Tori Spelling: Scraping By On $800K

“All my other co-stars made investments in houses, and I bought like a hundred sweaters at Barneys.” —Tori Spelling

Poor Donna Martin! She’s used to dropping thousands on Fendi bags and hair extensions. Now, she’s broke and forced to sell her Beverly Hills 90210 trading cards on her latest TV show, Tori & Dean: Inn Love. Though she’s short on specifics, Tori says she’s in a lot of debt, having squandered the cash she earned on her long-running series and on TV movie gems such as, Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?

And then mogul-daddy dies and leaves her only $800,000. Quelle tragedy!

But she and her sometimes-actor husband Dean have a plan. They’ll buy a four-bedroom bed-and-breakfast outside L.A. and, in Tori’s words, “make it all kitchy and cute.”

Her friends are all Nancy Negatives, saying the venture will fail because Tori has never washed a dish. I’m thinking Tori’s housekeeping skills may be the least of her worries so I consulted Whit Mulford, a financial planner with Morgan Keenan in Atlanta.

“Location and number of rooms are key to a successful B&B,” Whit says. “Profitability is directly tied to occupancy rate.”

The industry standard is thirty-five to fifty percent. “A bed-and-breakfast with four or fewer guest rooms will have a more difficult time being profitable,” Whit says. His source is the Professional Association of Innkeepers International, and he suggests the couple check out its Web site.

Mortgage size also plays a role in the business model, and on this point, Tori and Dean are annoyingly vague. (If you are going to put your lives out there for couch potatoes to pick apart, give us the relevant information, please!) Dean says they are spending their “life savings” on the inn, suggesting he has a nest egg to serve as a down payment and they don’t have to dip into the inheritance.

For the inheritance, which Tori and Dean find tragically small, Whit suggests stocks over bonds.

“I am a big proponent of ‘own don’t loan,’ which simply means own stocks not bonds when you can,” he says. “Stocks have a historic return of roughly eight to ten percent verses about five percent for bonds.”

With stocks, the risk is greater, but so is the potential reward. “The premium long-term returns of stocks are a pure function of that volatility,” he says. “They are an efficient market’s way of demanding compensation for the risk of decline. You get the premium for being able to stomach the declines.”

It’s a pretty simple concept, but one Tori would not take the time to ponder.

In one of Inn Love’s most tragic scenes—and there are many from which to choose—Tori declares herself incapable of understanding money as anything other than a credit card you hand over at the boutique when you’ve picked out all the cute tops you want to take home.

When she and Dean seek his financial advisor’s advice, Tori expects her husband to process it all. “I won’t understand any of it,” she says, “which is why I’m in this financial difficulty because I never knew how to… take interest or manage my money.”

Aaaarrrggghhh! Where’s Suze Orman when you need her? Women seem to think it’s cute to wave off money as something too complicated, like girls in school who declare themselves not cut out for math and science.

And Tori plays up her cluelessness for the cameras, like she views her ditziness as her marketable skill. Tori, your father left you almost a million dollars! You might want to try a little harder to understand how much money that is.

Dean’s advisor, sensing her lack of interest in mortgage rates, tells Tori, “Use your head for something other than growing hair.”

As the show progresses, the couple buys a B&B—without the assistance of a Realtor!?!—and their plan for profitability gets murkier. They live in the B & B, and I assume their child has his own room. That leaves just two rooms for guests. Tori is shocked to find their new town has no restaurant that delivers, while Dean absorbs the fact that the local DVD store doesn’t stock porn. The tabloids, Tori’s required reading material, are a week old.

My cynical self is starting to think this whole B&B thing is a performance. But then, I remind myself that everything on reality television is always true. That’s why they call it reality! Duh!

Meanwhile, Whit is hoping Tori uses her windfall to save for retirement. “We are all living longer, Social Security will pay us less, and medical expenses will continue to rise,” he says.

As for Tori and Dean’s son, Whit is not concerned with saving for his education. “At the risk of sounding harsh, parents should really take care of themselves first when it comes to their children’s college expenses,” he says. “There are many ways for kids to pay their college expenses, loans, scholarships, grants and so on.”

Once parents have given kids the tools to make it on their own—whether it’s a quality K-12 education or a plum role on a television series—why shouldn’t they expect their kids to get by without the family blank check? Maybe that’s what Aaron Spelling had in mind when he left his children just crumbs of his spectacular wealth.

I hope Tori’s next reality show—you know there will be more—shows her making investments, setting up a retirement account, and mentoring young women on the importance of understanding finances.

Sadly, a more likely storyline would have the B&B handed over to some Tori and Dean look-alikes, so the real Tori can return to her Beverly Hills life of Fendi bags, hair extensions, and all the sweaters from Barneys that $800,000 can buy.