Did James Van Der Beek Really Die Broke?

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/james-van-der-beek-financial-struggles-gofundme-1236510777/

Did James Van Der Beek Really Die Broke?
Hollywood has rallied behind the late 'Dawson’s Creek' star, raising $2.6 million for his widow and six children. But the internet has been less generous, with scores of posters wondering why such a famous actor would need a fundraiser in the first plac

Steven Spielberg wrote a check for $25,000. Zoe Saldaña pledged $2,500 a month. Jon M. Chu gave $10,000, Norman Lear’s widow, Lyn, chipped in $5,000, while a slew of others — TV writer Julie Plec, talk show host Ricki Lake, model Lydia Hearst — signed up for thousands more.

In total, the GoFundMe launched to help James Van Der Beek‘s widow and six children so far has collected more than $2.6 million — tangible, dollar-and-cents proof of how much the Dawson’s Creek star was valued in Hollywood and how genuinely shaken the town was when, on Feb. 11, at just 48, he lost his three-year battle with colorectal cancer.

But, of course, no good deed goes unscrutinized, and those donations have been raising some prickly questions, especially online, where not everyone has been feeling so generous about Van Der Beek’s GoFundMe campaign. Scores of posters have been wondering out loud why the family of such a famous actor — the star not only of a seminal millennial teen drama that ran on The WB for six seasons but of a string of later TV projects and films— would require an online fund-raiser.

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Maybe. But Van Der Beek, for all his widespread name recognition, was not a super-high-net-worth celebrity — or at least he didn’t spend super conspicuously. ...... Until shortly before his death, he was renting the 36-acre ranch outside Austin, where he moved in 2020 and where he spent his final days among his family and friends, along with a small menagerie of horses, dogs and chickens. Whatever money he made through his decades onscreen — and from what can be pieced together from interviews and industry realities, it probably wasn’t a huge amount — got sucked up by the costly business of battling cancer,

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“There was no residual money,” Van Der Beek bluntly told an interviewer in 2014. “I was 20. It was a bad contract.”
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But raising six kids, even in Austin, is expensive, and the rent on that 36-acre ranch — which before Van Der Beek’s arrival was sometimes leased out as a wedding venue — wasn’t cheap either (comparable properties in the area can go from $10,000 to $30,000 a month). Reports that Van Der Beek had purchased the place just before his death for $4.8 million turned out to be only half true. Reps for the actor told People that “James secured [a] down payment for the Texas ranch for the family with the help of friends through a trust so they could shift from rent to mortgage.”