FWIW, I’ve never watched a single show on E! that didn’t leave me wanting to do that to some degree, sometimes to myself. 
Did you catch the one on 20 Best and Worst Plastic Surgeries? They showed that Cat Woman…I couldn’t look away. :eek:
A big powerball winner up north was a maid for a super rich person so she already knew that lifestyle from the other side.
That was actually near the top of the list of shows I was thinking about. 
Must be one of British things, like “stopcock”
A Fruit machine in the US is a Slot Machine (fruit symbols on the reels).
I love it when lotto winners go bankrupt.
So it turns out people who gamble are not all that great with even more money. Shocker.
I just won 29 dollars in PA’s Super Seven. I put 20 of it in a piggy bank and I’m gonna squander the rest. (I already spent two of it on next week’s Super Seven.)
Postin’ “me too,” like some brain-dead AOLer.
Correct. This was before many (or maybe even any) of the lotteries were offering cash settlements. In fact, the point was made in that TAL episode* that the lottery commissions saw this side business and decided that they could do it better and more profitably (for themselves), effectively putting most of those middlemen out of business. However, I still hear ads for companies offering to turn insurance settlement annuities into immediate cash, so I guess they’ve not all gone away.
*For the OP - the *This American Life *episode referred to might be of interest to you.
There have been several TV shows on This. Many of them squander it and go broke. Some do not, but they don’t make good TV. I have seen a few that have wasted mega millions. But one show showed a few who took care of their winning quite well and are living a comfortable life. It happens.
One woman said she was broke before the lottery. Now she is broke with more zeroes after it. If you can not handle money now, a few million will not fix that.
It’s not only lottery winners
http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1153364/index.htm
Granted those numbers contain many guys who never hit the mutimillion dollar paydays, and I’m sure even a quite few who only had a year or two at league minimum(300k or so).
Ah, thanks! Makes perfect sense now. I was thinking she’d spent all her money on smoothies.
Hey, if I spent 10 million dollars on hookers and blow, I won’t have squandered it unless I got an inferior product for my money.
And if I die snorting top-notch coke off the boobs of my 5 thousand doller a night hooker, that would be a perfect way to go.
The rule of thumb is that if you’re not good with money before coming into a large sum (through the lottery, an NFL contract or whatever), your story will probably end badly. But if you’re fairly sensible to begin with, you might do OK. One guy in Idaho who was formerly a manager at several Gold’s Gym franchises won a lump sum of $85 million and set out to turn it into a billion dollars.
Heck, I buy lottery tickets now and then and I’m fine at math and money.
The likelihood of me winning the lottery is ludicrously remote, but I already have my first week planned, and it involves around-the-clock work on investing half the jackpot as safely as possible. (In Canada you get all the money up front, tax free, so in fairness, it’s a bit simpler to deal with here than it is in a place where you get an annuity and a hefty tax bill.) I’d have a nest egg only an asteroid collision could possibly wipe out - saving accounts in multiple chartered banks and overseas banks, index funds, government paper, even gold bullion. Nobody, not even me, gets a penny until most of the cash is invested as safely as possible. I wouldn’t even quit my job to do it, I’d take vacation. But then, I’m an adult who’s fought to have this level of material comfort and lived the lessons of debt and poor money management, and worked my way up, so I’m naturally in a mindset of “Hoard money, trust no one, tell asshole relatives to suck it.”
wolfman points out, though, that the millionaire-to-loser phenomenon doesn’t just apply to lottery winners. Many former pro athletes go broke; I’ve heard of all kinds of them who end up bankrupt. They live beyond their means, failing to adjust for the carrying costs of their possessions after the paydays stop, or they invest in businesses with overly optimistic estimates of the likelihood of success. Mike Tyson famously went broke, but so did Evander Holyfield. Robin Yount went broke. Dorothy Hamill went broke. Happens to celebrities in other fields, too. MC Hammer is the pinnacle of the phenomenon.
They don’t even have to retire. Baseball player Jack Clark went bankrupt WHILE IN THE MIDDLE OF A MULTIMILLION DOLLAR CONTRACT. According to the story Clark owned 17 luxury automobiles at the time and owed on all of them. Either you’d enough of an idiot to buy 17 cars or yoiu aren’t. I wouldn’t buy 17 cars, if for no other reason than I’d never know which one my sunglasses were in.
Conventional wisdom is that a lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math.
I say, better than a tax on people who are good at math!
Some previous threads on the topic:
Of course, we Dopers are much smarter than that!
I work for a lottery corporation in Canada. I don’t know any specific stories, but I do know when someone wins a large amount of money we do advise them to talk to lawyers and financial analysts and not do anything too rash. Although once we know a winner is coming to pick-up a cheque we do do some kind of interview to ask them a few questions. We usually find-out what kind of vehicle they’ve always wanted, then we arrange with a local car dealer to have that model of car waiting for them. I’m not sure how many people end up keeping that vehicle, but it’s pretty neat to see their faces!
One person who worked here had a sister that lived across the hall from someone that won $3,000,000. Their sister got a cheque for $15,000 because they always helped each other out and neither had much money (they’d borrow boxes of KD off each other, give the other left overs, etc.).
The reality is in today’s economy a million dollars ain’t what it used to be! I’m 34, and for me to consider retiring I’d have to win $5 million or more.
If I won a million bucks, I’d buy a new house (outright, probably in the $400,000 range), a couple new vehicles (sensible vehicles for my wife and I say $60,000 combined), give my immediate family (parents, in-laws, sister, wife’s brother) some money ($5,000 a piece). The remaining $500,000 would be invested in something safe.
I’d then retire at 45 or 50 instead of 55 or 60 (if I wanted too).
MtM