A former winner of America’s Next Top Model, India Gants, has revealed that she spent her $100,000 cash prize in just one year. She later had to set up a payment plan to afford the taxes on her winnings.
The 29-year-old content creator, who won the 23rd cycle of ANTM in 2017, discussed her experience on the reality series in a TikTok video Sunday. She recalled that when she won the show, she got a check with “$100,000 written on it,” and no taxes taken out.
However, she said that when it was time to pay taxes on the payment, a year after receiving the $100,000, she’d already spent it all.
“I know that sounds crazy, but I paid for a year upfront in a beautiful New York City apartment that my roommate was going to pay me every month to rent out. That was just over $60,000. Plus, I used a broker,” she explained.
According to Gants, her parents told her to put 30 percent of her prize money aside in preparation for the taxes she would owe. However, she didn’t think she needed to do that as she thought she’d make more money from her modeling career after winning the reality series.
“I thought that after winning America’s Next Top Model, $100,000 checks were going to be coming this way and that,” Gants, who is no longer modeling, said. “Like I was going to be booking so many jobs. I just thought I had to pay to maintain this lifestyle of somebody who just won America’s Next Top Model. I want to have this nice apartment in New York. I want to dress nicely, go to nice restaurants, get my hair done, look presentable.”
“I thought I was going to be making so much money that even if I overspent, I would still be able to pay the $35,000, $40,000 in taxes it ended up being,” she added. “I didn't need to put aside money from my prize money because I was gonna be making so much money, right? Wrong.”
In a follow-up video, she also reiterated that all the money — some of which was spent on her move from New York City to Long Angeles at the time — was gone before she paid taxes on it. So, she was paying off those taxes for “a very, very long time.”
“I thought receiving a $100,000 check was going to become routine, and I would have no problem paying the taxes whenever tax season came around,” Gants said. “But of course, I did have a problem paying those taxes, and I had to go on a payment plan. And yeah, it was kind of crazy.”
She also said that if she had the $100,000 now, she would be spending it much differently, such as by investing it and using it to “make more money.”
“But I didn’t have the brain as a 19- or 20-year-old as I do as an almost 30-year-old,” she concluded. “It is what it is. Do I regret it? Actually, probably yes, but the way I like to learn lessons is through making mistakes. So I definitely learned some good lessons, and learned a lot about finance and financial planning.”
Gants isn’t the only ANTM winner who has spoken about what happened to their winnings from the show. When Adrianne Curry won the first-ever season of the modeling series, she was awarded a modeling contract with Wilhelmina Models, a spread in Marie Claire and a Revlon cosmetics contract. However, she claimed that she never actually got a huge contract with Revlon like the judges and host of the show, including Tyra Banks, promised.
“What I won was to go to Revlon corporate, sit in a back room, have a makeup artist put makeup on my face for a team of about seven people watching me. Who the f*** would fight as hard as we fought for that?” she told Entertainment Weekly in 2023. She also said she was “f***ing humiliated” by the gig, which she said only paid $15,000.
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