The Godfather star Al Pacino once blew $50M via lifestyle creep. How to build (and keep) your wealth.
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One Academy Award, two Tony Awards and two Primetime Emmy Awards still can’t save you from going broke.
Al Pacino, the actor who won all these accolades and more, recounts his struggles with money in his memoir, Sonny Boy.
“I had $50 million and then I had nothing,” wrote Pacino, according to a Variety profile of the book (1).
After spending millions on everything from lavish rental homes to expensive landscaping, he ultimately ended up in financial turmoil. Reportedly, this also included 16 cars and 23 cellphones.
The core cause? A crooked accountant and Pacino’s own fundamental misunderstandings about how money works.
But when it comes to the world of entertainment, the star is far from alone in his financial struggles. Francis Ford Coppola, director of The Godfather — the same movie where Pacino got his breakout — is selling off his assets.
According to a New York Times report, Coppola was selling several luxury watches in 2025, when he was quoted as saying, “I need to get some money to keep the ship afloat (2).” This was at least in part due to borrowing over $100M to fund his mega-flop, Megalopolis, according to Business Insider (3).
Their stories are powerful reminders that choosing the right investments, diversification and maintaining financial discipline are crucial to sustaining wealth and securing a stable future — no matter your industry.
Even if you aren’t bringing your talents to the silver screen, here are a few tips to help you manage your finances and set you on the path to not only building wealth, but keeping it too.
The first step in avoiding financial mismanagement is setting clear financial goals. Without a well-defined plan, you may be endlessly chasing “more,” constantly moving the goalpost and never reaching satisfaction or contentment.
If you’re trying to build that plan yourself, it can be hard to know where to start. And if you’re looking for expert help — be sure to find someone you can trust, emphasis trust.
Pacino has another lesson here. He worked with an accountant who later served seven and a half years in prison for running a Ponzi scheme, according to Variety. In his memoir, Pacino wrote he had received “warnings that my accountant at the time, a guy who had lots of celebrity clients, was not to be trusted.”
Maybe he should’ve listened to their warnings.
To be clear, having a plan doesn’t mean simply earning as much as possible and finding the right accountant — a trustworthy one — to decide your best path forward.
It means determining what you want to achieve and what resources you genuinely need. By clarifying these objectives, you can work toward clear and tangible goals, so you’ll feel secure once you meet them.
How it works is simple: Just put in some basic information, like your ZIP code, and a little bit about your financial goals. From here, Advisor.com will comb through their database to connect you with someone who specializes in your needs — whether retirement planning, goal-setting or building a tailor-made investment strategy.
With Advisor.com, you gain access to expert guidance that helps keep your financial plan on track and aligned with your long-term vision. And the best part? You can set up an initial meeting free of charge with no obligation to hire your match. That was you can make sure they’re a good fit before making a decision.
Once you’ve set a plan and you’re investing in alignment with it, commitment is essential.
“Lifestyle creep” is one of the biggest threats to your financial security as your wealth accumulates. This is the tendency to gradually spend more money as your income increases, often without realizing it.
It’s a concept that is very familiar to Pacino, who described it to Variety as, “very strange, the way it happens. The more money you make, the less you have.”
This very notion is the likely culprit behind Pacino ultimately going broke and losing “all his money,” in his own words. But it’s an incredibly common phenomenon that can easily hit any American.
Being aware of lifestyle creep is one thing, and keeping it in check is another. Often, the pressure to spend more comes from friends, family or is itself a celebration of success — now that you’ve got a raise, why wouldn’t you spend a little bit more?
Perhaps finance expert Suze Orman framed it best in a 2024 LinkedIn post: “Live below your means but within your needs,” adding that this “is how you bodycheck yourself out of lifestyle creep (3).”
Protecting the wealth you accumulate requires discipline and mindfulness. But it can be hard to know if you’re spending beyond your means if you aren’t tracking your spending at all.
A quick daily check-in of your accounts can show you exactly where your money is going.
