That is one job you do NOT take sabbatical - I suspect that by the time it sank in that this was the end, it was much too late to move back to LA and say "I’m back! - where’s my work?
So going back was out, and he had never trained for anything else (no degree, contempt for those who had them), so no future
Had he talked to professional lawyers and accountants, he could have at least had a comfy little condo somewhere.
But no, he’s an artiste, and all he does is music (which is a young person’s game, and he hasn’t been young in 40 years.
In the 30’s there was a black jazz group called “The Ink Spots”. Tremendously successful (for a black group in the 30’s). I once saw them - playing the grand opening of a discount furniture store in a pole barn in a hick town of 20,000. The Drummer looked original - and also looked like an advanced syphilitic.
My grandmother. My grandfather was very wealthy for his time (first decade of the 20th century), having made his fortune in the produce business in Oregon. He retired at age 52 and was ready to live a life of ease when he discovered an infected cut on his foot. He went into the hospital on Christmas Eve, 1915, and died on New Year’s Eve. In those days, it wasn’t common to leave a business to a wife. Instead, his will provided for a monthly stipend from his business partners. The partners eventually ran the business into the ground and then the depression happened. She ended up working for the rest of her life, moving into a succession of smaller houses, and dying in 1936 without having a retirement. She was cremated, and since there was no money for a grave, her ashes were kept at the crematory and still reside in the area where they keep the remains of people who have no memorial.
Jeez. I’m about to change careers - and actually take an initial pay cut - but with a lot of future opportunity. I need to stay positive amongst all these negative stories, and believe in myself.
I’m going to get a small payout from a lousy cash-account that the company has been accumulating for me, but which I wouldn’t be able to do anything with for the next 30 years. I already have that money earmarked (what’s left after taxes and penalties and fees) to pay off long-term debt so as to give the wife and my monthly budget more margin to work with.
I hope I’m being responsible with my decisions.
Having said that, my parents just told me a story like this.
My cousin’s in-laws. They lived out west somewhere - Colorado, I think. When the children were little, the father bought into the building and ownership of a race track - for motor vehicles, I think. I don’t know which one.
I don’t believe his investment was huge, but it entitled him to future earnings of the race track.
They immediately became very wealthy. So wealthy that my cousin’s wife tells stories about a huge paved race track on their property where her and her brother would drive around in real miniaturized cars with real engines. Not those little electric cars.
Then, there was the story where Cheap Trick played at one of her birthday parties.
I just found out the other weekend from my parents that during the banking and lending bubble, they mortgaged and leveraged everything.
I’m not sure what happened to the ownership of the race track, but they are living in a one-bedroom apartment near my cousin and his wife, and they pay the parents to babysit for them.
I have known many people that were very, very bad with money but they were also swindlers themselves so I think there is some type of karma involved. However, the worst case isn’t very interesting because it is so cliche. My ex-wife’s uncle played the lottery every week even while unemployed to the tune of $50 - $100 a week in tickets in the early 1980’s. He didn’t have the money to spare yet he assured everyone that he would win. Everyone told him he was an idiot. Well, he did win but wasn’t a huge one - $3.5 million but even that should have been enough to set him up for life if he invested it responsibly. Of course he didn’t.
He was immediately a ‘millionaire’ in his mind even though he wasn’t at all because they didn’t offer lump sums back then. It was just a guaranteed decent annual check for the next 20 years. He made it a few months before he screwed that up. He thought that he could get a house in San Francisco, Rome and Florida on his annual check but that was impossible even back then but he tried for a while and borrowed against future payouts to start to make it happen.
He ran into financial problems immediately and eventually paired down his dream to a single smaller house in Florida. Things worked OK for the next 15 years after that even if they weren’t luxurious. As the 20 years ran down, he had no money saved, he remortgaged his house, spent the money and then his wife divorced him taking almost everything else. On top of all that, he also ballooned to over 350 pounds because he didn’t have anything to do but sit at home and eat for a couple of decades. He lives in a rented apartment today in near poverty and didn’t even have health insurance the last I heard. I don’t even know if he qualifies for social security because he didn’t ever work much. He is close to 70 now with no prospects for any income in his senior years except for anything his family will pay to keep roof over his head.
He is a big reason I hate lotteries and the attitude they foster about money. You can give financially smart person any amount of money and they will turn it into more, you can give a fool millions and they will destroy it and themselves in short order.
I worked free lance for a guy who paid me enormous sums to do very little work. It turned out he had concocted the “perfect” scheme to defraud American Express out of a half million dollars.
Although not really rich, I have a relative with an engineering degree who had a very comfortable lifestyle, paid up house, wife and two kids. Then after 25 years, he got laid off and moved to another state where he does some ad-hoc teaching. He lost half of their retirement savings in the 2008 meltdown, got divorced, sold their new house, and is now living in an apartment above a store. He said they were worth over a million dollars ten years ago, and now he can’t afford a new $250 TV. He’s approaching 70 years old, but at least he has a partial pension from his first job.
The local area is rife with stories of kids who inherited the family prosperous grocery store business, only to see it get blown away with his cocaine habit.
I have a friend from high school who went on to be fairly successful. He worked as an accountant, cashed out of a start-up, had a fairly nice house with a swimming pool in a decent suburb.
Unfortunately, he’s an alcoholic and may have violent tendencies towards women. His wife divorced him, he lost his job, blew his 401K on elaborate landscaping prior to the divorce. He’s now living with a friend’s brother, renting a room. He’s trying to get an independent finance company off the ground, but I don’t know how much success he’s having - I’ve fallen out of touch with him. We have a mutual friend that likes to gossip and tells me about the guys ups and downs. I feel bad for him and all, but he needs to get off the sauce.
I’ve got another friend who was a Senior VP of Wireless Sales for Verizon (older businessman with degree from Notre Dame). He left them to go work for a start-up, which failed. Instead of finding another job, he just sat on his couch, drank beer, smoked pot and watched Sports Center all day. Eventually he lost his house and everything in it, and was legitimately homeless. I ran into his ex-wife occasionally and she told me he was living in a homeless shelter and working at the newspaper stand across the street from the shelter.
I knew a remarkably charasmatic man growing up that started his own publishing company, sold it back in the '70s to ABC for $60 million and was for several years the largest owner of Egyptian Arabian horses in the world. He had a very successful breeding program and his horses were often worth many millions each. His clients were wealthy too, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, etc. Then the tax writeoff and the Arabian market crashed and he ended up actually in debt for many millions. Shortly after he began suffering from memory and personality loss due to a genetic hardening of the blood vessels and he died in a nursing home, unable to recognize even his dearest friends like my dad. It was a stunning fall and quite tragic to witness.
