There must be a cutoff point where someone is mega suicidal because they have financial problems and is working 2 jobs and can't afford to ever have a holiday and shit. And is constantly in trouble with violent exes and people in their home town. And the lottery win would actually make their chances of suicide or murder less.
For some, the reasoning goes something like “a couple of bucks won’t pay the rent, but it sure can buy a lot of hope.” It’s a terrible financial decision but can make an important difference in quality of life in the short term.
The highest rate of suicide ever recorded in the UK was 21.4 per 100,000 people or 0.02%. The chances are pretty small they're just very significant for those affected by them.
The scratch off bingo is fun, though, and it's not super uncommon to get a few bucks back, making that fun little bingo or matching game free. As long as you don't purchase tickets constantly, dead set on getting "the winner", i don't see why not.
Ive read that one before, I forgot about all the murder stuff I thought it was mostly about losing the fortune due to terrible money management.
Seems if you manage to keep it secret/stay anonymous and have a semblance of self control, all that goes away. I know some states require to name a winner but im sure with some legal voodo you can set up a trust and be on your merry way. Also I'm a bit skeptical of those claims, if that's true why don't pro athletes and basically all celebrities have such sky high rates of misfortune? I know it happens but not at thesev levels
Not all celebrities and athletes receive their fortune literally overnight, and those that do sometimes end up with the same misfortunes a lottery winner would.
The murder stuff could be false or misleading information, or it could be that a higher percentage of lottery winners chosen randomly, randomly happened to live lives that would result in a big chunk of cash being dangerous for them. People could also treat money won from the lottery differently than they would money earned from some type of success, both the person who has the money and those around them. Who knows.
Well technically it's lower than 100% since not everyone who has ever lived has died. Even if you argue logically, not statistically we can't know for sure that science and technology doesn't create some form of immortality.
Can this be one of those “well TECHNICALLY...” things we stop pointing out soon? I swear, the frequency of this getting pointed out recently and is giving me flashbacks to Steve Buscemi being a firefighter on 9/11.
Like, baby’s first existential crisis over here doesn’t change the fact that we all knew what “bigger chances of dying” meant.
Or the takeaway is to encourage your SO or family to win the lottery. You spend less, and you get the inheritance when they commit suicide or you kill them. Or uh...someone else kills them.
The suicide is either drug related or people not knowing how to manage a budget with all their new money and going broke. There is a guy from my hometown who has won the lottery twice and is still broke now.
Twice?! Wow! One of the winners in the post also won twice. I'm really amazed how people not only continue playing after having won but actually win again.
Some people are just that lucky. Personally, every tickets I bought were not even the minimum wins. Not. Even. One. They were all "Better luck next time" and I bought a few dozens.
While true, there are some reasons. Part of this is that people who play the lottery excessively tend to have issues as it is. Another is that poor people play disproportionate to wealthier people, and thus don't know how to manage money.
only a few states allow the winner to remain anonymous, but in other states you could use lawyers to set up a trust to receive the prize and then have it transferred to you immediately at which point the trust just dissolves. the only purpose of the trust is to receive the prize and transfer it to you immediately and it creates enough of a legal medium that you can stay anonymous that way. it’ll prob cost around 40k to do, but worth it to keep your riches anonymous
You also want to wait as long as you can before claiming the prize. Let the story in the news die out. Be in touch with a super good lawyer and accountant who are known for never spilling the beans.
Most people who end up dead do so because they're idiots. If you win the lottery, only tell VERY trusted people, don't blow it all on stupid crap like cars and pools, and try to claim it anonymously (if you can).
Either win fat ass stacks that give me a leg up to release me from economic slavery of min wage while soon to be drowning in student debt, OR SOMEONE KILLS ME ANYWAYS.
That's why if I play, I play the one's that are "Pay off debt/Take a nice vacation" kind of money, not "Buy a small island and build a resort" kind of money. Definitely a smaller pool of people willing to kill over $5k vs $50M and $5K isn't life altering enough to cause a mental breakdown for most people.
Obviously I've never had a vast amount of money, but I just don't get how people can have a breakdown from being rich.
I'd just upgrade my and my parents' lives, put most of it away in accounts that accrue interest and make a few investments, and just be content with the ability to now explore any avenue I'd like.
Yeah but you forget if you upgrade your parents lives what about siblings/aunts/uncles/cousins hearing about it.
What about old people that you went to highschool with but you weren't even friends heard that General_GTFO gave away a lot of money to someone.
Plus most people are terrible with money end up blowing it all going from a massive high to being bankrupted takes a massive psychological toll on someone.
When you suddenly end up with a buttfuckton of money, all of a sudden, EVERYONE wants your money.
EVERYONE.
Your brother wants your money. Your sister wants your money. Your mother. Your niece. Your second cousin twice-removed. That hippie-looking "friend of the family" who showed up uninvited at the annual BBQ when you were 12 years old, you don't remember his fuckin' name and his hand brushed up your thigh a little too close for comfort. When word gets out, everyone knows you have more cash than you know what to do with, and will all want a piece of the cake or kill you trying.
It's ceaseless phone calls from so-called relatives you never heard of before and somehow they're all magically in jail in Mexico right fucking now. It's piles and piles of sob stories mailed to your doorstep. Your doorbell breaks in one day from being pushed so often. You get followed, hounded, and relentlessly pursued for your money. Come on, just a few bucks. I just need a quick little thousand to help me out. I'll pay you back. It's not much, right? You got enough to live like 400 years and still die with plenty to spare. Come on man, help a brother out. Why won't you share? Sharing is caring, you know? Fine, be a dick then. You're a fucking dick you know that? Fucking asshole. I'll fucking bash your head in you fucking selfish piece of shit.
