated, I never asked my parents for money. I always supported myself through acting and would make money last a long time. I understand the value of money, and I’m not an impulsive buyer.”
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Chastain continued, “I bought a new laptop three years ago, and before I bought it, I spent a month thinking about buying it. So my lifestyle hasn’t changed, except my anxiety about paying the rent is gone.”
8. THEN: Mila Kunis was 7 when she and her parents moved from Ukraine to the US. She told Cover Mag, “We came to this country with literally nothing, and so any level of success is important to us. They never wanted me to become an actress because it’s such an unstable and unpredictable profession.”
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She said, “When you’re immigrants and you have to work hard for everything just to survive, it’s only natural that you worry about having a stable job and income.”
NOW: On the “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast, she said, “Because I am an immigrant, I think that creates a different perspective on what the value of a dollar is and what hard work is … I’m a big supporter of Groupon. I have walked into restaurants with a Groupon; I use it all the time.”
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Kunis also said that she had a lot of financial anxiety before marrying Ashton Kutcher, who helped her manage those feelings.
She told O’Brien, “I was such an extreme, ‘I’m gonna be broke tomorrow; I’m not gonna have a job’ — I was always living my life … so cautiously that it took me the longest time … I was like, ‘But we can’t buy this house.’ He was like, ‘What are you talking about? … I promise you, we can do this.'”
9. THEN: According to the Beatles’ biographer Bob Spitz, Paul McCartney grew up in poverty, as did his bandmates Ringo Starr and George Harrison.
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The only Beatle to come from a “solidly middle-class” family was John Lennon.
NOW: He taught his children to save money and value their possessions. His daughter Stella McCartney told Net-a-Porter, “I’ve grown up in a family that doesn’t chuck stuff away. And it sounds silly, but I didn’t have a huge amount of money as a kid. My mum and dad were really clever; I went to a comprehensive [school] and I wasn’t given a load of cash, so I would go to vintage and secondhand shops and markets to buy clothes.”
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She continued, “I think that’s kind of the future, and I would encourage kids to rent clothes and buy secondhand because you don’t have to always go for that quick fix. It’s way more exciting and cooler.”
10. THEN: Tiffany Haddish entered foster care at 13. Two years later, she and her siblings were put in their grandparents’ custody, but they stayed in the system because the subsidies helped the family’s financial situation. After striking out on her own, she experienced homelessness three times.
John Sciulli / Getty Images for the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA)
She told GQ, “I think that was God teaching me a lesson over and over. I wasn’t paying attention the first two times.”
NOW: Her priorities are taking care of her family and saving for retirement. She told Insider, “I’m trying to create something so when I turn 55 or 60, I don’t have to work no more. I’m not about to spend it all up right now.”
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She added, “I plan on living to at least 75. I need some money to play with.”
11. THEN: Dave Grohl grew up in an impoverished, single-parent family in Virginia. He told the Guardian, “I never needed much, and I never thought I’d get more than what I had.”
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He said, “A trip to Burger King was the biggest thing in the world to me. Heaven.”
NOW: He told the Red Bulletin, “[All my money] goes straight into my bank account, where it turns all moldy and smelly.”
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He added, “I drive a family car — not a monster SUV, but a family car that fits five people. I’ve got a house that is just big enough, too.”
12. THEN: While working as a child actor, Sarah Michelle Gellar attended a private school in Manhattan on a scholarship that covered half of her expenses. She told the Independent, “I can remember this kid having an engraved Tiffany money clip when I barely had enough money for my bus pass.”
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She added, “I was different, and that’s the one thing you can’t be at school, because you’re ostracized. I didn’t have the money these kids had.”
NOW: She told CNBC Make It, “I saved [my first ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ paycheck]. I think I was very well aware already … you heard all those stories about actors that make money and people run off with it. And I remember thinking, If I ever had money like that, I would know where it was at all times.”
