Nicolas Cage on finance: trouble meeting 20 multimillion $ mortages is your business manager's fault

Cafe Society
1

A very tame recreational outrage but I’ll put it here since it’s about Cage, and I’ll be the first to admit his financial woes don’t affect me personally in the least. Still, this takes some gaul:

This is Nicolas Cage’s mansion in Belair (value: $35 million)

This is Nicolas Cage’s mansion inVegas (est. value: $9 million)

This is Nicolas Cage’s mansion in Newport Beach (est. value $25 million)

This is Nicolas Cage’s mansion inNew Orleans (formerlyMme Lalaurie’s- the woman who tortured her slaves while her physician husband used them as skin-grafting/gender reassignment guinea pigs) (est. value $4.5 million)

This is Nicolas Cage’s castle in Bavaria (est. value $5 million)

This is Nicolas Cage’scastle in England

This is Nicolas Cage’s mansion in Rhode Island (est. value $19 million)

These are two of Nicholas Cages castles in England

This is Nicolas Cage’s mansion in the Bahamas

This is artist Manuel Palosstanding next to a sculpture he made for Nicolas Cage’s mansion in San Francisco

This is Nicolas Cage’s private islandin the Bahamas

Not available for pics: his homes in NYC, Connecticut, and London. Or his Gulfstream jet. Or his multimillion dollar comic book collection. Or his 132 foot yacht.

Now he doesn’t own all of these now but he has bought them all in the past 10 years. Some he’s sold, some are in foreclosure.

Okey-dokey- Nicolas likes to buy houses. They’re for investments. He buys them and he “flips” them for an exclusive clientele. Being a financial genius he bought several of these when the market was at its height which is only logical, because after all the house will never be worth more than it is then, right?

Here’s the amazing thing: Nicolas Cage is broke. Not just broke, but he owes many millions of dollars more than his assets are worth. He’s facing foreclosure on several of his properties and he owes $6.2 million in taxes to the IRS.

Unfortunately somehow it hasn’t quite worked out. It’s almost as if there’s a very limited market for $5 million to $40 million houses, and it’s almost as if when the housing market collapses and numerous companies collapse homes in that price range stop selling altogether or else sell for a fraction of their former value.

So whose fault is this?

His business manager’s of course.

His business manager should have told him that "spending $80 million on houses that only 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% the world’s population could conceivably afford IF they were interested in buying them so that he could make a fast turnover that made money was not a sound idea.

Again, it doesn’t affect me one way or the other but things like this just make my eyes want to bleed.

OPRAH is many many times richer than Cage is or ever will be and with her nine figure per year income (which I doubt Cage has ever had a nine figure per year income) I seriously doubt she could afford to buy and maintain and repair and flip that many luxury homes all over the world. I’m pretty certain that she would. Multiple luxury homes (we’re not talking a mansion and a couple of vacation properties) are total money pits, and HE BOUGHT THEM AT TOP DOLLAR! YOU BUY INVESTMENT REAL ESTATE IN A DEPRESSED MARKET!!!

Anyway, totally MPIMS or PIT, but I’ll put it here. Feel free to move it, mock it, or send PayPal payments for imagined expenses.

2

I wish I could buy a castle- that looks so freakin’ cool.

But yeah, he’s an idiot. A crazy ass idiot.

3

Apparently it’s genetic. His older son. With a name like Khalel I’m guessing the younger isn’t going to turn out to be a star quarterback either.

4

Oh. So this is the reason he has to make National Treasure III (I admit, I enjoyed the first one, if only because it showed my Mecca, the Library of Congress, but the second one was meh.)

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And IV, V, VI, VII, VIII and IX probably.

From what I’ve read you do not ever want it known in Hollywood that you have serious money problems. Producers will not pay you your usual salary and points (because they know you need the money) nor will they put up with a lot of crap from you. I don’t know if Cage is said to be difficult to work with, but if he is that might be about to end.

6

I may be mistaken, but I think that I read (probably here on SDMB) that Nicolas Cage is known as a huge prima donna, and has a reputation as generally one of the most unpleasant stars in Hollywood…

7

Cage actually has a perfectly valid point, as far as I can tell.

