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Hey Big Spender, Spend a Little Time with Me
January 18th, 2010 by Laurie CampbellIt’s not the money, it’s the mindset. Just ask some unlucky lottery winners.
Over time I’ve landed on some strange shores while surfing the Internet. What I’ve found is sometimes appalling. Like stories about big lottery winners who end up being big losers simply because they have no clue about what to do with their winnings.
Well, it actually goes deeper than that. It’s not just that these people lack money management skills, it’s that their attitude towards money is deeply flawed. These are people who by and large believe that money in and of itself solves all of life’s problems. The notion that money is just a tool, and that the user of the tool is the real source of wealth or the lack of it, does not enter their heads.
There appears to be an astonishing number of people in the world who fit this description. For example, according to one Internet news article, almost 80 per cent of big lottery winners in the United States lose their winnings in a matter of a few years at most.
Take a man named William “Bud” Post, for instance, who won over $16 million. He spent freely, and invested in automobile and restaurant business ventures with family and friends without the aid of a financial advisor and without bothering to do any risk analysis. Within a single year, he ended up firing a gun over the head of a bill collector. That was before he declared bankruptcy. He now depends on social security cheques for a living.
Think about that. Sixteen million dollars gone in less than a year.
There are literally thousands of lottery stories similar to those of “Bud” across North America and around the world. They may not involve as much money, but the patterns are the same, often worse. Indeed, some of the tragedies are so astounding that they beggar belief, involving everything from drug-running and extortion to contract killings and cold-blooded murder.
I read about this stuff and I shake my head. If only Credit Canada had been on hand to help these people before they picked up their big cheques. The first thing they would have learned from us is, invest in some self-awareness. Namely, deal with the negative attitudes you have about money and give it some respect. It’s the mindset towards money that counts most. With the right attitude, money tends to stick around in one’s life.
People like “Bud” demonstrate patterns of thinking and behavior that qualify them as self-saboteurs. That’s the term we use at Credit Canada for individuals who are self-defeatist in their thinking and activities. It’s the same sort of thing we see in so many people who come to us for counselling involving chronic debt problems.
Often, self-saboteurs are wholly or partially unconscious about what moves them financially speaking. When good fortune smiles upon them in the form of large sums of money, thoughts start entering their heads like, “I don’t deserve this,” or, “This can’t be real.” Or they simply experience an uneasy, unarticulated feeling of guilt that compels them to get rid of the cash in one way or another as soon as possible.
Credit Canada’s antidote for all this is to accentuate the positive while encouraging self-saboteurs to get past the emotional pain that comes with increased self-awareness. It all starts with being honest with yourself about what money means to you. And you learn about that simply by examining your spending habits over time. Do the habits have any real relationship to your income?
So to each one of you future lottery winners out there, let me say this. First of all, don’t bet the farm on your lottery ticket. Secondly, if you think you have the makings of a self-saboteur, then hey big spender, spend a little time with me and my qualified counsellors here at Credit Canada.
You could end up hitting another kind of jackpot. One you’ll keep for life.
