What about: "Hey, I made a million bucks in the lottery/stocks/crypto. I heard you're having a tough time, take this -- you don't owe me anything. Wishing you well, -Dave."
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
Doesn't mean your approach isn't right. A lot of people just can't do that properly and it can cause stress and depression, so for them it's probably easier to just avoid having to think about it.
Humans aren't really the most sophisticated when it comes to situations like this. Almost like we weren't supposed to have 10,000x times more resources at our disposal compared to the person standing next to us.
But let's just ignore that and continue our game of monopoly. Maybe this time it'll end differently. I'm sitting next to the bank though, so the outcome is pretty much certain for me.
So his reply could literally be "I gave you a mil. Pay some of it forward."
If you’re an executive at a large company, you’ve spent so much time working on that that your social circle has changed. Even if you’re a startup founder, you’re not surrounded by the kids you went to high school with, you’re surrounded by enough other rich people that they aren’t gonna mooch off of you.
Winning the lottery is more like a rookie in a professional sports league signing their first contract. Sometimes that works out fine—they buy their mom a house and a new car—and sometimes they go broke supporting an entire entourage.
As an extremely wealthy person or the very visible CEO of a company/division that stirs a lot of passion, you may want security against the nut cases. (I have some knowledge of this from trade shows.)
But for someone who has "just" become 8 figures wealthy over the course of their career, they may have some family branch that resents it but their relative success isn't an out of the blue thing. And CEOs are pretty good about saying no to people who want money for things.
Please share said documents. (Genuinely)
One could, however, claim that Piff is biased, and for sure Psych studies have come under fire in general for being irreproducible. So I guess take it all with a grain of salt.
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.
My response was to that. Maybe sharing it, rather than concealing it, might actually make his life a little better (there is a soft joy in giving), and bring him closer to the needs of people around him.
I don't see why you think I crossed a line by giving my opinion. The man is asking for opinions!
I worked with people who tried to retire early but got embezzled. They knew someone whose wife got diagnosed with cancer months after retirement and that money just went poof. You can’t see the future, you don’t know.
What you know is that people overplan for emergencies and miss out on positive experiences because if it. These are not the same thing.
It would sure be nice to think that. But that's not how the world works. From the link I posted above, and very abridged:
> Jack Whittaker, a Johnny Cash attired, West Virginia native, is the poster boy for the dangers of a lump sum award. In 2002 Mr. Whittaker (55 years old at the time) won what was, also at the time, the largest single award jackpot in U.S. history. $315 million. At the time, he planned to live as if nothing had changed, or so he said. He was remarkably modest and decent before the jackpot, and his ship sure came in, right? Wrong.
> Mr. Whittaker became the subject of a number of personal challenges, escalating into personal tragedies, complicated by a number of legal troubles.
...
> Whittaker quickly became the subject of a number of financial stalkers, who would lurk at his regular breakfast hideout and accost him with suggestions for how to spend his money. They were unemployed. No, an interview tomorrow morning wasn't good enough. They needed cash NOW. Perhaps they had a sure-fire business plan. Their daughter had cancer. A niece needed dialysis. Needless to say, Whittaker stopped going to his breakfast haunt. Eventually, they began ringing his doorbell. Sometimes in the early morning. Before long he was paying off-duty deputies to protect his family. He was accused of being heartless. Cold. Stingy.
> Letters poured in. Children with cancer. Diabetes. MS. You name it. He hired three people to sort the mail. A detective to filter out the false claims and the con men (and women) was retained.
...
> Whittaker's car was twice broken into, by trusted acquaintances who watched him leave large amounts of cash in it. $500,000 and $200,000 were stolen in two separate instances. The thieves spiked Whittaker's drink with prescription drugs in the first instance. The second incident was the handiwork of his granddaughter's friends, who had been probing the girl for details on Whittaker's cash for weeks.
...
> Whittaker invested quite a bit in his own businesses, tripled the number of people his businesses employed (making him one of the larger employers in the area) and eventually had given away $14 million to charity through a foundation he set up for the purpose. This is, of course, what you are "supposed" to do. Set up a foundation. Be careful about your charity giving. It made no difference in the end.
...
> Today Whittaker is badly in debt, and bankruptcy looms large in his future.
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.
Plus, the utility of an extra billion dollars to a billionaire is basically zero. Fight me if you disagree.
Yup. Families can be like that.
Some distant relatives of mine, whom I never met, have been suing each other over some inheritance for what must be a good ~20 years now. I know because we're still getting an occasional mail from court calling my dad (who died many years ago) to stand witness in that case.
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" :)