“I’ve read more than a few times that it’s very common for winners of big lottery jackpots wind up in bankruptcy court within a few years of winning.”
All because they fail to do a few simple things:
1. Pay off debts.
2. Keep a million or so in cash on hand, gold, silver.
3. Put the rest in diversified secure investments, even at today’s low rates you can safely generate at least 200K-300K annually off of 10 million in secure investments for example. That’s more than enough to cover your expenses, even if you get the desire to splurge every now and then.
Instead they choose wild spending sprees and get sucked into speculative investments like burger franchises, etc. The sad thing is they could’ve avoided financial ruin by employing some simple math/number crunching.
Also, change your phone number. You’ll be surprised how many new friends pop out of the woodwork willing to spend your money on great investment ideas.
Yup,lack of level headed planning is the first problem.And in addition to the new found friends offering great investment ideas a staggering number of relatives all of a sudden reveal that they need major heart surgery.
Also, people who buy big houses and expensive cars, don’t consider the expense of maintenance and upkeep in their purchase decisions.
A million dollar house is not just a million dollar house. It’s a good $25 grand/year or better to maintain it, and that’s not the taxes. If you’re paying some guy to do everything for you, that’s probably an additional $70 grand to do that.