20 Celebrities Who Went Completely Broke

Given the choice, many of us would happily swap our regular, mundane lives for that of a rich and famous celebrity. The radical increase in available finances alone would be enough to entice us, that is until we remember that even the richest of the rich sometimes manage to lose it all.

We’re sure that the more money you have the easier it is to blow it all, but we still can’t understand how multi-millionaires could even come close to emptying their once healthy bank accounts.

But there are many examples of extremely rich celebrities blowing everything and going broke, and below are eight of the more extreme examples. So the next time you feel like you don’t have enough money, spare a thought for these poor little famous people who ended up with absolutely nothing.

In his 90s heyday, in which he won an Oscar and starred in such major box office attractions as The Rock and Con Air, Nicolas Cage was commanding $20 million per movie.

Such was his regular fee, Cage at his peak was worth an estimated $150 million, but by 2009 he had blown it all.

How did Cage manage to lose $150 million? He spent it in a lavish spending spree involving real estate and obscure historical treasures, of course.

As well the expected items such as supercars, jewelry and a private jet, Cage is known to have spent big on such oddities as a dinosaur skull, a collection of shrunken pygmy heads and a couple of castle (one in Germany, one in the UK).

Cage’s collection once also included a pyramid tombstone in a New Orleans cemetery, as well as a number of ‘pets’ that included a shark, a crocodile and a cobra.