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We hear the opposite all the time, someone who came from a council estate/ghetto and built themselves up (though it's not as common as the sensationalized stories).
The reverse I imagine must be even more so uncommon, middle class to extremely wealthy people who later lose everything and become homeless or live in abhorrent conditions.
People say that stories like these happened in the recession but is that really true? How many of those people were stable beforehand and owned their house, car, etc...fully without being on a mortgage/loan. Can a multi millionaire who has actual million dollar assets lose everything?
Wealth is no protection from mental illness or addiction. Either of those can put even the richest person into the gutter. And there are plenty of examples of wealthy figures in sports or the entertainment industry who made millions and wound up back in ordinary circumstances because they mismanaged their money and spent it all. That's not the same as living in the gutter, but once someone's used to a hedonistic lifestyle, going back to being an ordinary Joe or Jane who has to live on a budget has got to smart.
I think there are countless stories that you're asking about. Did you not witness the credit/housing bubble between 2002-2006 and the subsequent day of reckoning? You have people with millions in assets who were living on credit with complete disregard for all the loans they took out...because 1) real estate "always goes up." 2) Fear of missing out.
I have yet to see any responsible person lose their footing in the middle class. The key is to adjust your expectations, monitor you cash-flow and balance sheet, stay insured, and a trusted safety net in your friends and family (they can be wonderful counsel to prevent you from making bad choices)...all of which seems more challenging than in decades past.
I could Google so many of riches to rags stories. From athletes to musicians to actors/actresses. Many say they had bad people watching over them. Lottery winners. Business owners where the economy shredded them into bankruptcy. Just too many.
Plenty of atheletes think those $2mil contracts will last forever. 3-4 years later they aren't the top of the depth chart and slowly fade until eventually being cut.
It created a big to-do recently when a rising star from the Celtic was cut and found to be working a local Home Depot several years later due to blowing all the cash he earned while playing.
Antoine Walker is another perfect example. He earned 108 million over his career, but then declared bankruptcy in 2010 with $12 million in debt.
My stepfather did a leveraged buyout of a cigar company as CEO. He was so hard to get along with that the rest of the team pooled their stock and voted him off the island. He started his forced retirement with $10 million when they flipped the company back to Ron Perelman shortly afterwards four years after the initial buyout. When he died 25 years later, the house was liquidated as a short sale after the attorney/executor burned up the last couple hundred grand in his brokerage account. The guy died insolvent. Fortunately, the house was in trust for his children and my mother had no ownership stake or he would have wiped her out, too. I was sweating out Medicaid rules but fortunately, he did the team player thing and died in a nursing home after his big health event before the Medicare benefit ran out.
No one that I know personally from very high levels of wealth.
I grew up with a guy whose father founded a small firm of architects and mother was a PhD botanist. I have no idea what they are worth, but I'd guesstimate at least several million (which, in our neck of the woods, is still quite a lot), and they own around 200 acres of land. Kind of a "landed gentry."
The son was brilliant intellectually, but he crossed the line from genius to madness long ago. He got into alcohol badly years ago. I bumped into him at a gas station a month or so ago - we're 33, and he looked 53. I didn't ask what he was doing, but he looked roadworn. It was obvious he's had a tough life.
Depends on what you define as 'riches', but when I was 24 years old I was making what's the equivalent today of $110k/year, I started drinking, it nearly ruined my life. I'm sober now, and doing well again, but the fact that I'm alive and not in jail is a sort of miracle, based on how I lived for most of my 20s.
Stop by any AA/NA meeting and just listen, you'll hear plenty of stories. It's not just athletes and lottery winners in those kinds of situations.
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