On April 23, T-Pain was present at Clark Atlanta University for their 7th Annual Financial Literacy, Innovation & Technology Conference. T-Pain sat down with the CEO of CLLCTVE, Kelsey Davis, as they spoke about their journey of financial literacy, while also giving some of the students advice about what and what not to do.
The Grammy-winning artist told the audience that he didn’t get into financial literacy until he had to.
“It was when I ran out of money. That’s when I was, like, ‘I don’t know how I ran out of money,'” T-Pain said. “I wanted to learn how that happened. Once I saw the patterns, and once I realized what was going on — what money was going where, who was controlling the money, what percentages were going to where, who was distributing those percentages, where was it coming from and who’s the actual person that writes the check at the publishing company — I need to talk to them because I need to let them know where things need to go.”
“As soon as I figured out all of that and put some effort towards it, I was right back on my feet,” he said.
In 2016, T-Pain entered the world of streaming and created Nappy Boy Gaming. Now, people are getting paid millions of dollars to stream such as Kai Cenat. For T-Pain, he didn’t look at it as a way to make money.
“The crazy thing is that I was just living, and come to find out, people like to see me living — and people like to give me money for that. The way I found out that I could diversify was to separate those things and not just be one life, so to separate those times, and to separate the schedules that it would take to operate those entities,” T-Pain continued.
“That part I had to put some effort into but other than that, these are just things that I was doing and people caught wind of it and they’re like,’ These people would love to have you do this for them,'” the artist said. “I’m, like, I’m just doing it at home for free. I don’t need to get paid for this, but I’m not going to stop you. When I first started getting things together, it wasn’t really about diversifying or anything like that, it was just living life and loving what I do.”
