off as bodybuilder and personal trainer after college, then moving to New York City to pursue modeling and acting, and most recently finding a groove in Hollywood after his Jan. 15 “Bling Empire” debut opened up new speaking and advertising opportunities.
At this point in his life, Kreider, 37, says he’s finally feeling more secure in his career and his finances.
Unlike his crazy rich castmates, including reclusive billionaire Anna Shay and celebrity plastic surgery businesswoman Christine Chiu, Kreider tells CNBC Make It that he expects to finally hit the six-figure salary mark in 2021 — the first time he’s ever done so.
He says that after growing up middle class in Philadelphia, he always viewed crossing the $100,000 threshold as a marker for success. Meanwhile, “here in LA., it’s a little bit different. Six figures is the baseline. But to me, it’s a huge success.”
With a new show season and lineup of gigs on the horizon, “it’s the first time that I don’t feel anxiety,” Kreider adds.
Racking up credit card debt
The sense of stability comes after nearly 14 years of “failure after failure,” Kreider says. He was able to make a pretty decent living as a personal trainer in Philadelphia, though he says that focusing too much on bulking up physically came at the expense of his mental health. After a few years, he left all his clients in Philadelphia and moved to New York, hoping to lean into his interests of improving Asian American representation in media, and speaking up about perceptions of Asian masculinity and mental health.
He went into modeling after being inspired by the likes of Ford model Daniel Liu and Godfrey Gao, described as the world’s first Asian male supermodel. But the unsteady work hit his budget and his ego: “I went from doing personal training, to all of a sudden catering. It was very humbling.”
Around the same time, Kreider says he wanted to pursue acting and took classes for it, but without a steady income and already scraping by, he relied heavily on credit cards to cover everything from tuition to headshots to food to everyday living: “It was literally just trying to survive.”
At its highest, he says he racked up around $26,000 in credit card debt. It was around this time of financial strain that Kreider started losing hair in chunks due to stress — which was ultimately a catalyst for him to prioritize his mental health and wellbeing.
At times he’d make a dent in his debt, like after he booked his first big commercial in 2012 and put the entire $5,000 paycheck toward it. But it wasn’t until 2014, after a year of chipping away and eventually having to move back to Philadelphia, that he finally cleared the balance.
“It was such a big accomplishment,” Kreider recalls. “I didn’t realize how much a burden and weight it was holding over me.”
