Nicki Minaj and Jada Pinkett Smith recently had a sit-down conversation on “Red Table Talk” about motherhood, being financially confident and leaving a financial legacy for their children.
When asked about her financial skills, Minaj, whose net worth is $100 million, said she is not one of those celebrity mothers who does not plan for her children’s future.
Passing it On
“I vowed I would never be one of these Black women, these men, these Black rappers that make all this money and then have nothing to leave for their kids. I would promise my family since I was a kid, ‘I’m going to get rich and buy you a house.’ I had all these big dreams, but it was always important to me what I was going to leave behind,” Minaj said.
In September 2020, she and her husband, Kenneth “Zoo” Petty, became first-time parents to a boy.
On Financial Literacy
She also talked about how the entertainment industry tries to take advantage of her financial literacy, or lack thereof, because she is a woman.
“So even though I’m not even halfway where I’m trying to go financially, I know that no one is going to be on top of my stuff more than me. And I feel like as women, people always assume that they can play with you, for lack of a better term, and I just can’t have that. I have to leave something behind because we work hard. Yo, this industry, it takes so much out of you mentally, man. And to do all of this and then not have anything to show for it? I refuse,” she continued.
The rapper also told Pinkett Smith that her spending habits have significantly improved over the years, encouraging others to save their earnings from endorsements.
“If Mike Tyson could go broke, anybody can. I want people to understand the money that these labels and these endorsement deals throw at you at the beginning of your career, and all these advances that you get, baby, those ain’t going to come every year,” she said.
When she first started out she found herself spending beyond control.
“My first year, before I even put out my first album, I bought my girlfriends a Benz, a BMW and two Range Rovers. I shouldn’t have been buying those kinds of vehicles. They should have been getting a decent vehicle until maybe later on when I was really stacking bread,” the artist recalled. “Thank God, I did keep getting money because I was spending kinda crazy at that time. But I wish people understood, save your money. Every time people come to my house, they think they’re going to see 20 cars in the driveway, living in La Vida Loca. No, no, no. I don’t have nobody to prove anything to. I’m quite happy. Thank God, I could not work for the last couple of years and still be good.”
