Beware the curse of sudden wealth
Everybody dreams of winning mega millions in lottery, but nobody realises the nightmares afterwards
I’ll tell you what “wealth psychologists”, experts who use their therapeutic skills to help the wealthy deal with the challenges of quotidian life, will tell you: Beware the curse of sudden wealth. If you play the lottery and you one day win the Mega Million jackpot, as one person living in the state of Maine did last Friday, get yourself ready to live a complicated and miserable life suffused with stress, wishing all the while that you had torn to shreds that winning ticket that added, as it did in this case, an unimaginable $1.35 billion to your bank account — minus, of course, Uncle Sam’s cut.
Sure, sudden wealth will buy you relief from the drudgery of your old life, buying that dream house in Beverly Hills, and telling yourself that you are now free, free at last of debt. But what you don’t realise is that you’re about to live a life of incessant stress. Sudden wealth is truly a dreadful curse. And wealth psychologists have stories to tell about how it all unfolds and how it all too often leads to a series of bad choices, tragedy, heartache and in some cases violent death. But first things first.
The day you become a lottery winner is the day your problems begin, the least of which will be the stress of warding off the “charity” organisations asking for donations, the financial advisers offering their advice (for a hefty fee) on how to invest your fortune, the sudden show of affection by a second cousin on your aunt’s maternal side who wants to share with you a sob story — along with a host of other hucksters knocking on your door, leaving your phone ringing off the hook and stuffing full your inbox with messages marked “urgent”.
It is a crisis that we find too difficult to handle, too stressful to deal with. The end result is that we end up living on the edge of an emotional precipice.
This from the archives of the wealth therapists. Everly Adams, an unrepentant gambler who against all odds bought winning tickets both in 1985 and 1986, which earned her a total of $5.4 million, had lost it all in no time in Atlantic City, a beloved gamblers’ paradise. William Post won a Pennsylvania lottery jackpot worth $16.2 million in 1988, soon after which his brother was arrested for hiring a hit man to kill him for the inheritance, while an ex-girlfriend sued him for a share of the winnings, leaving him, after all was said and done, with over one million dollars in debt by the time he died in 2006. (In 1993, he told a reporter: “Everybody dreams of winning big money, but nobody realises the nightmares that come out of the woodwork [afterwards]”.
In 2006, Abraham Shakespeare, an African-American, down-on-his-luck unskilled-labourer, won $30 million in Florida. Three years later he was found buried under a concrete slab in the backyard of a woman who had somehow befriended him after his win and who was eventually convicted of his murder.
And so on and on it goes.
And yet we keep playing the lottery, following the dream of winning big.