There was a great analysis of what happens when you win the lottery on reddit some years back - <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the_happiest_5word_sentence_you_could_hear/chb38xf/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the...</a><p>> Nearly one third of multi-million dollar jackpot winners eventually declare bankruptcy. Some end up worse.<p>Of course many of the issues related to winning the lottery are caused by the attention you suddenly receive.<p>But a related story from someone that was able to retire early thanks to Bitcoin - <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/lz4x37/ive_retired_thanks_to_crypto_but_theres_something/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/lz4x37/ive_...</a><p>> 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.<p>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.
The woman in this essay is having her moment of peripeteia.<p>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:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I'm in a similar situation, but it's like 1/3 of what she'll make. And I have literally no idea what to do now. I have a good feeling for how to manage it. But not a good feeling about what it means for my life.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
This person sounds like she should take some of that money and spend it on therapy. Talking to someone would probably be better than this navel gazing and thought-spiraling.
My dad came to 7 digit figures in his account twice. It wasn’t really easy money, he worked both times decade long for it to happen. Both times he wasted it. I guess, one needs a decent financial literacy to be able to control such amount of money. Both times he listened to some charlatans and invested into some weird shit. I don’t think he will make it for the 3rd time, but let’s see.<p>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.
> I’ve been obsessed with men who are smarter than me. (Even when I was younger, at sleepaway camp, I was fixated on the boys who went to the magnet public schools, because I knew they were hard to get into.) Part of it comes from an obsession that my kid has to be intelligent, but part of it is about earning potential, because smart men tend to earn a lot of money.<p>Ugh.
For all her money, she has a paralyzing view of relationships.<p>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.
You don’t think much about $200,000; it’s not life-changing.<p>I think the start of this shows just how out of touch this human is before they became a millionaire.
> Being a tech worker is not like banking, where you know you’re not doing good for society<p>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...
> You don’t think much about $200,000; it’s not life-changing.<p>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 ).<p>That is certainly life changing,
it's amusing to read about wealth management interviews.<p>6 mil is just over the minimum to qualify for private banking these days.<p>Of course they couldn't care less about the account, it's tiny.
One thing that immediately stood out to me was the following quote at the beginning of the article:<p>> You don’t think much about $200,000; it’s not life-changing<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Is that person even real? The ending made me doubt it, as it was just a list of things leftists want rich people to do with their money. Like donate it all somehow, and under no circumstances give anything to their kids. Wtf?<p>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.<p>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.
That's because humans were designed to start adult life with becoming parents, then do the rest of life chores. That's the only thing that matters really. Life is short, and once you are dead, money don't matter. Procreating is how you outlive yourself. Go get kids, and your boredom will evaporate. No matter how much money you got, you will never have time for middle age crises