Have mentioned before here on the boards, but my SO was good friends with (and I met a few times) a guy in Berlin who won the German Lottery many, many years ago.
He went out and bought a condo, Mercedes limo, a BMW and took several trips abroad. He then invested the rest in his lover’s printing business that his lover had inherited from his family.
Five years later, the business went bankrupt and he had to sell both cars. Basically, he was broke. On the upside, he still has the condo (the one good investment he made back then) and has been able to work part time due to not having to pay rent, just condo building fees.
Many lotteries have links to forms and places to go to, should you be so lucky as to win. They mention getting a good accountant. Also, they suggest you take a small percentage of your winnings and splurge on that fancy car, or trips, or diamonds or whatever - get the “spendthrif thrill” out of your system a bit - and then start thinking practically regarding investments. Also, they warn not to promise everybody you know that you will give them money - best is not to tell many people at all. They also suggest going into hiding for awhile to avoid the solicitations and beating down of your door by every person you have met in your lifetime.
Then again, you read that people who suddenly get a lot of money turn into the same people they were before, just with more money. Spendthrifts just spend more and practical people just stayed practical.
Then how about this: the odds of winning the lottery is also strongly correlated to how much you play the lottery, and playing the lottery a lot is, I think, a very strong indicator for poor money management skills.
This. Also, there’s “poor” and there’s “poor”: someone who’s poor due to being a graduate student, but who learned money-management skills, is not the same as someone who’s poor due to having been born in a slum to a mother who isn’t sure who the father was, or someone who’s poor due to having been born into money but with less brains than God gave to a mayfly. The first one would do well with lottery winnings, the second one might, the third one will blow it same as the original stash got blown.
From my experience of noticing lottery jackpot winners, the vast majority seem to be the type who probably didn’t even need a lottery win. The only reason people who stuck their last dollar on and won, get reported, is because it is such a rare occurrence.
Playing it “a lot”? I think we’d better go over the definition first. I know my tactic of getting a single “lucky dip” everytime there’s a roll-over, and treating it as a £1(or £2 for the EuroMillion) thrown away, with the potential of a nice surprise, is probably not the norm, but a fool and their money are easily parted anyway.
My husband spends a couple bucks each time his standard group of coworkers chips in for someone to buy tickets on a big lottery payoff. I think he does it more because he’d kick himself if they ever hit it big and he’d stopped playing, rather than any real expectation that he might win a lot of money!
Personally I’d buy an Aston Martin DB9, a townhouse in London, a flat in Hong Kong, a holiday home in Thailand, and go travelling for a long time. I reckon I’d still have £5 mill to invest and live off the interest.
When I worked in advertising, we created a campaign for a lottery bingo-type game. We conducted a couple of focus groups that indicated that many people consider playing the lottery a form of entertainment, worth the couple of bucks (or Euros or whatever) a week to have the fun of anticipating a possible win, and talking about what they would do with the money, even though they know their chances of winning are very small.
I would invest almost all of it, and just turn managing my money into my job.
But yes, I would own an expensive car, I admit it. But I see no reason (outside of suits, of course) to spent $100 on jeans, just because I CAN. I have a hard time spending $30 on jeans as it is.
Sadly, my being poor is a result of a squandered youth. And I’m only “poor” by the US definition, of course.
That’s a horrible philosophy. That’s like saying ‘poor people are poor because they want to be poor.’
Nah, that’s just self-justification from someone who’s never accepted responsibility for his own mistakes.
Not every nineteen-year-old is a criminal who’s already served time in prison, a drug addict, a prostitute-user, an idiot to the extent that he has ‘evil’ tattooed on his neck in Chinese and doesn’t even care if that’s what it says, and, at the time of his win, had a criminal record long enough that he couldn’t open a bank account. Not every 19-year-old has a childhood as bad as his indisputably was.
Maybe his years of being rich have taught him something; if nothing else, they’ve probably lessened his jail time and - unless he were really really shit and never put any money in his kids’ bank accounts - given his kids a few grand to have in the future.
And he will still own lots of things that he wouldn’t otherwise own. Bankruptcy in the UK doesn’t take every single one of your belongings - it doesn’t take your personal residence (within reason) or all your means of transport or all your computers, etc; odds are, he still has a lot of stuff left over.
He is an exception in almost every way, and doesn’t say much about anyone else winning the lottery.
Not to answer for tdn, but I think I know what he means. One thing that’s hard to shake from being poor is living paycheck to paycheck. You always have; you make just enough money to make it through till your next paycheck. You don’t have enough money to have savings, so you never save. When you do get any extra money, you’ve never saved before, so you don’t start now.
This doesn’t mean it’s a good idea, obviously. But when you haven’t had spare money*, you generally don’t have a lot of financial skills. You have learned how to get by on what you have. Planning for the future hasn’t entered the equation; you’re more concerned about the present. If you’re suddenly handed millions, you don’t magically get all the education and knowledge needed to responsibly save the money.
and read “Nickel and Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich for good insight into how the poor pay more for things because they can’t save. If you need to wash your clothes right now, and you have $3, you’re buying the small $3 bottle of detergent, even though the $8 bottle gives you a lot more per dollar. But you need to wash your clothes now; you can’t wait until your next paycheck for the $5 more to be able to buy the better value jug.