If you hire someone to give you advice or to invest your money for you, they are obligated to perform their duties with competence. If a “reasonable manager” would have realised that buying so many multmillion dollar properties on credit at that time was a bad idea and this manager didn’t, Cage can sue him for negligence.

Cage was actually doing the smart thing here: he recognised that he lacked the skills to invest effectively, so he hired an expert to act as his agent.

8

A reasonable adult would know that you can’t spend money on every toy you want forever. If this was a lower middle class blue colar guy you’d say he should have lived within his means. Works for Nick too.

He wants to have his cake and eat it too and blame someone else when it doesn’t work out. Sounds like a Hollywood prima donna to me.

9

I’m not worried. He seems to have no problem getting work in H’Wood, and those National Treasure movies are money machines for all concerned. We’ll be seeing his “bloodhound eyeballing a ham sandwich” face up on a screen for a good long time to come…

10

No, I wouldn’t, so quit trying to put words in my mouth.

The point of hiring a manager is that they have expertise that you lack. This means that they have to act with the expertise possessed by a “reasonable man” in that line of work. Blaming Cage for any incompetence shown by his financial manager is like blaming you because the electrician you hired to rewire your house didn’t do his job.

11

Is getting your boxers in a bunch over a nick cage thread worth it? I’ll worry about something more important like the rising cost of drink umbrellas.

The guy spent $2,000 for snack during a movie. I think he’s a douche, but maybe you’re the guy who liked The Wicker Man.

12

I’ll take his Newport Beach property off his hands. I’ll give him…let’s see…where did I put my wallet?..ah, there it is…$37 for it. Cash.

13

Who gives a damn if he’s a douche? There’s no sub-clause saying that an agent is obligated to use due diligence, unless the principal is a douche.

14

Oh? What was his name?

:stuck_out_tongue:

15

Vercingetorix. That’s why you don’t hire a Gallic business manager- they’re still pissed off at the Italians.

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That and the Italians were better business managers. In fact that was central to the downfall of the Gaels. They allowed themselves to become dependent upon Roman trade, and the Romans protected their merchants.

Remember, first hit’s free.

17

I like The Wicker Man too. But the one with Christopher Lee in it.

I just don’t want people to associate the name of a great movie with Nicolas Cage’s ridiculous remake of it.

18

Cage is apparently the exception (though actually he’s Sicilian isn’t he?).

19

“How’d he get burnt?! How’d he get burnt?!!”

20

My understanding has always been- may be wrong- that while a house is often-to-usually a good investment a mansion is a poor investment due to the high upkeep, taxes, and difficulty in selling them. (Ed McMahon for example couldn’t move his mansion even though he was asking $2 million under appraisal price.) Leonard Nimoy and DeForrest Kelley both attributed their solvency through the lean post-STAR TREK series/pre-STAR TREK movies years to the fact they kept the comfortable-but-far-from-lavish homes they lived in when the series premiered and never upgraded to mansions, while Shatner did and this along with a divorce left him penniless.

OTOH Liberace owned about as many mansions as Cage, though for him they were all rental properties and an important part of his income rather than his outgo. He leased them to megamillionaires who were playing Vegas or needed a place to stay while filming a movie in LA and often the homes were rented by the casino or movie studio; when he got a good offer he’d sell one. While he technically owned about a dozen palatial homes all but 2 or 3 (Palm Springs was his ‘main house’ with a work place in Vegas and sometimes one of his L.A. homes) were strictly income property.

I remember a few years ago Anne Rice went on about how she felt the need to “simplify my life and return from the materialist side of life to the more spiritual concentration in the wake of my husband’s death and as I endeavor to write about the Christ”. I remember thinking at the time “You own THE WITCHING HOUR mansion in The Garden District, a sprawling former convent and at least two houses in the Quarter, a mansion in San Francisco, a place in NYC, a place in South Beach, a house on Ponchartrain, and other homes- I’m guessing the decision to divest coincides- coincidentally- with the fact your books aren’t selling like they used to and you’re spending millions to maintain all these places plus your chefs and maids and chauffeurs [she had a domestic staff of 24 at her First Street mansion alone]”. Rice earned many millions from her writings but it doesn’t take a whole lot of mansions and hangers on to suck that up. (Today she lives in La Jolla, CA in an adobe and glass rambling mansion similar to the one Jesus and the Apostles shared and has mostly gotten rid of her New Orleans properties.)