I won over $55M in the lottery, but didn’t tell my friends or family

Drawing down on a windfall should be a very serious decision, not something done casually. That money you're spending on pure consumption is not coming back, ever, so only use it for experiences and endeavors that will meaningfully improve the life of yourself or whoever you care about.

As the GP mentioned, people, even family members will start treating you differently (nicer if you start giving them your money, worse if you don't). That's IMO a valid excuse why you didn't want to tell.

I never cease to be amazed at how terrified people commonly are of trivial confrontation and worthless opinions.

A life spent placating other people to live by their low value opinions, will be a life very poorly lived. Rather than spending the effort on fretting about their low value opinions, that effort should go into mentally reducing the incorrect value being placed on said opinions.

People twist themselves into grotesque knots living under the unreasonable expectations of others, even living under the fantay projection opinions of those people (thoughts/opinions they don't even know to be the case, just things they fear may be the case), even when they quietly don't care about the person/s.

The sister in this story for example, she can go right fuck off. This guy wins $55m and is terrified of his own shadow, can't even deal with the sister (who he doesn't like at all, has zero interest in speaking to) he's afraid will demand that he donate half his wealth to her church. It's unbelievable behavior.

YMMV. I don't have any immediate family members who are at risk for monetary issues (luckily) and I have not had any issues with them knowing how much I earn. I'm also lucky that my family has been taught the value of a dollar since I was little. Not everyone has that advantage so I can definitely see why the default advice should be "don't tell them".

My dad's sisters and some cousins on the other hand...ya...they don't need to know.

Your advice is cynical and unhelpful.

I have a healthy relationship with my family where talking about wealth, money, and unexpected windfalls is not a problem. Or, conversely, talking about death, disease, unemployment, or breakups. Of course, a healthy non-toxic relationship needs years of hard work and maintenance.

The kind of work most people don't want to put in.

Parents at their peak earned maybe $60k together. Most of life they earned less and our house we got when growing up was only $120k. (They didn’t have a house until they were in their 40’s btw)

They have no envy. They still pay for dinner if I visit. You know why? Cause they know how hard I worked for it - they saw how many years I spent grinding. They’re proud more than envious by a large margin. They’ll brag to their peer group while still conveying that it wasn’t them that made it happen.

I think if you worked hard for it. I think if it’s apparent how much effort went in and that you’re not a person who is callous to others then people will treat you with respect.

This is one area of my life that does differ from some. I’m very upfront with how much I’ve struggled to get where I am. Extremely upfront. No one has a single ounce of envy for my life. I’ve professed many times that if I end up being a billionaire - I’d never relive my life even knowing I’d be a billionaire later because no amount of money will make up for the pain, suffering, and agony that I had to endure. Even now, it’s not like things are fantastic. I still don’t have what I want because what I want requires 10x what I have for SFBA. If I moved to BFE then it’d be no problem but then I wouldn’t have a job or a hope of a social life.

The general idea I get is that the money of the extended family is considered accessible (at least to some extent) by the entire pool. This seems especially true for medical expenses, but also seems true for “investments”.

The boundaries seem really unhealthy to me, but I’m not part of that culture, so I don’t know how it really works (esp. for families with wealth disparities).

One “feel good” story I have heard was when a friend of mine flew from the US to the Philippines with a large sum of cash that paid for a life-saving surgery for grandmother (had to pay in advance).

I’d love to hear other stories.

Thanks for reaching out. You’re right that we were struggling and this generous gift really helped ease our minds.

Anyway, Auntie Venessa has come down with lung cancer and we’re finding it difficult to…”

etc

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.

He's 67. If he's incredibly lucky, he'll have another 30 years to enjoy it. He has no kids.

I don't see anything wrong with donating it at/near death rather than now. We are not morally obliged to live the life of an ascetic.

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" :)

You're correct about not being fucked. It's dramatically easier than that though. Just go melt into New York City, where there are many thousands of people in that general wealth category.

The US has ~180,000 people with $30 million or more in wealth. 180,000!

You can trivially vanish in numerous major cities in the US if you have $100 million. No need to hire elaborate security or buy a fortress. With $1b it's still difficult to vanish; with $100m it's trivial. You won't show up on the money lists, the public won't know you exist, you won't be famous, the news media and paparazzi isn't going to hound you.

If you bothered actually reading the thread, that's what it says to do.

It's a great way to lose a lot of money. It's why venture capitalists prefer to play with other people's money.

You better absolutely love playing god with start-ups, because there is a hellish nightmare that can go with allocating capital to high-risk new businesses, tracking everything, being responsible for it, enforcing legal agreements, dealing with lawyers and accountants, dealing with conflicts, watching people do incredibly stupid things with your money, and on and on and on it goes.

And you can't just hire people to entirely remove you from the annoying aspects, because that's an even faster way to lose a lot of money.

I made a decent amount of money from a startup (enough to pay for a wedding + eventual retirement at a standard age). As part of this windfall I paid for a vacation for me and my close friends.

No one ever came asking for money. No one asked if we could do it again. Friends that didn't go have never asked for me to pay for their vacations. And if they did I would just say no.

Because its the poor-man's version of F-You money.

It instantly and dramatically lowers the monthly takings to have to make to keep your household going, and noticeably shifts the balance of power in all financial negotiations in your favour.

Try it. Trust me.

Pretend you lose your job in an economic recession. You can't make your mortgage payment anymore, and because recession, your investments aren't worth anything either. Lets pretend you have rental properties, too: there's an eviction moratorium, and small businesses are closing left and right, so almost no one's paying rent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_recession

OH F**K.

"if you are living comfortably while others are hungry or dying from easily preventable diseases, and you are doing nothing about it, there is something wrong with your behavior." [1]

I'm inclined to agree with him. This is my current moral quandry, since my income is about to dramatically increase.

I'm looking for a new car. I can pay in cash. I could pay $90K for a Porsche, or $20K for a used Honda and donate $70K to Doctors without Borders. (I don't drive much, so the difference in environmental impact is negligible.)

This is not theoretical. People in Haiti are dying just 1400 miles away, and $70K could really help.

1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/charity/duty_1.shtml

And I will even take a pretty broad view of “helping others”. But one should have put some real thought into it and sincerely believe in whatever approach they are taking.

Of course, you need to take of your own basic human needs as well. Which is sometimes easier said than done, even with immense wealth.

You're too humble. Did you say you have a job working with people who have giant egos and politicking? If I ever won it big, my idea of philanthropy is to give random people on the street $100 for no reason, except I have agoraphobia and can't leave the house. Is that really the best use of $50mm if I won the lottery? I don't have the attention span to do better than that, plus the effective altruism people I've met in person are all douchebags.

Do you really think you'd not do a better job than just anybody that reads your comment? especially having seen some of the waste up front