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Gellar also told CNBC Make It, “I cut coupons to this day. I’ll never forget, one time I was at Bloomingdale’s, and they had these coupons — Bloomingdale’s has really good coupons — and I was taking them all out; I was doing holiday shopping. And someone behind me turned around and said, ‘I can’t believe how long you’re taking. Why are you using coupons?’ I remember looking at her like, Why should I pay more? Like, if there’s a coupon there, I’m going to use it. Just because you’re successful doesn’t mean that you should be errant in your spending. I’ve never believed that.”
13. THEN: Tyler Perry grew up in an impoverished family in New Orleans, and he was unhoused for a time.
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He told Forbes, “I love when people say you come from ‘humble beginnings.’ [It] means you were poor as hell.”
NOW: Michael Jai White, who starred in Perry’s show “For Better or Worse,” told Vlad TV, “I make movies on a shoestring budget. I look at it kinda like Tyler Perry does … Tyler is frugal … Tyler will not waste stuff.”
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He continued, speaking of Perry, “It’s like, ‘That craft service table? We can use that in this shot.'”
14. THEN: When Halle Berry first moved to New York City to pursue acting, she ran out of money within three months and temporarily lived in a homeless shelter. She told “The Jess Cagle Interview,” “I called my mother and asked her to send me some money, and she said no, and that subsequently led to a year of not speaking to her because I was so upset that she wouldn’t help me.”
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She continued, “That’s probably one of the best things she did for me … She said, ‘If you want to be there, then you work it out.’ And I had to work it out. … And shelter life was part of figuring it out for a minute until I could get a waitressing job. Then I got a bartending job, and until I could figure that out, that’s what I did.”
NOW: She told the Daily Record, “I am pretty frugal. I save a lot because I am always worried about when this trip is going to end.”
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Berry also said, “I am very thankful for my good fortune, but one of my biggest fears is that I could lose it all. I am not someone who has to have 10 cars and lots of diamonds.”
15. THEN: When Hilary Swank was 6, her family moved into a trailer park. Nine years later, her parents separated, and she and her mother relocated to LA, where they lived in their car until they could afford an apartment.
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She told Together magazine, “For me, when people say, ‘Wow, you grew up in a trailer.’ But it didn’t feel like that. I didn’t feel, ‘Oh, poor me, I’m in a trailer park.’ It wasn’t a bad experience. I had a roof over my head and I had food, and so it wasn’t that being poor and having those experiences was a negative. The negative part of it was learning about class at such a young age, not from my friends, but from my friends’ parents, who would say, ‘You aren’t to hang out with her.’ At 6 years old, to have a parent say, ‘You’re not welcome in our home, you need to go.’ Or, ‘You can’t play with my son or daughter.’ Now I see children, I just think, How could anyone do something like that?“
NOW: Appearing on “Live With Regis and Kelly” after her first Oscar win, she said, “I am [a coupon clipper]. You know, when you open up the paper and you see those coupons, it looks like dollar bills staring you in the face.”
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Swank added, “People [who see me shopping with coupons] just go, ‘Wow! You do it, too? Cool!'”
16. And finally, THEN: Sarah Jessica Parker, who grew up as one of eight siblings, told the New York Times, “We were on welfare. I knew I was different from the kids who pay for lunch or bring their lunch from home. It was a stigma thing. I was not the only person receiving a free lunch, but you are aware.”
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She continued, “I remember my childhood as Dickensian. I remember being poor. There was no great way to hide it. We didn’t have electricity sometimes. We didn’t have Christmases sometimes, or we didn’t have birthdays sometimes, or the bill collectors came, or the phone company would call and say, ‘We’re shutting your phones off.’ And we were all old enough to either get the calls or watch my mother’s reactions or watch my parents shuffling the money around.”
NOW: She told the Times, “That is why I have such a weird relationship with money. And it is why I can be profligate and super frugal. And I think it is rather warped, since it comes from this desire to save, save, save.”
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Parker continued, “My friends know me so well, and they know how terrified I am of being broke, and they think it is hilarious and humorous. In the case of the entertainment industry, actresses have this window, and the window closes every day a little bit more. The earnings potential falls and the window is closed, and I am really cognizant of that. I have no illusions of who I am or what I look like or what I have to offer.”
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