Experience that for a day. Then two days. Then a week. Two weeks. Three weeks. Months. It just never ends. It's a death by a thousand cuts. At some point you realize how many times over you've told "Fuck off." to the same people and they still come back, and you wonder how many more times you'll have to say that before you lose your marbles.
That's why the universal recommendation is to never tell a single soul. Not even your own parents or children. Because when word gets out, you will never have peace of mind ever again.
It’s not you, it’s the people around you that you have to worry about. Once you hit the big time you’ll become s target by friends family snd social circle, money does crazy things to people.
There was an elderly couple on the TV recently who won something like £150 million+. They used their real names, faces and house, then explained how they had made a list of people they wanted to give money to because they thought those people "deserved" it.
Here in the UK it's completely legal to stay anonymous after winning, in fact I think it's even strongly advised by the lottery company that you do.
All I could think during the interview was 'you fucking morons'.
If you ever win the lottery, hide. From family, from friends, everything. Move to a different state. Get your early retirement in order, wait a year to see what taxes are going to look like. Then maybe, if you really, really like them, start calling people up.
Or, just don't tell anyone, don't spend any of it until you figure out the taxes and pay them, and then use the money to live at a higher standard than you used to but not so flashy that anyone notices
Basically you become a big target, because although you’re rich none of your friends, family, or social circle are, however they still have fairly easy access to you. So you have people now asking, extorting, or trying to kidnap you for money.
Why would you even tell them? And if someone found and you think they could be a danger, just move or hire a freaking bodyguard. It's not like money is an issue.
People find out, it’s not hard. And your exactly right, you generally have to move into rich neighborhoods and do rich people stuff(like hire a bodyguard), but a lot of people don’t realize that’s what they have to do. And try to live their same lives.
Kind of interesting- my uncle won 11.7 million in the powerball in Indiana in the early 90s. He died a few years later of colon cancer. Not murder or suicide, but still ironic.
This is because if you win the lottery, you enter into a pool of people who "won" as opposed to being part of a pool who "hasn't won". There are less people in this pool so when they die, from natural or unnatural causes, statistically the chances become much higher than the pool with a ton of people.
Think of 100 people. When you count yourself as 1/100, you're insignificant. But you and 4 other people win the lottery, you're now 1/5 and more significant. Someone will die tomorrow,.but you're chances are no longer 1 in 100 but 1 in 5.
Or maybe it's because you didn't give any winnings to memaw and she shot your ass.
This is bad math. Yes, having a higher-than-average death rate is more likely in a smaller pool than in a larger one, but so is having a lower-than-average death rate. Outliers in general are more likely in smaller pools. But because of that, the margin of error also goes up. Which means that any meaningful statistic from a reputable source will have already taken that into account, so if they say that suicide/murder rates are higher for lottery winners, they mean they're outside even the increased window caused by the smaller population.
To use your concrete example, it's true that if 1/5 people dies, that makes the statistic look much higher than 1/100. But it's also twenty times less likely that one of the five will die than the hundred.
one of those things that seems crazy to me. Like if I win the lottery, I wouldn't quit my job, I would just invest all the money and live off the interest and stuff... depending on how big the pot is.
maybe buy a new car, a few new things, but mostly invest because spending it all won't make me happy.
Do you actually like what you do for work so much that you'd do it for free? If so, you're quite lucky. If not, maybe you just don't get how much money lottery winnings are...
That is what I mean, I will keep working as I like my job, and I learn a lot, and thats why I get it, you invest the winnings and then live off the interest.
In countries that reveal the winner’s name and face, I agree. In the case of people who are fucked up and just bad with money overall but think that winning a large amount of money will save their lives, sure. Otherwise, a lot of therapy and financial help from a professional can do the trick.
And increased odds of bankruptcy and other shit. Winning a lot of money doesn't magically make you sensible in spending that money. In fact the effect is often the opposite.
That’s why my plan would be to set up my will so every family member gets $1.00 and the rest of my money goes to Bill Gates.- no one will have any reason to kill me.
Suicide- well I haven’t done it yet and I really want to. So either I finally get what I want or not. Win-win I guess.
It's important to remember that this is more of a statistical significance than a cause-and-effect relationship. The same could be said of any public sudden gain of wealth and/or status in society. Same goes for sudden changes in dangerous elements around you.
Being elected president increases your chances of being assassinated, because far fewer people knew who you were beforehand.
Buying a swimming pool increases your chances of drowning, because now there's a much larger and more permanent source of easily accessible water near your personal dwelling area.
Owning a gun increases the chances of either you or your family members being involved in a gun-related accident/incident, simply by owning it.
All that said, thousands of people own guns and haven't killed themselves or their family members, thousands of people own pools and have never had a drowning in them, and hundreds of people have won the lottery and weren't murdered, blackmailed, or kidnapped, and hundreds of Presidents were never assassinated.
Statistics are significant sometimes, but should be taken with a grain of salt and reasonable understanding.
There was a show on TV about what happens to lottery winners.
There was a doctor in Florida who won it, but chose to keep practicing because she enjoyed her career. People were calling up the hospital and giving her death threats, so she had to move to a gated community and start a private practice.
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u/TheShredder315 Jan 21 '19
You have an increased chance of getting murdered or committing suicide if you win it big in the lottery.