It's such a low bar to pass. The guy in the article is 67, makes 1MM+ in interest a year, and won't even consider telling his friends or family? Or donating a penny of it? Is there not room for a middle ground here?
What about: "Hey, I made a million bucks in the lottery/stocks/crypto. I heard you're having a tough time, take this -- you don't owe me anything. Wishing you well, -Dave."
Most humans suck at sorting out the cognitive dissonance between "I am a good guy" and "I let auntie Vanessa die".
Doesn't mean your approach isn't right. A lot of people just can't do that properly and it can cause stress and depression, so for them it's probably easier to just avoid having to think about it.
Humans aren't really the most sophisticated when it comes to situations like this. Almost like we weren't supposed to have 10,000x times more resources at our disposal compared to the person standing next to us.
But let's just ignore that and continue our game of monopoly. Maybe this time it'll end differently. I'm sitting next to the bank though, so the outcome is pretty much certain for me.
I'll point out that, like it or not, the sort of money you're talking about is in the range of many CEOs or other senior execs of large US companies. Yes, some of these do have security services especially those at the high end of the range, but tens of millions of dollars pretty much puts you in the wealthy but not Uber-rich in the US.
Yeah, I think it’s the shape of the transition that makes the difference, and even then it can be weird.
If you’re an executive at a large company, you’ve spent so much time working on that that your social circle has changed. Even if you’re a startup founder, you’re not surrounded by the kids you went to high school with, you’re surrounded by enough other rich people that they aren’t gonna mooch off of you.
Winning the lottery is more like a rookie in a professional sports league signing their first contract. Sometimes that works out fine—they buy their mom a house and a new car—and sometimes they go broke supporting an entire entourage.
As an extremely wealthy person or the very visible CEO of a company/division that stirs a lot of passion, you may want security against the nut cases. (I have some knowledge of this from trade shows.)
But for someone who has "just" become 8 figures wealthy over the course of their career, they may have some family branch that resents it but their relative success isn't an out of the blue thing. And CEOs are pretty good about saying no to people who want money for things.
No no, see, once you actually have money you stop caring about other people and just want to protect what you have. "Got mine, fuck you" and all that. At least, that's how it seems from all the advice that gets thrown around about people who suddenly come in to wealth. Weirdly no one gives advice related to the documented ways that people tend to change when they suddenly have much more money than the people around them.
The study that comes immediately to mind is Paul K Piff's Monopoly experiment. In it, one participant of each game was given twice as much starting money, twice as much Go money, and twice as many dice as the others. Consistently the "affluent" player would become more aggressive and less polite as the game went on. Other experiments conducted by Piff indicate a lack of empathy associated with increasing wealth. High wealth individuals being shown to be more likely to cut people off in traffic, lie during job interviews, cheat on tests, and in one experiment even more likely to steal candy from children.
One could, however, claim that Piff is biased, and for sure Psych studies have come under fire in general for being irreproducible. So I guess take it all with a grain of salt.
What Dave does with his money is none of your concern. But since he put it out in the public, you are certainly entitled to your opinion.
You see, that's the point of not telling anyone. Everyone has an opinion and once they know a little something about anything they want to share it. Most of those opinions are how to separate Dave from his money. Nobody needs that in their lives. Not Dave. Not anyone. He was right to keep quite and it looks like he had good reason to keep it quite in the first place. How you feel about finding a middle ground is the problem Dave was looking to avoid. See my first sentence.
Our anonymous Dave has a tremendous excess of wealth that far exceeds his needs and his ability or desire to spend it. He asked "Was I wrong in not telling anyone about my winnings?"
My response was to that. Maybe sharing it, rather than concealing it, might actually make his life a little better (there is a soft joy in giving), and bring him closer to the needs of people around him.
I don't see why you think I crossed a line by giving my opinion. The man is asking for opinions!
What if Dave gets aggressive ALS and there is stem cell research that looks promising, but basically he has to help fund research? Does Dave need that now? Can he ask for it back?
I worked with people who tried to retire early but got embezzled. They knew someone whose wife got diagnosed with cancer months after retirement and that money just went poof. You can’t see the future, you don’t know.
What you know is that people overplan for emergencies and miss out on positive experiences because if it. These are not the same thing.
> My response was to that. Maybe sharing it, rather than concealing it, might actually make his life a little better (there is a soft joy in giving), and bring him closer to the needs of people around him.
It would sure be nice to think that. But that's not how the world works. From the link I posted above, and very abridged:
> Jack Whittaker, a Johnny Cash attired, West Virginia native, is the poster boy for the dangers of a lump sum award. In 2002 Mr. Whittaker (55 years old at the time) won what was, also at the time, the largest single award jackpot in U.S. history. $315 million. At the time, he planned to live as if nothing had changed, or so he said. He was remarkably modest and decent before the jackpot, and his ship sure came in, right? Wrong.
> Mr. Whittaker became the subject of a number of personal challenges, escalating into personal tragedies, complicated by a number of legal troubles.
...
> Whittaker quickly became the subject of a number of financial stalkers, who would lurk at his regular breakfast hideout and accost him with suggestions for how to spend his money. They were unemployed. No, an interview tomorrow morning wasn't good enough. They needed cash NOW. Perhaps they had a sure-fire business plan. Their daughter had cancer. A niece needed dialysis. Needless to say, Whittaker stopped going to his breakfast haunt. Eventually, they began ringing his doorbell. Sometimes in the early morning. Before long he was paying off-duty deputies to protect his family. He was accused of being heartless. Cold. Stingy.
