Living and eating for free, and being paid for it too.
The newest group of contestants entered the Big Brother house on Monday night. The 16 housemates will obviously live and eat for free until they are booted off the show. A pretty good deal for giving up your complete privacy right? Well, what you may not know is the contestants actually get a wage for the duration of their stay.
Yes, they get paid to be there.
News.com reports the housemates will be paid $75 a day as a living away from home allowance. This equals to $525 a week of $2,325 a month. So if you’re the winner of Big Brother 2014 and have stayed in the house for the entire 80 days, that’s already $6,000 in your pocket.
That’s as well as the grand prize money, of course, with this year’s haul being $250,000. The weekly allowance might not sound like a lot, but it seems like a pretty good deal for not having to do much at all.
So what would they spend their “allowance” on? Apparently, the living costs back home.
Former contestant Joel Scalzi, who spent 92 days in the house in 2007, says “$500 a week for doing not much, sure I thought that was enough. The money more than covered my bills and my rent while I was on the show plus I won a $7,000 bonus (from one of the sponsors for lasting so long in the house) and a car worth $20,000. It was definitely worthwhile.”
As well as the chance to win cash and prizes, lots of past Big Brother housemates have gone on to land media jobs like Chrissie Swan, Fitzy and Blair McDonough.
SCROLL THROUGH the gallery for pictures of this year’s Big Brother contestants…
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