After Surviving On “Very Little Money,” Chris Pratt Recalled The Major Mistakes He Made With His First Acting Paycheck Of $75,000

“My perspective has shifted over time,” he began. “The first time I made it, I was in a commercial, and my friends from my hometown were gathering around the TV like, ‘Dude, we saw you in that Carl's Jr. commercial. You made it.’ … And then it was, the biggest one was, you know, there’s getting your SAG card.”

“That's when I felt like I made it,” he said.

“I traveled the world. I was like, ‘Well, I'm gonna probably invest, I'm probably gonna get a yacht.’ I didn't know how, that was just a crazy amount of money to me,” he said. “I never could have possibly imagined making that amount of money, and it went very quickly.”

After their chance meeting, Rae Dawn cast Chris in her directorial debut, Cursed Part 3, which launched his acting career in 2000.

“The moment she told me she was bringing me to LA, I knew,” Chris recalled of the life-changing moment during an interview in 2014. “I was like, ‘This is what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.’”

“Slowly your life gets a little bigger, and it costs a little bit more money, and then you know, because also we never had any money growing up. No one ever taught me financial literacy. I didn’t know what to do with money,” he said. “It was like, it would come in, I would spend it, you know what I mean?”

“It took a good amount of time for me to kind of stop and say, ‘Alright, I gotta get wise about this.’” he said. “I have to think about what am I gonna do. How am I gonna get to the point to where if I stop working one day, I’ll still be okay? My family will be okay, so kind of coming up with a financial literacy plan, you know, later in my life was sort of one of the steps of me growing up.”