Bella Thorne Lost Most Of Her Money After Starring On Disney Channel

Bella Thorne is one of the most successful stars to ever graduate from the Disney Channel — but she lost most of her money. Thorne shot to fame starring as CeCe Jones on the hit Disney Channel show "Shake It Up" alongside Zendaya, with her performance garnering the actor a trophy for best young actress in the television category at the 27th Annual Imagen Awards.

But according to Thorne herself, she never even wanted the role. However, at the time, she felt like she didn't have a choice. Her family needed to survive. "I never wanted to be a Disney star in the first place," she admitted during an interview with Fox News. "I did it for my family because we were on the brink of poverty and I was told this is what I had to do." The "Famous in Love" actor detailed her initial career struggles on the "Happy Sad Confused" podcast, telling host Josh Howowitz that if she didn't nab the role — her family might have become homeless. "We were about to live physically on the street," she shared. "We were living off Stouffer's coupons, and that's all we had to eat every day. That may not sound like a big deal to everybody, but when you're a single mom raising four kids with debt, and you have nothing to your name, it's f***ing s***ty."

Thorne ended up co-starring in "Shake It Up" from 2010 to 2013 until Disney pulled the plug on the show despite its high ratings. And even then, she didn't even enjoy the supposed fruits of her labor, as she ended up with only $200 in the bank.

You would have thought that Bella Thorne had pulled herself out of poverty after becoming a big Disney star, but what happened was the exact opposite. She was practically homeless and had to rely on someone else to eat.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2018, Thorne confessed that after "Shake It Up's" three-year run and the show's mainstream success, she had nothing to show for it. She was left with $200 but refused to divulge the reason why. "You know where it went," she noted, with the outlet asserting that her money must have been put into a trust due to the Coogan Law, which mandates parents of underage stars to stash away a considerable chunk of their child's earnings for later access. At the time, she had no choice but to live with her then-boyfriend Gregg Sulkin, who also helped pay for her meals. "I didn't think things were going to go down like that," she added.

Things would have been easier for Thorne if only she had managed to score other projects, but directors wouldn't even hire her just because she was a Disney star. "Coming off the Disney channel, there were a lot of casting directors who said, 'I'm not going to read her,'" she told Forbes. "So I was like, 'What? Just because I was on the Disney Channel?' So there were quite a few auditions where I showed up, at 15 1/2, and was like, 'You have to read me. I'm here. Please let me do the first scene and I'll show you that it's worth seeing the second scene.'"

While Bella Thorne eventually landed movies and shows, they were not enough to make it big. She then used her social media savviness to try her hand at becoming an influencer. And it worked. In her mini-documentary with Vogue, she revealed that her social media career allowed her to buy a home.

"For grid posting, it's $65,000 a post. For Story posting, it's anywhere from $10K to $20K," she shared, detailing her earnings from sponsored posts. "Instagram is 100 percent a job to me. I started out 18 with literally $200 in my bank account, and I bought this house a year later, a year and a half, and that's all from social media." Her online success didn't happen overnight, of course. She shared that she had to study and try multiple tactics to figure out what resonated with her audience. "[I became that successful] from studying that sh*t: Demographics and ratios and engagement and definitely the more technical side of it," she explained.

In 2020, Thorne reached new heights by becoming the first content creator to earn $1 million on OnlyFans within 24 hours. And while people berated her for it, she tweeted that she only joined the platform to help "remove the stigma behind sex, sex work, and the negativity that surrounds the word SEX itself by bringing a mainstream face to it."