Kansas Powerball lottery winner claims jackpot anonymouslyPrevious TopicNext Topic

Living on a fixed income for a long time obviously has its down-side, but what you're describing is stupidity. Being stupid is a much bigger problem than an income that doesn't go up. I could spend the 600 grand a year I'd net after earning a million bucks a year, and I could probably do it pretty easily, but  only by being stupid or reckless. 600 grand a year is enough to live extremely nicely and still make an annual investment that's considerably more than the average household income.

Of course I do see some posts here that indicate that a fair number of people might follow the wrong path. When people talk about how they'd spend a windfall of a couple of hundred grand to a million bucks there's a lot of talk about vacations, new cars, new houses, etc, but few posts about saving most of it for retirement. How many people with a typical household income are already putting away the 10 or 20 grand a year for their retirement that they could by investing the majority of a windfall?

One of the problems with annuities is that a lot of peole will start living within their means, but just barely within their means. For those people, even a 10% annual increase will probably just result in a 10% increase in spending.There's no question that a lot of people would be better off choosing the annuity, but I think the people who would benefit the most are among the least likely to do so.

I can only agree with you, but then I'm one of those people who seem to always need to spend it all.  I have a CPA friend who manages to spend less than 100% of their income and I imagine that about 5% of the population can do that.  I could really be socking it away if only I stayed living on $12,000 a year.  My only excuse is that you do have to live a little for today - you never know when it will all end.  I do know that when I'm stuck in that cheap retirement home while my buddy is getting luxurous bed baths and the tastiest of pureed foods, I'll probably be jeolous (well, maybe not).  I've heard wealthy folks say - "It all goes to the same thing, no matter how much you make, your house ($10 million instead of $150,000), your cars, and your recreation.  Of course, those things all mean different things to different folks.

I can handle money very well because we never had it when I was growing up, it was just me and mom.

She worked minimum wage jobs, I worked in Jr. High, High School and College.

Momma preached to me from day one 'stay out of debt', and except for student loans, I have.  I live every day as if I was

making $18,000 a year, and I made about 3x-4x that amount, but I still lived as cheap as I could, no telling when your job might disappear.  I parlayed $60,000 in the stock market to almost a million, gave back 10%, then got out of the market.  It's all in an IRA I can't have anyway, until I retire. 

My job HAS disappeared - twice in four years, thank god we have no debt at all except for our mortgage, and I have saved enough that I don't need to worry for quite a long time, hopefully I will land another job soon, and get my wife off my back (she works). 

It all comes back to priorities, how you were raised, what life has taught you.

I could very easily spend a few hundred dollars on lottery tickets every drawing, I limit myself to 10.  I'm not so tight that I squeek, but I do have the philosophy that 'you can't take it with you', so I do indulge once in awhile.