An app like Rocket Money can easily flag recurring subscriptions, upcoming bills and unusual charges by pulling in transactions from all your linked accounts.
This can help you cut unnecessary costs, and then you can manually redirect savings straight into your retirement fund. No spreadsheets, no guesswork, no stress. Small habits like this can make a big difference over time.
Rocket Money’s intuitive app offers a variety of free and premium tools. Free features include subscription tracking, bill reminders and budgeting basics, while premium features — like automated savings, net worth tracking, customizable dashboards and more — make it easier to stay on top of your retirement contributions and overall financial goals.
In another passage from his memoir, Pacino expressed that from early on in his career, he simply didn’t understand how money worked.
“It was a language I just didn’t speak,” he admitted.
And he’s certainly not alone in that sentiment. If your finances are scattered across multiple accounts for saving, investing, lending and spending, it’s easy to get confused by it all.
With a myriad of tools and technologies now on the market, your assets and liabilities can quickly feel like a foreign language beyond comprehension. And Americans are feeling increasingly anxious about their money, too. According to an Allianz survey, 48% of Americans were more stressed about their finances heading into 2026 than at the start of 2025 (4).
Simplifying your finances not only has a financial benefit, but it also might reduce some of the stress of managing your finances and help you get on top of them.
One way to get a hold of your finances is by automating what you can. The more automatic and effortless you can make saving and investing, the more likely you are to stick with it.
One way to make investing a habit is by attaching it to your daily activities — like spending. It might seem counterintuitive, but whenever you attach a new behaviour to a habit you already have — like swiping your credit or debit card — you’re more likely to make it fit.
A great place to start is with a micro-investing app like Acorns.
With Acorns, you can link your bank account or credit card to round everyday purchases up to the nearest dollar — investing the excess into a smart investment portfolio. With automated deposits and auto-reinvesting dividends, you can truly set it and forget it in a way that’s tailored to your risk tolerance.
Here’s an example: Say you buy a donut for $3.25, Acorns will round up the purchase to $4 and invest the change in a smart investment portfolio. That way, a $3.25 purchase automatically becomes a 75-cent investment in your future.
Even better, if you sign up now with a recurring monthly deposit, you can get a $20 bonus investment to kick off your investing journey.
That said, automatic investing might not be for everyone — especially if you want to curate your picks outside of index funds and ETFs.
If that sounds like you, and you’re comfortable with increased risk, you could work with SoFi to pick out individual stocks yourself.
The platform is designed to help you learn investing as you go, with real-time investing news, curated content and the data you need to make decisions about the stocks that matter most to you. SoFi can even help create a personal watch list based on your interests. That way, even if you’re not investing a huge amount each month, you’re still learning as you deepen your knowledge.
This DIY approach also allows you to invest with no commission fees in the stocks, index funds or ETFs you believe in. Plus, for a limited time, you can get up to $1,000 in stock when you fund a new account. All you have to do is fund your account with $50 to get going.
Beyond investing, it’s also important that you start building an emergency fund if you don’t already have one. Experts suggest three to six months at minimum to ensure you’re prepared for the worst-case scenario — whether job loss or health-related.
Having an emergency account is also a key way to decrease your stress around finances. According to a 2025 Vanguard report, having at least $2,000 in emergency savings is associated with a 21% higher level of financial well-being (5).
However, when choosing your emergency savings account, be sure to find one offering a solid interest rate.
That’s why a high-yield account like the Wealthfront Cash Account can be a great place to grow your emergency funds, offering both competitive interest rates and easy access to your cash when you need it.
A Wealthfront Cash Account currently offers a base variable APY of 3.30%, and new clients can get a 0.75% boost during their first three months on up to $150,000 for a total APY of 4.05%. That’s more than 10 times the national deposit savings rate, according to the FDIC’s February report (6).
With no minimum balances or account fees, plus 24/7 withdrawals and free domestic wire transfers, your funds remain accessible at all times. Better yet, Wealthfront Cash Account balances of up to $8 million are insured by the FDIC through program banks.
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