Josh Peck Reveals He Made About $900,000 After Working on “Drake & Josh” For Four Years
Posted by enews
Josh Peck Reveals He Made About $900,000 After Working on “Drake & Josh” For Four Years
Posted by enews
8 Comments
TL;DR
* Josh Peck is getting candid with how much he made as a child star on shows like *The Amanda Show* and *Drake & Josh*. And he knows it may be surprising to some people.
* “We started out making $3,000 an episode on *The Amanda Show*,” Peck—who appeared on the Nickelodeon series from 2000 to 2002—shared on the June 25 episode of the *Financial Tea with Mrs. Dow Jones* podcast. “And then by the time we finished *Drake & Josh*—so that was 60 episodes total for the whole show—the median rate, the average rate per episode was about $15,000. So over four years, we wound up making about 900 grand.”
* But while he and his fellow castmates, which included star Amanda Bynes and Drake Bell, were “working so much,” Peck emphasized that they didn’t actually take home all of that money.
* “We probably, between agent, manager and taxes,” he said, “we cleared half of that.”
* When Peck broke down his take-home pay over the nearly four years he worked on *Drake & Josh*, which aired from January 2004 to September 2007, he found that he still made good money, although it wasn’t life-changing.
* “We were making about $125,000 a year. And people always will say, ‘Well, compared to so many other tougher jobs, like who are you to say anything?’ And I go, ‘I’m not,’” Peck continued. “The only reason I say it is because people always assume that it’s so much more and why would you ever have to work again? But of course, if you made the salary of a dentist or something like that, you couldn’t just stop working after four years.”
Didn’t he also not make any royalties?
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It’s not right to say after taxes he made $125K and then compare it to people who make that much before taxes.
$225k/year…not too bad.
Nice work if you can get it.
Way better than I get in four years of busting my hump daily in a warehouse.
…Let’s put this in perspective of [r/Professorfinance](r/Professorfinance)
He said he took home around $500,000 over four years, while he was roughly 16 to 20 years old. Objectively speaking that’s an extraordinary income for someone that age with limited education and no hard skills. Period.
If he’d simply invested that money in a broad stock market index and left it alone, it would likely be worth somewhere around **$2–3.5 million today**, depending on the return and tax advantaged accounts.
If that money disappeared because of overspending, bad investments, or poor financial management, that’s unfortunate. But that’s a different argument than saying the money itself wasn’t life changing.
500k can absolutely change someone’s life over 4 years at 16 to 20. That is a chance at extremely low debt home ownership very early, or a fully paid for higher education, or a fat investment account as previously mentioned…or a smaller piece of all 3 of those.
Now I get that Josh himself wasn’t claiming he had it bad or was labouring away in a coal mine; he was correcting the misconception that every child star automatically becomes set for life.
But $125,000 a year in your final teenager years, is by every measurable standard “life changing” money if it’s managed well. Which it seems Josh/his family/his business manager did not do.
It isn’t “never work again” money, but it’s an incredible financial head start that very few people ever get.
Edit:typos…