If You Won The Euro Millions......

MCMLXXV wrote: »

Now this thread is a little different than the usual lotto type thread. The way things are these days if you did win the Irish lotto you would barely have enough to pay off your debts, buy a nice house and have a savage holiday.

If you won the Euro Millions however it would be quite a different story: Champagne would fall from the sky, you could buy multiple houses, cars, maybe a modest 'plane or pleasure cruiser, have coke and hookers for breakfast, etc. - you get the picture.

So picture this: you are in a long term loving relationship, married or 'partner' status, with or without kids but strong ties and planning to spend the rest of your lives together, then you win the Euro Millions with a ticket you bought yourself for yourself.

Can you see yourself staying with your current partner in this scenario?

a few bob off the euromillions would make me and her a bit more comfortable. even if I bought the ticket the money would still be ours

Folks chances of winning this

1 in 116,531,800

So best not to think about it.

This person always sticks out in my head.

'In May 2009 a 25 year old Spanish woman got lucky on the Euromillions Lottery when she pocketed a win of €126,231,764 (£113,229,891) on draw number 274 with the winning numbers 4, 23, 24, 29, 31 with Lucky Stars 8 and 9'.

I wonder what she done with her life. How it changed. Is she a different person now.

I think winning that much cash would have some negative consequences too.
Sure getting to set up your family would be great, but if your win ever became public knowledge then your life would never be the same.

Consider the spate of tiger-kidnappings recently. I would be fearful of something happening to the family in such a case. Then i'd have to consider getting security to prevent something like that. I'd hate to have to travel around in an Obama style entourage.

The way I see it, your sense of place in the world becomes inverted if you win that kind of money.

Your relationships with everybody changes, whether you want them to or not.

You lose your motivation to work for money and you lose your ability to appreciate the value of money; therefore, you become scared of losing your easily acquired mega-fortune and retaining it becomes the main focus of your life. You start planning out how to live on interest alone so that your money never disappears. You become afraid to eat into the money-generating "principal".

Before you won, you might have had a job you enjoyed and that gave a nice routine to your day/life, got you up in the morning and made you feel like a contributing member of society with a clear sense of role and purpose.. a healthy, natural balance of work and play; this routine becomes turned on it's head when you win 100 million euro as you will never need to work again. You can pretend to yourself it doesn't make a difference but after a while with the money you would feel a niggling feeling that something isn't right and that feeling will never go away as you'll never work again.

Even if you try your hardest to keep your huge win private, it will almost certainly eventually become known to people. If you give money to some friends, which is an understandable desire, what happens when you don't give to those you only half-consider to be friends? They grow to hate you, and everyone begins measuring their worth as your friend by the amount they received. Parasites and hangers-on come out of the woodwork to skim off your millions and if you make any new "friends" or meet a new girl, you don't know if they want to know you for you, or your money; the cynic in me tells me that it's practically guaranteed the money would play at least a contributory role in all cases.

You will be inundated with begging letters which will break your heart. But giving money to some and not to others will mess with your head. You don't know which are fake or genuine, deserving or undeserving. It would mess with your head having the resources to consider all these letters.

You will be a prime target for death threats and tiger kidnappings, as will your kids and family if you have them.

If you move to an extremely upmarket neighbourhood, none of your neighbours will accept you as their will be a chasm between your financial capital and the social class you have suddenly been plucked from.

If you remain in the home you lived in when you won, your neighbours will eventually find out you won and will grow to treat you differently, in a bad way. And if you try to force yourself to "not change a bit", you will find yourself putting all your effort into this and you won't be able to enjoy the money anyway.

You might feel guilty possessing such enormous wealth in a world where enormous poverty exists.

Basically, there are many reasons an amount of money like that can ruin your life. That said, it would be nice to win 1 or 2 million just to give yourself an easy life where you'd still know the value of money.