> Nearly one third of multi-million dollar jackpot winners eventually declare bankruptcy. Some end up worse.
Of course many of the issues related to winning the lottery are caused by the attention you suddenly receive.
But a related story from someone that was able to retire early thanks to Bitcoin - https://old.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/lz4x37/ive_...
> my advice is that you need to get prepared to deal with boredom. We grow up with our parents telling us to go to school, have a job, a car, a house and that this is life. But when you suddenly have the car, the house and everything else, what's left? Do something for yourself and have this in mind.
Most of the planet works for money because they have to. That means the majority of their time is consumed by earning money. Once you take away that imperative, you suddenly have a lot more time on your hands. That in turn effectively triggers an existential crisis - what do with all this extra time? Some people will be able to turn into taking their lives in a new direction but others are going address with drugs and alcohol.
Give your money to me. I have a million things I want/need to do. So many things to do in the world. How can you possibly get bored?
For example your social network may be largely people you work with - if you stop working, you lose those connections. And lockdown has shown what impact social isolation can have.
Forcibly changing economic class without taking care to also change social class can be really tough psychologically, something that you frequently see in those Reddit topics.
It’s just bits in a database. From an alien looking down on earth, there is no difference between the people with big numbers and the people with small numbers. They all spend their entire lives under the same set of beliefs, namely:
1. Any decrease in my number would be horrible. The best part of my life was when my number was zero, and other people are happier with lower numbers, but that is irrelevant. I need a big number or else I will suffer immensely.
2. People with bigger numbers than me are more important than anybody else in my life. I worship them, or I hate them, but either way, I think about them all the time.
3. I must commit my entire life to increasing this number. I am willing to do things I hate, or stupid risky things for no other reason.
Note that I’m not claiming to be any exception. It really is stupid though. Even people that hate the fiat system still worship it. Maybe it’s necessary for our civilization to follow these rules, but it seems to me that a fiat system would work best if people were thinking least about the ‘meta’ aspects of money, such as investments. It seems to me that, historically, public frenzy over financial topics has been a reliable predictor of collapse, and generally this starts with an attempt to use the financial system for some social engineering purpose other than the three primary purposes: store of value, unit of account, medium of exchange.
In the SF area, it's not enough to live with a family. Where my wife and I are from, it's enough to early-retire with average incomes (4% of 2M$ ~= 80k$/y, 40k$/y median income). But do I want to do this? Or do I keep working my job?
My job is alright, and I make pretty good money. I've been progressing along so far and doing well. But would I rather not have to attend meetings I don't feel like? Yes. But would I rather ride a bike everyday that I want? Yes. Would I rather play games for hours? Yes. Would I rather learn to machine stuff with a CNC? Yes. Would I rather learn new maths, sciences, engineering fields? Yes. Would I rather go sailing around the world? Yes.
Or at least for a while. But then I'd probably get tired of it. And then I can't do too crazy stuff because we have young kids that need to grow up. And then I couldn't afford the sustained expenses, and then want to go back to work. But then I'd have a gap in my resume and worry about having lost touch with my network and career.
We're already debt free and save a large amount of our income every pay-check. We're not interested in buying a house or living in a fancier place. Not interested in a fancier car. We don't want to flash like we're wealthy. We want to be able to hangout with our friends without making them uncomfortable.
So what do I even do with this money? I've never been taught how to be "wealthy". Before all this became reality, I thought I knew what I'd do, I had so many ideas. Now that it's there... crickets.
If you want to pass some money on to your children (and invest in their education), already the amount doesn't look that much anymore.
On the other hand I could retire after inheriting all the assets from my mother alone. At first glance it would be really cool, I would retire to Croatia, have a small house and a boat, but after a while it would be boring for sure.
Ugh.
> My mom has gotten bitter. She said, “You’re going to have more money than your dad and I combined, and we’ve worked all our lives.”
I guess her thinking comes from somewhere
The entire article IS myopic, but that's the point. Its a self-exploration of the feelings and emotions experienced by someone in their 20s who just received a lot of money unexpectedly for reasons largely outside their control. In a lot of ways it reads like conversations I've had with my therapist about other (non-money related) topics.
She does a good job explaining her anxieties around finances and the power dynamics in relationships caused by money as well as explaining the personal experiences in her childhood (her friend's parents' and her parents' divorce, the financial collapse of 2008) and the shared experiences of her generation (the first to have less money than their parents) that created those anxieties. She literally says what your last sentence implies.
