I don’t know anyone who is currently poor but was once well-to-do or rich. I also don’t know anyone who was obviously a lot more well-off ten years ago than they are now. Well, except for my aunt. She was married to a fairly well-to-do guy and they had a very nice house out in Clearwater, FL. Now she’s living in an apartment, planning to bail out of Florida as soon as she is able.
Whenever I hear about a rich person going bankrupt and supposedly “losing everything”, I picture them paring back their lavish lifestyle. Maybe they move into a smaller house and trade the Hummer for something that gets better mileage. But it’s hard for me to imagine a truly rich person becoming a truly poor person–food stamps and all.
I wouldn’t say exactly “rich” but I know a woman who was doing very well in IT, lost her job, cashed out everything to open her own business, got injured and couldn’t work and now makes a living mostly by driving for Lyft. I don’t know about food stamps, but she has talked about how badly it sucks to be disabled and on Medicaid.
My parents’ stories about how their parents lost everything during the Great Depression are a lot worse than that.
I just spent about ten minutes responding with a great rags to riches story before I realized I’d misread the OP. :smack:
In about 2010 I did run into a previously well-to-do Realtor I knew filling out an hourly cashier electronic application at Meijers. She’d been selling mid to high-end real estate making good money and was applying for an entry-level, minimum wage job after the crash (which hit my area bad) and I felt badly for her.
I know a couple who went from wealthy to abject poverty, one was severely mentally ill and over 30 years it was mission accomplished.
They were bringing in a quarter mil a year easy.
I’ve never known any people who were particularly rich in the first place, but my aunt went from relatively normal middle-class to flat-broke as a result of mental illness and divorce. She was bipolar, but irregularly medicated. She used to work as a columnist for the local paper, she was married, she was raising 2 kids. As time went on, she/her husband were arrested for a variety of domestic disputes. CPS was called more and more often. My mom took in my cousins for awhile when my sister and I were kids. We’re all right around the same age. It was fun, if crowded.
Nowadays, my aunt cannot hold down a job. Fortunately for her, a nice family member bought her a trailer to live in. My cousins (her kids) aren’t doing so hot, either. One of them turned into an even worse hot mess than my aunt, so my aunt is raising her daughter’s 3 kids on a paltry $600 a month in disability, and I assume other benefits for the kids’ sake (medicaid, WIC, food stamps). She really has no business being around kids, but 1) nobody else was willing to take them, and 2) I think most of the drama in her life came from relations with the other sex. Since that’s not a factor anymore–either she’s not looking, or her looks are so unappealing that she’s unable to attract anybody anymore–she’s a lot more stable than she used to be. Which isn’t saying much, but she’s doing the best she can to do right by those kids.
Maybe not a remarkable story compared to some, but it’s the most dramatic one I know of.
A riches-to-rags joke. (Spoilered because, strictly speaking, it’s off-topic. And just slightly NSFW.)
[spoiler]So there’s this wealthy dude – or more precisely, this formerly wealthy dude – explaining to his wife that he just blew the family fortune gambling, and they would now have to learn to live a more Spartan lifestyle.
Husband: If you will learn to make great meals, we can fire the cook.
Wife: (Thinks about that a bit.) And if you will learn to make great love, we can fire the gardener.
[/spoiler]
A guy I know was horribly injured in an accident. He sued, and won a cool million dollars. He then proceeded to throw it all away by investing in Gold Futures, without having a damn clue in the world what he was doing.
I know two different people who, in their sales jobs, landed HUGE contracts and retired on the commission. One sold a particular item of safety equipment to every K-Mart store in the U.S. Nice work!
I know of one family where he inherited a ton of money but blew it. It was funny seeing them having to sell all their expensive things like their exotic bird collection just to pay the mortgage. He had this Rolls Royce which after awhile, was the only car still running so they had to use it for everyday errands. They ended up living in a trailer house on her parents farm.
Being rich is expensive. Taxes alone on big mansions alone can kill you let alone the cost of maintenance and heating/cooling. Many people who get into a certain lifestyle and mode of living have big problems paring it down when hard times come.
Well, I went from $60/hr to 4 years unemployed. Hadn’t been for crippling disease giving me SS Disability. I’d be homeless.
I know a fellow who was a session musician - those folks make $60/hr look like chicken feed.
He retired with $2mil - and married a woman who went stone nuts, just in time for Ronnie to shut down the State Hospitals.
He went through all of it and ended up in a shack until SS kicked in. He only worked for a few years, so his SS payout is pathetic. He lives in the cheapest place he can find.
The pathetic part: after she was discharged, he divorced her and put her on a plane to UK (she was a British Subject). Had he done this at the beginning, her treatment in UK would have been free. Don’t know if he ever realized that.
