To be a bit depressed by the Euromillions story?

[MobLife]

I find myself wishing I knew nothing about it and hadn't read the story about the winning couple!
All day I've been ruminating over that extraordinary sum of money and what it must feel like....it's left me feeling really flat especially when the imagination suddenly dissolves and I'm left mulling over my actual reality of bills and debts and whatever.

It's not even like I have a bad life in so far as I've got a roof over my head and a secure job, no posh holidays or particular luxuries but in the fortune position of not having to worry too much about the food bill and can have a meal out once in a while. And we're all healthy which £184million cannot buy.

The irony is I don't even play the bloody lottery!!

But yeh, very very flat

Exactly, fuck giving anything to the Nhs (I work for the nhs) the abysmal wasting of money such as sending me numerous appointment reminders by post and test for routine shite gets on my tits.

I momentarily wondered what I would do with that sort of money, or even half that sort of money, or even just 1 million would solve lots of problems.
With any win of that nature, I would give at least half away, some to charitable causes (some of the lest well known ones, rather than the major ones that often seem to be more like business).
That said, the thought quickly passed, and I haven't given it another thought.
I do not and never have entered the lottery, although my DH used to when it first started.
I consider lottery tickets to be a kind of voluntary tax, with the bribe of a win.
That said, none of us know the couple concerned or what their circumstances are, or what they plan to do with the money. They will no doubt be receiving lots of begging letters from various people and / or organisations, and none of us know what they will do with the money. They may indeed give lots away to various causes.

This was my thought! It's just voluntarily paying tax.

But apparently if you say you'll help the NHS, look pious and click your heels three times then the lottery gods will cause their faces to shine upon you when the next lot of ping-pong balls are being chosen

They already do, £140 billion per year, more in notional and real terms than it’s ever been funded before; £2,000 per person per year for every man, woman and child in the country.

Liz Truss?

Can you imagine the interest on that amount of money? It must bring in at least 300k a month without even touching the capital, ok they'd pay tax on the interest I imagine, but even so...

What about her? She’s the Foreign Secretary; what has that to do,with the NHS?

You don't understand the concept of Karma. Karma means essentially you reap what you sow in regards to your past lives' deeds.
These people must have donated diamonds in their past lives.
It's a Hindu concept, look it up.

Well I suppose a lot of couples do the lotto between them so they see it as a joint win.

I'm not sure about the legalities of it though, I remember hearing a lot about the Irish winner Dolores McNamara many times over the year, and then last year saw a story that her husband had died, he had never been mentioned at all, definitely not as a winner, so I was surprised to hear she had a husband.

I would have 100% kept it a secret. Yes you would have to have some sort of explanation as to why you were going holidays but you could easily tell close friends you won £50,000 or something and that would be an easy excuse to get you through a few years. I would much rather that than be on edge constantly thinking someone is going to break in, I’m going to get attacked in the street, people are constantly asking for money, charities sending letters etc. You’d need security in place and probably a house move before even being able to go public with it

Look at me putting it down like I wouldn’t fancy it 🤣

I genuinely wish this couple well, with absolutely no envy or resentment. They are obviously decent, respectable hard-working people who bought a ticket for that draw in exactly the same way I did.

I think they have been very poorly advised in going public, though. The media will be all over their lives and the lives of their families & friends. If I were them, I would have stayed private, told absolutely nobody, done nothing with the money for at least 6 months then tell their families they had won £5m. Then they could retire, travel, upgrade their lifestyles etc without anyone knowing how rich they really were.

Yes I do that. But I also spitefully think about those I would leave out, for tiny little petty reasons. Yes Marjorie you were so close. But remember that time you wouldn’t help me with X, well sadly you’re out and I’ve given your million pounds - that would have been yours had you helped - to the local foodbank.

More like £2 odd each 😆

It’s an enormous amount of money. I would never go public, but I would enjoy giving the vast majority of it to family, friends, deserving causes. It would create plenty of millionaires because surely very few people would keep that whole amount for themselves?

If I won, as well as buying one of my Fantasy Rightmove houses and doing lovely things for myself and my nearest and dearest, I reckon I’d go full JK Rowling… give away a fuck tonne of it, set up a charity of my own and throw some financial weight behind some feminist causes.

I’d give a pretty hefty sum to the hospice where my Dad was taken care of before he died. I’ll never forget how kind the staff there were, and a lot of them were working for free over the Christmas period because there wasn’t enough money to pay them.