Yes shes humble-bragging and talking about feeling shes low-maintenance and frugal. She also talks about feelings of bitterness and imposter syndrome and concerns about the future and feeling like she needs to give it all back because she doesn't deserve it.
Shes being honest and open because most people aren't. I mean its titled "Confessions of". I think shes aware. The most important lines in the article are these:
> there are people who feel like they don’t know what they’re doing with the money, and what the money means, and they’re encompassed by anxiety. They don’t realize that nobody else knows what they’re doing either.
I've had a couple meaningful equity events -- not as large as OP's but same order of magnitude in combination -- and have discussed this with my parents several times over the years. Despite otherwise being of sound mind, they're incapable of remembering it. It's the strangest thing.
I've been semi-retired since my mid 30s. My parents honestly seem to believe I'm unemployed and just can't get a job. They keep offering me money. Recently they keep mentioning how it's such a good time to finally buy a home since mortgage rates are low. This despite the fact I live in a large nice condo that I paid for in cash years ago. They've visited several times.
No matter how many times I try explaining my situation to them, they just can't retain it. It really bothers me. I've given up and just change the subject any time it comes up now.
Overnight windfalls are great, don't get me wrong. But they can certainly impact your family relationships in negative ways.
This person worked for a startup for likely several years to get her grant sufficiently vested to be valued at $6M.
She can’t make more than him, because then he’s not a real man, but she can’t make less, because real men want power.
I think the start of this shows just how out of touch this human is before they became a millionaire.
I... I work in banking and I think I'm doing good for society :D It's weird how deep this belief banks are an artificial parasite that built itself on top of normal people became. If people don't like banks and think they're really bad, they could really try removing them... it's not like I'd disobey a law or anything that says we can't work in banks anymore...
Banks keep injecting new fiat money into the economy via loans and thus dilute everyone's salaries (buying power) by inflating asset prices artificially and thus make them increasingly out of reach for salary earners.
Loans are also used to facilitate thousands of different financial schemes to inflate stock prices, distort the markets and drive honest people into corporate servitude and ensure that they will never be able to afford a house or any passive-income asset.
At a global scale, it converts salary earners into slaves and asset owners to into masters. Intelligence and skill are entirely factored out of the equation, success is all a socially-oriented scheme of who is who and who knows who; not much different from Stalin's USSR.
The banking sector is the main reason why there is growing wealth inequality and why jobs are getting increasingly useless. It atrophies people's useful skills and replaces them with useless bureaucratic skills as they are forced into the highly inefficient, monopolistic corporate sector and are shielded from essential competitive pressure.
For many smart, ambitious, passionate, hard-working people, it has turned their lives into an absolute Kafkaesque hell.
Once you can see what the monetary system is doing, you cannot enjoy any work. You cannot enjoy well paid intellectual office work because you know that your job is useless and you're making your money on the back of financial exploitation. You also cannot enjoy real useful, meaningful work because you get paid less and you know you're being taken advantage of by those who do the useless work. You can either be a crooked winner or an honest loser.
The only meaningful job I could find was in blockchain space, but because financing is all driven by fiat monetary policy (driven by banks and governments who have no idea what the problems are), the industry is a complete centralized brainfuck.
The reality for many people is beyond what even Franz Kafka could have imagined.
An even more extreme example, if you want to start a business. If you have to save for 30 years to get your starting capital, you might already be too old to start.
So it sounds like this person had assets or capital before the IPO. $200,000 post tax is certainly enough to pay off either a large potion of a mortgage if not all of it for a large majority of people . Hell where I live it can get you a very nice house in a good neighborhood ( I live outside of Philly ).
That is certainly life changing,
6 mil is just over the minimum to qualify for private banking these days.
Of course they couldn't care less about the account, it's tiny.
> You don’t think much about $200,000; it’s not life-changing
I'm happy for the author that $200,000 isn't and wasn't a life-changing amount of money for her, but to so many people it would be incredibly life-changing. I could very comfortably live off that amount of money for 10 years. As an alternative view, that's more than four years of my net income. Obviously my cost of living is also dramatically lower than it is in SF.
For someone working minimum wage where I live it would be more like 11 or 12 years, that's an incredible amount of money and I think it's important not to forget about that entirely.
EDIT: I've said this in a grand-child comment, but I just want to clarify this here since it has come up more than once. I don't mean to say that $200,000 is or should be a life-changing amount of money to her. I just think it's easy to forget the scales sometimes. I've had the same "whatever" reaction to smaller amounts of money that would have been life-changing to someone else. My point is: those of use who are fortunate (and I include myself in this group), let's not forget it.
