Entertainment

Mad money

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So when does Charlie Sheen start to need money?

To primetime TV’s highest paid star — who was making $30 million a year before he got fired earlier this week — that’s not an academic question.

Getting fired from “Two and a Half Men” cost Sheen at least $40 million in lost salary, based on his reported $1.2 million-per-episode deal.

In all, estimates of Sheen’s personal wealth have ranged as high as $85 million — a figure most insiders say is overblown because it counts income from reruns of the show he has not yet received.

According to sources, Sheen is owed about $500,000 for each of the 16 episodes he made this year — his share of the money that local stations and cable channel FX pay for reruns of the series.

But that money probably won’t come until next year.

(Not estimated: Sheen’s “party” expenses.)

Sheen himself told The Post last week he was “counting on the dough [to support himself] in the ways and means I’m accustomed to.”

The actor’s ability to keep up expenses during a protracted legal battle with CBS and show producer Warner Bros. is pretty much at the heart of his epic, month-long meltdown.

At least one online report yesterday described the actor as “cash poor.

“Every penny he has is tied up in property or business dealings,” gossip site popeater.com quoted an insider saying about Sheen.

His costs, even the ones on the public record, are huge. Sheen is paying $1.3 million a year in child support to ex-wives Denise Richards and Brooke Mueller.

On top of that, he owes Mueller another $1.8 million this year to settle a prenuptial agreement and to buy out her share of the house they shared during their tempestuous two-year marriage.

And speaking of that house, Sheen wants to move out of it as quickly as possible. Friends say it reminds him too much of the failed marriage.

So he’s shopping for a new place.

Much of Sheen’s money is tied up in real estate — including the $7.5 million he plunked down this week for a 9,000-square-foot Beverly Hills mansion for Richards and their two children.

Sheen, in fact, owns at least six homes, on which he’s spent in the neighborhood of $20 million in the past five years.

In 2005, Sheen paid $2.3 million for a 3,500-square-foot house in Agoura Hills, a suburb of LA, according to records.

Then, in 2006, he spent $7.2 million on a 9,000-square-foot estate in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Mullholland Estates — the mansion he now calls “Sober Valley Lodge,” from which he’s streamed his bizarre Webcasts.

In 2007, he spent $2.5 million on a 4,200-square-foot home in Los Feliz which now belongs to his ex-wife Mueller, according to ibtimes.com.

He also gave his sister a condo in Malibu, bought his daughter a 3,000 square-foot condo in Ventura County, bought condos in Marina Del Ray and purchased two small houses in Malibu, according to the site.