He has nothing but contempt for college education, so it is not surprising he didn’t know that.
Or that he didn’t find another line of work once poverty was imminent.
Very few realize that, with housing, the purchase price is only the beginning. Taxes alone will eat you alive.
Unless you have the purchase price AND enough to set up a trust fund to cover expenses and STILL are rich, a nice 3/2/2 in a fancy neighborhood works fine. If you have the trust fund… etc.
Throughout the later 1800’s and into the early 1900’s these rich people on America’s east coast like in Hampton Rhode Island built these huge mansions.
Then go ahead 30-40 years and their children inherit the property and many times they just walked away and abandoned those mansions. Why? Many times it’s upkeep. Just replacing a roof on those mansions can go into the hundreds of thousands. Then they often need foundation work, upkeep on all that stonework, then the transition to electricity and modern heating & cooling.
And then the taxes and insurance.
So many times the families, after grandma died, just grabbed what they could and walked away from the mansion when the tax bill came due. Over time they began to really rot away and eventually the local governments took them over and made museums or bed & breakfasts out of them.
In the UK didn’t they do this with alot of those big manors and castles when the original families couldnt afford to keep them up anymore?
Many of us have inherited expensive dishes, crystal, or expensive silver or brass, or maybe even gold, flatware. What do we do with it? Well real silverware tarnishes badly and always needs polishing. Same with items made from brass or copper. Back in the old days servants did these chores but now that most of us dont have domestic labor so those items are stored away and maybe only come out on special occasions. Well if your not enjoying it is it worth keeping?
And then art or other expensive antiques like furniture. Lets say you inherit a valuable painting. Do you keep it? If so do you display it or hide it? Well security and insurance become an issue. Some families have “secret” rooms where these are kept. We once inventoried a family with a valuable baseball memorabilia collection. All kept in a secret room.
And after awhile when you realize you could maybe pay off your house or put your kid thru college with the items value you might just decide to go ahead and sell it.
A bunch of people in a Lincoln, Ne. lottery pool hit the big one, and each got something like 15 million. Rumor is that at least one is already broke. I know it’s easy to spend money, but blowing through 15 mil is something I personally can’t imagine. When I got down to 2 or 3 I think I’d ask myself if I wanted to work again or not.
A guy I used to hang out with worked for the Go Corporation, which did some groundbreaking work on pen-based computing back in the 80’s. They went public and got bought out and the guy found himself with several hundred-thousands of dollars, which, while not making him particularly wealthy, should have set him up for a long, successful career and early-ish retirement.
Instead, he moved to Rome and lived the high life and spent over half of the money in just nine months. Then he found out he needed to pay taxes on all that money… and he was broke. He had to borrow from his parents just to get home and has spent the past ten years or so moving from one desperation job to the next.
With lotteries being so popular these days, and many being known to lose it all, that probably is a big source of riches to rags stories. I’d guess health problems being another, especially getting caught up in America’s health care system, with or without health insurance.
I know of two lottery winners personally, one actually did well, however, but the other was a total disaster which I’ll talk about.
He was a former co-worker that won the one million dollar lottery paid out $50k over 20 years. This was about 15-20 years ago. He even kept his job at the newspaper. The newspaper made the story look like he was just that kind of a loyal employee, but others that knew him, knew that wasn’t the case. He didn’t go buy a fancy home or anything, but my brother who had still worked with him at the newspaper said he had a bunch of in-laws and bums that kept thinking they were a part of the deal, so anytime anybody wanted money, he was giving it to them. That was part of the problem, not sure what the rest was. He had so much debt accumulated, owing everybody in town, that after a number of years, he let someone buy out his yearly pay-outs, by taking a one-time lump sum pay off. With that, I believe he lost another several hundred thousand, but gave him temporary relief for awhile.
A few years back, he lies down on the railroad tracks, and tries to have a train run over him. He wasn’t successful with that either, not sure what prevented him from carrying that out. He ends up in a mental facility for a while, but back home now and I think is still working at the newspaper.
This one is not anyone I know personally, but perhaps many remember George Jung (portrayed by Johnny Depp in Blow) who made 100 million dollars trafficking cocaine from Columbia to America, but ended up losing all of it when he got busted again. The book was great too. It appears that Noriega had stolen his money that was in his Panama bank account.
Forgive me for butting in - but it seems like there is part of the story missing? If he was a session musician making great money who retired, why didn’t he go back into that? Your story mentions SS, something happened after he retired that disabled him?
I used to work for a guy who made millions, lost it all, and made millions again. He learned how to get rich the first time up, and after losing it all, knew how to do it again. The ability to do that is probably not at all rare among people who have made their own fortune.