In the past few years, I've received bonuses that were massive and I could only have dreamed of some years ago. Since then I've come to realize that sums like that were not life changing. When I dreamed of them some time ago, I imagined they would have been. I would have bought the car I really wanted or bought a bigger apartment or something. But in the end, I would have still had a car and somewhere to live, working to sustain that quality of life. Is it life changing?
But she didn't say "I don't think much [...]", she said "You don't think much [...]", which makes it sound like this notion wasn't specific to her, but rather a sentiment shared by some majority. Now my point is that while it may be true for the majority of her social circle, it's important not to loose track entirely of how others are doing, because our lifes aren't isolated from one another.
Maybe I'm reading too much into the specific choice of words , and if that is true just take my comment as a friendly reminder to us all not to forget those less fortunate than us.
Roughly 10 years ago when I first started in software development I was making ~$40k and thought I had made it and I'd be able to achieve everything I wanted on that amount assuming I just kept up with inflation.
Fast forward, I bought $500 of Basic Attention Tokens at $0.17 and after currency conversion it is over $5k. The money has 10x'ed but in the present I wouldn't describe it as life changing at all. The impact isn't notable at all to the point I'm like, either it goes to $0 or it goes to $50k to be "worthwhile".
It's all percentages. If the author's lifetime earnings were already going to be $5M than $200k might not seem like a life changing amount but anyone's who lifetime earnings are going to be $1M could see that as a life changing amount.
I hope that you are helping to make other lives better. I wish you well.
The Australian Gov floated making people pay for doctor visits that are currently free, and bagged out disagreement that it was 'only the price of a coffee'. Those on benefits cannot afford a coffee, as that would be almost 10% of money they had to per day to pay for everything. Meanwhile they use government flights costing $60000+, or give themselves raises more that a minimum wage earner gets per year.
Bill Gates was on a show and they made fun of him because he had no idea what bread and milk costs. Yet people like him are the ones that politicians listen to.
Isn't this often the case? Rich people looking at even richer people as something to aspire to. Middle-class people look up at the rich as something to aspire to. And the poor / working class look up at middle class as something to aspire to.
Everybody wants to move up in the world.
Which means most humans won't make $200K in their entire lives. Considering that it's not a life changing amount of money just shows how the 1% has lost touch with reality.
All depends on what you mean by life-changing though.
Maybe the smart thing to do would be to take the money and move to a cheap place. But there would be another price besides the money. And after 10 years, you would have a problem.
I worry so much about the world my kids are going to grow up them, that I am trying to give them as much of a financial head start as possible. I don't want them to have to suffer through discrimination because of their skin colour or gender, or having to bow to the office politics of the day.
As for donating money, why not wait until you die, and donate what is left (and your family can spare). Why the rush? Even the 6 million dollars that hypothetical woman has may amount to not much, with the crazy amount of money printing and inflating costs for housing.
She'd be "fucking hell finally I get something out of this endless suffering". Here she joined a company, waited a bit, and became a millionaire. We may all feel a bit disappointed at winning life with so little excitement :D
I can imagine this feeling of not deserving the money, but that doesn't mean you should be hellbent on giving it away.
Now 6 mil sounds like a lot (it is). But it is also easy to get in a habit of 'not worrying about money'. It sounds like she is setting herself up for that too (the cheese thing). It is ok to splurge but doing it every time and you will quickly find that money depleting. One lady I know got 15,000. In her social circles that was life changing. Along the lines of not worrying about many bills for a few years. It was gone in 3 weeks. I also feel that ladies assessment of wealth managers. Many are fairly weak at it.
My advice to the young new millionaire. Do nothing yet. Finding people to help manage your new burden is going to take time. Also watch out for the richer sharks. Many of them realized the best place to get money is from the newly rich with schemes of investing. Many investment advisors seem really fixated on what % of your money they are going to get per year. All the while telling you how they will grow it. Then drop you into index funds (that they get a kickback on). You could also think 'i know i will donate it' well that is an option. But take the time and evaluate them like the wealth management people. You will find the same people there. Ask around wait and see, do not let the money burn a hole in your pocket, evaluate. The best way to grow your own wealth and help out is to build things. Start a business. Maybe become a landlord that specializes in low income? Help create jobs in that segment? Instead of dumping it into some wealth management fund who is trying to build yet another 5k per unit per month condo building. Creating jobs and helping people level up is the best thing you can do with your money social wise. Giving it to someone else and hoping they get it right may or may not work.