> Letters poured in. Children with cancer. Diabetes. MS. You name it. He hired three people to sort the mail. A detective to filter out the false claims and the con men (and women) was retained.
...
> Whittaker's car was twice broken into, by trusted acquaintances who watched him leave large amounts of cash in it. $500,000 and $200,000 were stolen in two separate instances. The thieves spiked Whittaker's drink with prescription drugs in the first instance. The second incident was the handiwork of his granddaughter's friends, who had been probing the girl for details on Whittaker's cash for weeks.
...
> Whittaker invested quite a bit in his own businesses, tripled the number of people his businesses employed (making him one of the larger employers in the area) and eventually had given away $14 million to charity through a foundation he set up for the purpose. This is, of course, what you are "supposed" to do. Set up a foundation. Be careful about your charity giving. It made no difference in the end.
...
> Today Whittaker is badly in debt, and bankruptcy looms large in his future.
Everybody can choose to donate, nobody should donate (otherwise it is also not really a donation if you should). Singling out rich guys to donate who do not donate could actually be counterproductive (since people just feel the responsibility lies with the rich guys). Encouraging everybody to donate small amounts of money might lead to a better outcome.
I don't really see how that adds up. In order to collect $50B, everyone in the US would need to donate about $150. Or, Jeff Bezos could liquidate a 1/3 of his net worth. A bit exaggerated, and a bit of a cartoon, but you get the point.
Plus, the utility of an extra billion dollars to a billionaire is basically zero. Fight me if you disagree.
Well Bezos donated 12 billion already, and who knows how much more he will donate. He probably couldn't donate every year that amount, so if you say in 20 years it is 150$/20=7.50per year which is less than a dollar per month (admittingly this is everybody in the US). This is a lot of money for a lot of people but I still believe the total possible donatable wealth of non rich people is orders of magnitude larger than rich people (couldn't find good stats, was looking a while ago)
Psychologically, the middle ground turns out to be an unstable equilibrium. You can give them some money, but then they come back for more. If you say no, your family may find itself breaking apart unless you give up everything you got in the lottery
In that Reddit thread (assuming it is the one I'm thinking of) it seems there is also a high likelihood you get sued for giving people money because you didn't give them enough (under the same line of thought that if you regularly feed wild birds they will become dependent on your bird feeder and starve if you quit [don't know how true that is, but that is a common "wisdom"]). You also get harassed by local police, in addition to friends of your family breaking into your house/car.
> it seems there is also a high likelihood you get sued for giving people money because you didn't give them enough
Yup. Families can be like that.
Some distant relatives of mine, whom I never met, have been suing each other over some inheritance for what must be a good ~20 years now. I know because we're still getting an occasional mail from court calling my dad (who died many years ago) to stand witness in that case.
Probably difficult. If I would do <something> it would trigger some sort of chain reaction => probably difficult to keep it contained => I would have to try to at least act slowly & do stuff step-by-step.
Personally for me it would be really hard if not impossible not to tell my parents, hehe.
But once a bigger audience would become aware of that, e.g. cousins, then it could start getting very complicated (e.g. if I would end up donating $ to cousin X because s/he has financial problems or I just want to be nice, then cousin Y or nephew W might want to know why s/he's not getting anything, etc...).
People to whom I donate money to might end up quickly losing it (bad investment because of multiple potential reasons, most famous one just not being used to have to deal with such an amount of money), then once they lost it they might come back to me asking for a "replay" (e.g. "pls. save me, you gave me $$ but I screwed up and made debts - you've done it once so can you give me a 2nd chance! Pleasepleaseplease!") and saying "no" will make them angry and because of the whole situation (which would basically be something which I triggered) I might end up feeling like I own them something, with the final result that the relationship would suffer even if originally it was good (all all $ would be gone).
All this is not irrealistic - e.g. I saw in the past some short documentaries about NFL and soccer players screwing up their lifes because of all the money they got all of a sudden.
Personally I think that I would probably try to create some kind of "cover story" (e.g. something involving having "earned" it the hard way - because just saying e.g. "I won it" might make people start to think "s/he got the $ easily therefore chances might be high that s/he'll easily share some of it with me" but on the other hand that's probably less likely to happen if I would say "I had to 100 hours a week during the last 5 years") and I would probably say that I got a lot less (e.g. 3-5M $) which would just be fine to give me a chance to raise a bit my standard of living and stop working after having paid taxes but not to give out left&right money for free. Even the question "stop working?" might not be easy to answer (maybe just do something part-time, otherwise by not working at all I would feel disconnected from all my friends & colleagues)
Even if I would manage to keep everything absolutely secret and not to do anything with that $, my bank WOULD call me asking what I plan to do with the $M that are parked on my account, probably asking for an appointment to tell me about many interesting investment opportunities => that's a difficult situation for any person who's not used to deal with this stuff, e.g. people might not want to admit (or just would not be aware) that they don't understand the risks linked to some investments/financial products/whatever. Saying "no" is often a lot harder than to say "yes" :)
What about: "Hey, I made a million bucks in the lottery/stocks/crypto. I heard you're having a tough time, take this -- you don't owe me anything. Wishing you well, -Dave."