Posted: May 27, 2011 3:10 am
TMB wrote:There are some studies where they followed the fortunes of lottery winners - will try and find this. Here is an interesting reference to lottery winners happiness levels and accident victims.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/690806
They found that mostly they wer worse off than before. The issues seemed to be the inabaility to manage the money on the basis they did not have the experience to know how to moderate their spending usually betwen capital and operating cost - ie. buying a home for $5m is quite easy, however it might take another $500k to run the house each year, and many winners were unable to manage the ongoing cost of their expensive assets. I knew a man who lost both wealth parents when he was in his early 20's. He bought himself an expensive car, a helicopter and boat. 30 years on I believe he now has much less, presumably because he was unable to handle that quantity of money.
The people I know who won lottery have found their teenage kids think life will be easy (they did not tell the kids) as Mum does not work, Dad has an easy job and they lstill ive a great life - ergo you dont need to work to live the good life. They fell out with the friends they shared the winning ticket with, spent wildly for the first few years, left the city they were in because of this, nearly split as a couple and moved cities to start a new life. Now they live a more moderate lifestyle (aside from the kids attitude to money) - they won $4m split between 2 couples - $2m per family.
The $30m winner was busted by the press. He pulled his son from school to avoid kidnap ransom, moves suburbs and now spends his time managing the money, has bought a flash house and car, but lives among peoplpe who have far more than he does so has some perspective.
I think giving money to friends would create issues. How much do you give. to whom, do you judge how they spend it, what if you run out of money, is it still really your money?
Dan Gilbert, I think, uses similar data in his TED talk on synthesized happiness: Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy? - http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_as ... happy.html
He has another one touching the subject: Dan Gilbert on our mistaken expectations - http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_re ... iness.html
This reminds me of the other thread of yours TMB asking women if they would engage in polygyny with someone rich, handsome and famous if they had the chance. As much as it is an interesting subject over a couple of beers, I still maintain that hypothetical questions have hypothetical answers only and hypothetical answers are of a little value. In other words, what people say and what would they actually do is not necessarily the same thing.
Well, $50 mil, and I'd spend it with/on mamasitas, because data suggest that it is what I do with money.