Fame & Fortune: Drummer Carl Palmer Wild drummer for ELP and Asia invested conservatively
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Carl Palmer: Half my family was into business, the other half was into music. So you could play the violin or drums and listen to your grandfather who was a professor of music at the Royal Academy, or you could go work in the shop with your father who started out with $10 in his pocket and now had two retail outlets. You had your choice, or you could cross over, which I did. So, I did invest wisely throughout the years.

Bankrate: What were some of the things you invested in?

Carl Palmer: I invested in what I considered to be very easy investments -- government bonds, unit trusts, played the stock market to a certain extent, AT&T, Exxon, those types of things. My main interests were rental properties, beachfront properties and buying offshore properties when the legal side in Europe allowed you to do that. Laws changed, so to have anything that was in an offshore company would make you automatically subject to X amount of tax. I also recorded in places like Switzerland, Germany, Montreal and even America, because then the tax wouldn't have been as high. If you consider that to be an investment, then long term it turns into a very good investment, because it was taxed at a much lower rate.

Bankrate: What was the tax situation in the UK?

Carl Palmer: During the early '70s, the tax here was 98 percent. During that time, you could work and record outside of the country, because the product was recorded where it wasn't subject to full-on UK tax. This is a very old law, since changed a thousand times.

Bankrate: So which albums did you record outside the UK to avoid that excessive rate of tax?

Carl Palmer: The biggest one would have been "Works," which was a double album and which we toured with an orchestra. We recorded an orchestra in Montreux, Switzerland, and then we went to America and toured for three weeks with a 64-piece orchestra. The only way to do that was to use the tax savings we had to reinvest back into our business.

Bankrate: Have the laws changed to the point where it now makes financial sense to do projects like that in England?

Carl Palmer: Yes. If you record outside of England now, the savings are very little.

Bankrate: You mentioned real estate. Has that been a big aspect of your investments over the years?

Carl Palmer: It's been an asset that, if you make the right investment, can produce as much as 20 percent a year. The longer you have a property, the more you can push the rental value up. The property needs to start at five to 7.5 percent to get a good yield. If you have that property 10 years, 15 years, you could return possibly 15 to 18 percent, and then you look at the actual capital growth, it could average out to five, 6 percent per year. So long term, rental properties can be incredibly lucrative.