Money talks. Kaitlyn Bristowe opened up about getting a stipend shortly before her stint as the season 11 Bachelorette.
“[ABC] paid me a whopping $1,500 just because I didn’t have a job,” Bristowe, 37, told fiancé Jason Tartick on the Monday, April 3, episode of his “Trading Secrets” podcast, noting she received her compensation after being sent home from Chris Soules’ season of The Bachelor. “I was like, ‘You guys are making me wait around to see if I’m the Bachelorette and I can’t work.’ So, they gave me $1,500.”
The Canada native previously worked as a restaurant server, a job that she quit when she was cast on season 19 of The Bachelor. Bristowe revealed on Monday that she went into debt in order to purchase new wardrobe options for the reality TV show, which she referred to as “an investment.” Soules, now 41, ultimately sent Bristowe home ahead of the finale and she became one of the frontrunners to become the next Bachelorette alongside Britt Nilsson. ABC eventually decided to let the Bachelorette suitors choose which woman would lead the season. After a secret ballot vote during the first cocktail party, Bristowe came out victorious.
Bristowe noted on Monday that she used the network’s stipend — which they have not publicly addressed — to cover her expenses for nearly four months. “It was honestly the most money I [ever] had in my bank account,” she quipped to Tartick, 34. “Legit, yes!”
While in Bachelor Nation limbo, the former dancer — who claimed she learned of her lead role a week before filming commenced — started making a financial vision board for her future.
“Me being the Bachelorette was the only thing on my vision board and I was set on it,” she recalled to the New York native, who proposed in May 2021. “I was like, ‘I will be the Bachelorette.’ I had … a white board and I wrote down, ‘I’m so happy now that I’m the Bachelorette’ and I looked at it every day.”
At the end of Bristowe’s Bachelorette season, she accepted a proposal from Shawn Booth. After three years together, the twosome went their separate ways in November 2018. Bristowe eventually moved on with Tartick, who competed on Becca Kufrin’s season 14 in 2018, after meeting during a podcast appearance. They got engaged after three years of dating.
“I’m so not traditional that I’m like, ‘Why can’t we go to the courthouse?’ Because I would. He’s not down,” Bristowe exclusively told Us Weekly in August 2022 of planning the pair’s nuptials. “Jason and I are so funny. Like, if we talk about a venue — we actually have such different styles, different tastes, different everything that it’s almost frustrating. Because I’ll be like, ‘I’m in love with this venue and it’s perfect and it’s open.’ And he’ll be like, ‘Oh, no, that’s no. That’s not the style we’re going for at all.’”
