The Best Way to Wealth
A Tweet recently caught my eye: “One of the best ways to get rich
is to be born into a rich family.”
I politely disagreed, and thought it was worth elucidating in a longer post
here. Inheritance is probably the easiest
way to wealth.
Doesn’t
that make it the best way?
Not in my book.
Let
me tell you a quick story about
easy money. I’ll
provide a link to the full story, if you’re interested in all the
gory details. But first, the thumbnail sketch:
In
2002, West Virginia’s Jack Whittaker won the Powerball for $314
million, which was (at the
time) the largest lottery payout for a single ticket. Whittaker
took a much smaller lump sum that amounted
to about $113
million after taxes.
Still,
$113 million is a lot of money. Even
to Whittaker, who owned a
contracting
business laying pipe.
He
had reportedly built a $17 million business
already, so he didn’t really need
the Powerball funds.
So, Whittaker
promised to start a charitable foundation to
benefit the needy, and donate
millions more to
build a new church.
People
begged him for money in person, and submitted heartbreaking
sob stories via mail. In fact, Whittaker got so much mail, he had to
hire three people to sort through it, and also hired private
investigators to verify the details of some of these requests.
But
Whittaker wasn’t interested only
in charitable causes. He also wanted to enjoy the rest of his life,
as he had some health issues and figured he’d have about a decade
left. So, on New Year’s Eve of 2002, just a couple days after his
big win, Whittaker went to the local strip club and plunked down
$50,000 on the bar.
That
was just the first sign of what was to come.
Whittaker
was the victim of numerous
attempted robberies and
lawsuits. Public opinion
turned on him too, after a little while.
It
was mainly brought
on by his own behavior—he was seen in clubs and casinos, pawing at
women other than his wife, and he was charged with DUIs
on more than one occasion.
But
that was the happiest
part of the sad saga.
Thanks
to his drinking and womanizing, Whittaker’s wife left him, after
almost 40 years of marriage.
His
granddaughter Brandi—15
at the time of Whittaker’s Powerball win—got involved in drugs,
enabled by a constant flow of cash from Paw-Paw Whittaker. In
September 2004, Brandi’s
boyfriend was found dead of an overdose, in the bedroom of a home
owned by Whittaker. And
in December, almost 2 years
to the day after Whittaker bought the winning ticket, Brandi herself
was found dead at
a friend’s property, her
body wrapped in a tarp. Cocaine
and methadone were found in her system.
In
July 2009, Whittaker’s only daughter, Ginger,
was found dead. The cause of
death was not made public, but authorities said they do not suspect
foul play. She had
apparently been fighting cancer for several years, though it is not
public whether that was the cause of her death.
In
2016, Whittaker’s house
burned down, and he did not have insurance on it.
And
Whittaker claimed that,
in an apparently carefully-planned heist, thieves
simultaneously hit 12
different branches of a bank and
robbed him of much of his
money.
The
clerk who sold Whittaker the winning ticket summed it up best: “It
seems like money brings out the ugly in people.”
April Witt’s entire story on the matter, first
published by the Washington
Post in
2005, is well worth a read.
But if you consider the tragic
story for a while, you just might come up with some powerful
insights.
For
example: if money brings out the ugly in people, why wasn’t
Whittaker already getting himself
into trouble?
After
all, he already had his own company. He already had a pretty nice
amount of money even before winning the lottery. So why wasn’t he
already driving under the influence, or frequenting
strip clubs and grabbing at
women who weren’t his wife?
Why
wasn’t he already giving his granddaughter enough money to buy
drugs? With a $17
million business to his name,
he clearly could have afforded it!
I
think the answer is clear. Whittaker accumulated his money
slowly, over a long period
of time. He had to work for it. And think carefully about how to
handle it.
I’d
like to amend the clerk’s quote a bit. “Easy
money brings out the ugly in people.” Or perhaps, “fast
money brings out the ugly in people.”
People
might be a little jealous if, over the course of a lifetime, you
accumulate a couple million dollars by retirement age. But if they
think it came to you easily,
or quickly—in essence, that
you didn’t do anything to earn
it—that seems to be
when the claws come out.
Maybe
it’s pure jealousy. Maybe it comes from a sense of injustice, as if
they’ve been wronged by fate because this good thing happened to someone
else. Or maybe people have a sort of instinctive disdain for ease, an
understanding that the good fortune can vanish as quickly as it
arrived. “Easy come, easy go.”
I
suspect it’s probably a
combination of them all.
Back
to the initial Tweet: while everybody thinks
they want to inherit money, nobody actually likes an heir. Nobody
respects someone who didn’t earn his or her own money.
So,
if inheritance isn’t the best way to acquire wealth, what is?!
My response on Twitter sums it up pretty well, I think. I’d rather
earn it, save it, and invest it for myself. In the process, I’ll
learn. And, hopefully, I’ll learn enough to avoid the fatal errors that ensnare so
many.
Like
Jack Whittaker.
___
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