5 Famous People Who Lost Everything (For Stupid Reasons)

Cage declared bankruptcy in 2009, and to this day is desperately appearing in any movie script Hollywood craps out in an attempt to stay ahead of his debts.

Cage appears to make financial decisions by holding up a small handheld mirror and asking himself: "What would Nicolas Cage do?" Over the years, he has purchased a haunted murder mansion, a private island, and a collection of shrunken heads. But his crowning achievement was spending $276,000 on a 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex skull which turned out to be stolen.

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Get it? "Crowning"? Because it's a skull? Okay, I'll move on.

Authorities discovered that the gallery where Mr. Cage bought the skull had been scammed by criminal paleontologist Eric Prokopi, whom authorities describe as a "one-man black market in prehistoric fossils." Holy shit, Hollywood, you're still making terrible remakes of even more terrible 1990s book series when this guy is walking around with his story untold?

Cage returned the skull to its home country of Mongolia, but never revealed exactly what he wanted it for in the first place. The only reason I can think of is that he wanted to grind up the bones and ingest the powder in some sort of voodoo ritual to give himself mystical dinosaur powers and wisdom, but that's completely crazy shit that even Nicolas Cage wouldn't be into -- wait, Nicolas Cage is into that, too? Okay.

By 2010, Pratt and Montag were spending money like the world was ending, because they thought the world was ending. In 2013, Pratt admitted that he and his wife believed that an asteroid was going to hit the earth on December 21, 2012, and that the best thing to do was get rid of all that pesky money before that happened, presumably because cash and valuables would only weigh a person down in the underground garbage mines once cockroaches had taken over the earth.

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"If only we'd allowed Nicolas Cage to gain tyrannosaurus wisdom so he could guide us through this" -- Humanity

So the couple went on a wild pre-apocalyptic spending spree, handing out thousands of dollars to friends and tipping people $200 to open doors. Eventually, they were forced to move back in with Pratt's parents after their money ran out and they could no longer afford a house. And after all that, the prophecy turned out to be bullshit. Or maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was all set to happen, but then God changed his mind because he couldn't stand the idea of Spencer Pratt being right about something.

Some of Walker's money went the way one can expect money to go when you hand millions of dollars to a guy who's barely old enough to drink. He built his family members giant houses, was particularly fond of expensive cars, and hired his own personal wizard (I assume). But the main problem was that Walker, realizing that his basketball career wasn't going to last forever, decided to found a real-estate firm and buy 140 properties in the Chicago area. Which might usually be a good example of smart long-term financial planning, except that he did this in the mid-2000s.

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"Just let me go into the house and poop for a while. I'll have the mortgage payment ready in no time."

The housing market imploded, and Walker, still busy with the tail end of his NBA career, was unable to pay attention to which of his properties were actually worth something. By 2010, he was bankrupt. Today, Walker has a somewhat stable career as a basketball analyst, but admits that he doesn't even own a car anymore, and is currently reduced to using Uber to get around. Which is probably the most tragic part of this whole story, given that conversations with your Uber driver are awkward enough without the guy recognizing you and asking what happened to your Bentley.

But then disaster struck. NewsRadio was cancelled, and Foley's income dropped quicker than mine almost did when I submitted an article titled "5 Reasons Cracked.com Is For Stupid Jerks." Despite his massively reduced income (according to that link in the first paragraph, he now makes around $4,000 a month), a Canadian judge then ruled that Foley was obliged to keep up the child support payments because his children deserved to live at the comfort level they were accustomed to.

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"Divorce is hard enough on a child without depriving him of the gold-plated prostibot he expects for his 15th birthday."

If you've ever tried to scrounge together 17,000 dollars in a month, you'll know it's quite an effort (unless you're a spam bot talking about earning money online, in which case, tell us how in the comments). By 2011, Foley was complaining that he couldn't step foot in Canada without being very politely arrested for owing half a million dollars in back payments. We can all learn a valuable lesson from this: Never, ever fall in love and get married. Stay at home at night and read Cracked instead; we'll never leave you.

Although Jefferson repeatedly disparaged public debt during his lifetime, he wasn't so principled about his own money. He ended up dying broke, with debts of over $100,000. And if you're guessing he spent all his funds on a vast bald eagle breeding program, you're going to be disappointed.

Basically, the guy had a taste for really expensive wine. Jefferson became a superfan of the drink while living in France in the 1780s, and after his return to America, the inferior colonial wines no longer cut it. So he did the logical thing and started importing the stuff from Europe. Jefferson was so knee-deep in wine hipsterism that he even imported it in glass bottles rather than in the standard barrels, because he was paranoid that crooked merchants might water it down en route. All this added up to a habit that, in current dollars, cost over a million dollars a year. And here you were feeling guilty for buying the fancy scented hand sanitizer to get drunk on.

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"Finally, payday! Hello Purell, goodbye Dollar General Imitation Germ Weakener!"

Jefferson's debts were also affected by the fucked-up financial situation in America during much of his lifetime, but he really didn't help things by building a giant-ass house and then constantly renovating it. If a current president spent his money the way Jefferson did, a three-book deal would spontaneously materialize on Bill O'Reilly's nightstand.

C. Coville tweets here and has a book on sale here.

For more proof that celebrities are nuts, check out 5 Insane Things Otherwise Respected Celebrities Believe. And see why Courtney Love is sure to be arrested soon in The 5 Celebrity Arrests We'll Probably See Next.

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