I’d buy a number of really big but maybe rundown houses in the countryside, do them up and turn them into women’s shelters. Really lovely ones.

And, once the initial fun and games dies down and we’re just living day to life, DH would probably run a shitload of marathons all over the world so spend a lot of time training, and the rest of the time play a shitload of golf. I would re-take up horse riding and rock climbing, maybe have piano and guitar lessons, get a tutor to teach me some foreign languages, read books, get back into crochet and cross stitch, go to gigs and plays and shows whenever I want to… just do things I enjoy.

Good for them. I’d make my family and extended family and friends lives a shit lot easier by giving them all a good whack of it.

I do do the lottery sometimes - when I can afford a ticket. I did buy tickets for that last big euro lottery, but if I had won, I would have given good amounts to my favourite charities, and all my family and close friends would have received £1,000,000 + each. But I have my own idea of something I want to do, that I have no chance of doing without a very large win.

For many years now, I have wanted to be in the position to buy nice 'buy for let' properties - flats with gardens, or terraced houses with gardens (as my money would spread further). I would mainly let to families with dogs ( + other pets), at about £50 per week less than the cost of a similar property with other landlords, and it would include the cost of the council tax. If some were in very dire straights, I would - in conjunction with advice from people like shelter - provide them with very low, or even no cost properties if I was advised that that would help them in the longer term.

We - me, my husband, our (now adult) children, and our old, but very loved dog, who has been a member of the family since she was a puppy - had to sell our house about 5 years ago, and move into a private rented flat. Unfortunately it was extremely difficult to find one where they would accept a dog, we eventually found one - just in time - as otherwise we would have had to live in our cars until we could either find a flat that would accept a dog, or until the local authority could house us.

There was no-way that we would, or could, have rehomed our dog, anymore than we could re-home one of our ND adult children. I'm sorry if that annoys anyone, but we all agreed that that was the priority for our family. Obviously if we still had school-age children, we would not have had that luxury. However when they were young, our finances and health were fine.

I'd love to win that kind of money.

By going public, they have made themselves targets.

This x100

1 million isn't really a lot of money. Relatively speaking. In most places in London you can't even buy a house for that amount, and certainly not enough to buy and make over the house. Not to mention cost of living if you had kids.

Exactly this. I would keep it private and give away a lot of it.

I would also worry that it would turn my kids into trustafarians with no real sense of purpose.

I would wonder about how much to keep in the family so that future generations were comfortable.

And I would worry about it going into the wrong hands - eg into charity CEO’s pockets instead of to the charity. I guess I could dedicate my time to researching causes to give it to. A la J K Rowling.

It would be lovely to help family - close and distant. Even my exh whom I am not on speaking terms with.

And lovely to stop working which I would! Or just do work which interests me instead of what currently I mainly do because it pays the bills.

Plus how amazing to be able to fix the parts of the house which currently I have no money to fix.

I think it would be fun but also a worry basically. You would need honest financial advice!

First thing I would do though is go on holiday.

Good luck to them, wish it was me! I think its easy to say you wouldn't go public, but I think the Lotto people recommend going public with a huge win as they know its practically impossible to keep this kind of money secret.

As for dividing big prizes up to $1m each, sod that! That won't even buy you a big house any more in lots of places! I buy the odd lotto ticket to fantasize about exotic 5 star holidays and buying several houses and maybe an island in Tahiti, not just paying off the mortgage and going part time (nice as that would be).

I think its easy to say you wouldn't go public, but I think the Lotto people recommend going public with a huge win as they know its practically impossible to keep this kind of money secret.

Perhaps, but there’s a big difference between just not keeping it a secret, and having it splashed all over the feckin Daily Mail along with your address, your kids names and a sob story about your ex-wife…

I agree its a difficult choice. But I assume that by going public they at least are promised some press good will, that they probably won't get if the Daily Mail has to hunt them down.

If the money were to be split there wouldn't be such a prize money to be split.
These massive pots exist due to a snowball effect. A huge pot in itself is advertising, I see posters in shops, even people I know talk about these huge prizes- and that in turn encourages ticket sales and then makes the prize money even larger.
"Making lots of people millonaires" isn't so sensationalist, fewer people will buy tickets when things are lukewarm, overall prize money will be lower. It suits the lotto companies to give away silly money- that is when they make most profit.