- Cher came back from owing $270,000 in back taxes only to wind up broke again years later.
- The star makes several striking points about money in her memoir published this week.
- Cher says she overspent, lacked financial acumen, and benefited from owning real estate.
Cher has made and lost several fortunes in her career. The "Believe" singer, who shot to fame with hits including "I Got You Babe" with her ex-husband Sonny Bono, reflects on her financial triumphs and troubles in her new book, "Cher: The Memoir, Part One."
Here are six points she makes about money:
1. Feeling safe
Cher's parents struggled financially, so she often had to give things up she liked. When she made it big, the performer found comfort in having backup products.
"I was so insecure about becoming poor again that I started buying two of a few key household items in case we needed to replace things that had worn out," she writes.
"There was no logic to owning two electric frying pans or two hair dryers — I'd have been a broke housewife with great hair — but it made me feel better because since childhood I'd been accustomed to losing what I had or being forced to trade down to a worse situation."
2. Overspending
"We're broke, Cher. We owe the IRS $270,000 in back taxes and we don't have the money," Bono said to Cher in the late 1960s, in her telling.
Cher realized that she'd spent almost precisely that amount on her dream house. "That's how people in the movie industry or music business get into such trouble," she writes.
"You come from nothing and suddenly you've got all this money and you're doing Ed Sullivan and people are screaming for you all over the world and you think it's gonna last forever," she continued. "Then one day it dries up and you realize you never had any backup."
In 1980, Cher was on the brink of declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy when she was saved by a man who'd bought some apartment buildings from her — he decided to pay in full instead of in installments.
"Thank you, God," she writes. "I vowed never to overextend myself like that again. (Not that it stuck—I've been overextending myself in a million ways my whole life!)."
3. Financial acumen
Cher writes she was "someone who didn't know my ass from first base when it came to money."
She never considered that Bono might not be financially savvy or the best person to manage their money, and the pair didn't have a business manager.
Cher later relied on David Geffen, a music and film producer, to help her handle her finances.
4. Checking contracts
After separating from Bono in the 1970s, Cher learned from Geffen that despite being a duet for years, the pair were far from equal partners.
"Sweetheart, this contract is involuntary servitude," Geffen told Cher in her telling. "You work for Sonny. You have no rights, no vote, no money, nothing."
Cher writes in her memoir that "the contracts he'd had me sign were secretly designed to strip me of my income and the rights to my own career."
In 1980, when Cher discovered her managers were making more money than her, she swiftly fired them.
5. Diversified portfolio
Cher writes that when she had spare cash at one point, she invested some of it in apartment buildings which she later sold. The buyer's decision to pay in full instead of in installments not only taught her a lesson in not overextending herself, it also showed the power of holding assets and the value of a diversified portfolio.
In this case, parking her money in real estate spared her from bankruptcy.
6. Helping family
After her career took off, Cher supported her mom financially and at one point gave her money to open a store called Granny's Cabbage Patch in Brentwood, California.
"Mom's store attracted a lot of press attention, but it was never solvent and soon began to lose money," Cher writes. "As my business manager put it, 'Georgia's independence is killing you.'"