Problems only money can buy

Mavis Wanczyk has done what most of us at one time or another wished we could do ourselves. She’s won the lottery and quit her job.

The 53-year-old hospital worker from Massachusetts really had little other choice. On Thursday she won $1.04 billion. It’s the second largest single lottery prize ever and by anyone’s count a ridiculous amount of money.

There is no way her life could carry on as it had up until Thursday and quitting her job was the most sensible thing she could have done. As one of the world’s wealthiest people, it would have been virtually impossible for her to keep working anyway.

As much as we would like to pretend otherwise, much of our motivation for working at the jobs we do is not because we love them, but because they pay the bills.

Without that to motivate us it is probably true that a huge proportion of us would choose to stay at home. And if you are as lucky as Wanczyk you then get to choose exactly what you want to do and virtually nothing is off limits. This is both an amazing and daunting opportunity.

Wanczyk’s position will not be without other serious challenges and they are the sort of problems only money can buy. Because she has not just gained enough wealth to pay off her mortgage and set her kids up with a debt free life, as most of us dream of. She has won enough money to pay off the mortgage of everyone she has ever known.

And unless she has very understanding friends, she will be under pressure to do so. Yet if she does she will have forever changed that delicate power balance all genuine friendships rely on to one of benefactor and beneficiary, but if she doesn’t she will have to question just what sort of friend she is.

She will be under pressure to move to a bigger home, buy a better car, eat at better restaurants and generally live a better life that her fortune affords her. To do that she must, by definition, leave the one she lives now behind her.

It may be that she will be able to manage this and is itching for such a change, or it may be she will find the transition away from everything she knows as one that is traumatic and, dare we say it, not everything she wished for.

This is not a certainty but the internet abounds with stories of lottery winners who just a few years after their windfall are poorer both financially and emotionally.

But even knowing the potential pitfalls it’s almost certain most of us still want that chance to find out how we’d handle such wealth for ourselves. What that says about our values is up to the individual to decide. Matt Rilkoff Chief news director