Another cautionary tale involving a lottery winner: Michael Carroll, the notorious “chav king” who won £9.7 million ($13.9 million at current exchange rates) on Britain’s National Lottery in 2002 when he was 19, has blown all his money and wants to return to his former job as a trashman.
As much of a jerk and petty criminal as the guy is, I have to say he might be onto something in the last paragraph of the article.
Link to a documentary on Carroll.
The guy got to spend it and have the fun of spending it. I don’t care if he spent it all in one big party binge while he was young. I don’t care if he has to go back to work, and neither did he or he’d have saved some. The message of these articles is always bitter grapes written by people that didn’t win the money.
Reporter: See it would have been better if they never had the money. I knew it. God I wish I had won. No. Stick to chastising the guy. Now he has to do something shameful like work. Ha ex-rich bastard! At least I can ridicule him now that he’s poor and he can’t afford to sue me.
It’s really just a matter of proportion. I know people that get paid and head to the bars and drink their paychecks.
This is a good example though of proportionalism.
What is “affray”?
IMV, it’s simply human nature for many people to be interested in rags-to-riches-to-rags stories - they want to know how the person in question blew all those bucks. (Or pounds, or euros, or whatever.) And there’s nothing like a bit of schadenfreude to help pass the day. 
If I had won £9.7 million at 19, I would still have it today… even at 2% it is $260K/yr. Anyone can live on that forever. The guy is a moron.
Seems like it’s essentially a fistfight, according to Wiki.
Gotta agree with that.
These days in the UK you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere that gave you an interest rate that high!
It’s a rumpus. Or a fracas.
Same. I’m such a low key, low impact type, I wouldn’t know what to spend it on, and just keep myself surrounded by nerdy toys.
I think it was in The Millionare Mindset that the author says that many who are poor were never taught to handle money and so, no matter how much comes in, the same amount goes out and they never progress. It makes some sort of sense to me - where do we learn to handle money? At best, most of us learn from watching our parents, no one really teaches us.
I have to agree with this also. Even if you had an expensive year, and spent a million, you would still have time to take a step back and realize that you are plowing through your money. You would even have time to realize it a year after you’ve done it. Another thing I can’t ever figure out is how people who have become incredibly successful get into drugs and lose everything! I just saw an episode of Intervention where a girl was making 130,000 a year at 19, and ended up losing everything because of drugs. The last thing I’d be doing with millions of dollars is blowing it on drugs. Sometimes I hate people.
My coworkers and I were talking about winning the lottery last week, and we started talking about what kind of car we would buy. I didn’t realize we were going for the most expensive car there was, and I said “If I won the lottery, I’d probably go buy a new ranger or something.” :smack: I was only thinking about how much easier it would be to go craigslisting…
Hookers (probably) and blow!!
Not me, I would go one a sick spending spree, buying everything I have ever wanted in life. I wouldn’t even look at the price tags, just do the whole kid in a candy store thing. Gimme this one and this one and that one and that one and OH twelve of that one!
Not sure what I would do with the remaining 7 million though…
I have no idea how you’d even spend that kind of money. I mean, that’s enough to live almost anywhere you might want, do anything you want - first-class tickets to a week-long vacation in Lichtenstein? Done! Oh, you want a condo on Capitol Hill? Done!
And so on.
Only way I could see burning through that kind of money is if I decided to use it for politics or charity - say, kicking a few million into the DC Vote/Statehood movement. Even then, though, I doubt I’d let myself go broke.
There was a story in the UK newspapers a while ago about a guy came into a large sum of money and lost it to alcohol and drugs. I can’t remember the exact details (so no cite) but I have a feeling his wife won on the lottery, divorced him and paid him a substantial chunk of cash.
He gave up work because he was suddenly in a very good financial position. However, he got bored very quickly and ended up drinking because he’d got nothing better to do. The downward spiral continued until he reached a point where he was virtually penniless simply because he’d allowed his addictions to get out of control.
It is my understanding that people who win substantial amounts on the lottery are offered shedloads of financial advice, including ways to invest their money to keep an income flowing so it’s not as if they just have millions dumped into their accounts and are just left to get on with it.
Pshaw. Anyone can afford that. Those things only cost $600. It’s practically Section 8 housing!
Let’s see, how much would it cost to party 5 days per week: booze and drugs would be roughly $400/day per person, and let’s say he has 10 friends to pay for to keep him company, so that’s about a million dollars per year down the drain.
Sure, and if he has 100 friends it’ll be 10 million per year oh shit