In a new interview with Men’s Health, SLIPKNOT and STONE SOUR frontman Corey Taylor spoke about the best and worst money he has spent throughout his career.
“The absolute worst money I ever spent… A friend of mine, a tattoo artist, hit me up to invest in a tattoo shop,” Corey said. “There weren’t a lot of tattoo shops in Iowa, so I was, like, ‘Yeah, it’s great.’ However, he decided to put it in the middle of nowhere, in a town in the middle of nowhere, where nobody could get to it. And then, a relative of mine convinced me to invest in pet stores, in supplying pets — fish — for pet stores around the area. And that was a lot.
“Needless to say, drugs got involved, and not only did the entire operation get seized, almost all the animals died, and then tax time came, and I didn’t even know that you were supposed to set stuff aside for taxes. I found a really great accountant, money manager. He walked me through the steps that it would take to kind of get back to where we needed to be. Basically, it was a very, very, very expensive lesson.
“Suddenly, everyone’s your friend, and everyone has a great way for you to triple your money. They will not give you any charts, graphs, no numbers, no percentages, but they will take your money. It’s hardcore, dude.”
As for the “best money” he has ever spent, “there’s two kinds of that,” Corey explained. “There’s fun money, which I know a lot of people get really crazy with. I don’t get too crazy. I’m a geek. I have a thing for movies, comic books — things like that. I don’t get into expensive cars. I have a Spider-Man pinball machine. I have fun stuff. I don’t need a jet; I don’t need any of that crap. There’s nothing wrong with the occasional movie here and there, or the occasional signed Boba Fett helmet by George Lucas, which sometimes you just have to have that. Now that’s the fun side of it.
“The other side is real estate,” he continued. “I’ve been able to, over the years, buy and resell, at a good profit, many houses that I’ve lived in. Here in [Las] Vegas, I have slowly but surely upgraded every house that I’ve lived in to get to the house that I live in right now. It’s the first house that I’ve ever built, where I put every dent in this thing. Just because of the neighborhood that I’m in, I’ve already walked into equity.
“If you move into the right neighborhoods, and someone sells a house for one price, and it’s more than what you paid for your house, you’ll walk into money, and you didn’t do anything. It’s definitely something that I enjoyed learning over the years and learning more about.”
Taylor released his debut solo album, CMFT, on October 2 via Roadrunner Records.
