From Cave to Castle?

This story, from MSN, struck me enough to comment on it: Two homeless, cave-dwelling brothers in their 40’s, are pegged to inherit $6.6 BILLION dollars from a long lost grandmother. Talk about surprising life moments. Of course, the Hungarian brothers will most likely have to dig up some paperwork to prove they are related. Genetics research shows they are related to the woman with the inheritance.

But this got me thinking, what must be going through these brothers’ minds? Based on the short interview and comments the article posts, they are obviously elated and relieved, with the hope of living a “normal” life as one of the brothers mentioned. Normal? $6.6 billion dollars, whether it’s in US currency, Hungary’s forint, or euros, is a lot more money than “normal” people ever come into contact with. Their lives will be going from one extreme to another. I wonder what psychological effect this will have on their relationship with each other, and if they will make rational financial decisions, or blow it all within a short period of time?

My husband remembers an incident from his childhood that makes me think about how large windfalls affect “normal” or even very poor people. For a brief period of time my husband lived in a very small town. A very poor family in that town came into a large sum of money through an unfortunate accident. He remembers that they went on a buying binge (one of the family members went to high school with my husband during this time). All of a sudden they owned items that they had never owned before, they purchased new vehicles, they would come into my husband’s parents grocery store and pay with cash instead of the food stamps they used previously, they seemed to be spending their money as quickly as they had received it.

Sure enough, within a year that family was purchasing groceries with food stamps again and barely had enough money to pay their bills. They didn’t know how to manage their large windfall and it just burned a hole in their pocket.

Here in the United States, plenty of people play the lottery with the hope that they will someday win a huge sum of money. Of the few people who actually win, some of those go on to make horrible financial decisions and end up deep in debt. Another MSN article from a few months ago describes some of these winners who ended up in terrible financial trouble because they didn’t have any financial skills to manage their windfall properly.

I’m sure a psychologist could explain why an extraordinary event like this causes “normal” people to suffer a financial meltdown. In my opinion, a meltdown happens because 1) they can’t even comprehend such a dramatic and life altering event, leaving them in a stunned state of mind and 2) they may not have good financial skills to begin with, leaving them at a loss on what to do with a much greater sum of money.

I wish these two Hungarian brothers the best of luck and the hope that they do end up with the fortune. The fact that they eeked out a life in caves as urban nomads (I fancy the term Urban Nomad), and were inventive enough to sell scavenged scraps leaves me hopeful that these two men may be frugal and financial savvy enough to manage their new-found fortune.