NSYNC Member Reveals He Lost Power One Christmas Because He Couldn’t Afford to Pay Bill

It wasn’t always a happy holiday for NSYNC member Joey Fatone as their classic Christmas tune sings about. In a recent interview, the boy band staple opened up about financial woes he suffered when the group went on hiatus, revealing he was on the brink of bankruptcy.

In an exclusive sneak peek Entertainment Weekly obtained from ID’s new docuseries Boy Band Confidential, on which Fatone serves as executive producer, he spoke about the group’s indefinite hiatus beginning in 2002. In the clip, Fatone explains during NSYNC’s heyday, he purchased a 10,000-square-foot house on four acres.

“Money was coming in. I asked my accountant, ‘Hey, are we good?’ ‘Yeah, we’re great.’ ‘I’m OK to buy this house, right?’ He goes, ‘Your kids’ kids’ kids will be fine.’ Now, he was saying that as if money was probably still coming in,” Fatone says in the clip. “You go 10 years later after that conversation, and when I go to a new accountant, I say, ‘Hey man, can you look at my finances and what’s going on?’ And he goes, ‘You need to get out of that house or you’re gonna go bankrupt.’ I went, ‘I’m sorry, what?’”

His holiday season was interrupted by his money troubles. “There was one point during Christmas they shut off the lights to my house because I didn’t pay the bill,” Fatone shares. “I almost was gonna go bankrupt. And I have a family. This is when I am married, I have two kids. These are certain things that happen in normal people’s lives as well, but then you have to figure out, for me, how do I do this without the public even watching of what’s going on?”

He told Entertainment Weekly the power was shut off when he was preparing for Christmas Day. “It was horrible. I had family over at my house. Good thing I had the water, but the power just went pew,” he recalls. “It was actually in the afternoon. We’re cooking Christmas Eve dinner kind of thing. So all my family was there, cousins and aunts. And I was like, ‘We need to call these people up right now to get this thing back on. This is not smart.’”

In the documentary special, Fatone explained relying on help from others, which didn’t pan out the way he thought. “I was asking people for money,” he shares. These were people who “had the most money in life,” but no one helped. He then had to “put my tail between my legs as a man to try to figure this out.” He ended up selling the home and moving his then-wife Kelly and their daughters  in with his parents for a year. He says the experience was an eye opener.

“I lived in Vegas for almost a year, busted my ass to slowly build back up kind of a career in a sense,” he says. “And thank goodness, Lord, things were able to roll. Things came out better.”