Member-only story
What Newly-Minted Millionaires Struggle With
I’ve written about what I learned from suddenly becoming a multi-millionaire at twenty-seven, and what I learned from gradually spending all of it in mid-life retirement. I have many friends who have a lot of money, mostly in the tens of millions range, but some with hundreds of millions, plus the odd billionaire. I also coach and mentor people, and I help those who suddenly come into vast wealth deal with the challenges that brings.
It can be difficult to know what to do with all that money, including how to take care of it and make sure that it grows and becomes sustainable wealth. However, based on my own experience and also on conversations with many others, the hardest thing to deal with is the threat to identity, the sudden freedom, and the loss of meaning.
Most people spend their lives focused on mundane objectives such as putting food on the table, paying bills, and raising children. These demands fan out into other areas of life, such as setting and meeting education and career goals, living within a budget to save and invest, and working on gradually paying-off a mortgage. Often when the kids leave home, couples can have identity crises because their time, money, and attention is freed up. Sometimes the couple remembers that they had a relationship and then all the deferred hurt suddenly bubbles up to be looked at. When folks don’t have the capacity or courage to face this un-lived past, marriages often end.
But what happens when you’re in your twenties or thirties and you’ve worked hard to develop a professional career when suddenly millions of dollars are thrust upon you? This often happens when people work at start-ups and their stock options blossom overnight due to an IPO. That’s what happened to me. Once the shock wears off, and some fancy toys have been purchased, depression often sets in.
The first shocking discovery is that money doesn’t actually remove any of the real, deep suffering, the depression, the anxiety, and all the complexes. Money doesn’t do what it says on the tin. The deeper problem is that there is no longer any excuse to defer examining all the painful stuff from childhood: the wounding, the grief, and the interwoven limiting beliefs. And we all carry this stuff. Anyone who tells you that, “I had a perfect childhood” is either lying, in…
