We have all dreamed about winning the lottery. Especially when all our coworkers at the office come in and announce, “the jackpot is up to 200 million!” and a they are gathering a pool to buy tickets. We all say, “If we win, don’t expect to see me at work tomorrow!” It is natural to dream of getting a huge mass of money out of nowhere and then live a life of ease on the beach somewhere.
The issue with this dream is that I have heard too many stories about how lottery winners end up bankrupt within a few years. Or how it wrecked their marriage and family life.
While I was researching for the post on George Clymer, Signer of the Declaration of Independence, I was struck by this quote from his writings:
Money and water may be compared together in the circumstance of their expenditure; –both running off, the one in the proportion of its heap, or quantity, and the other according to its height or head with this frequent difference, however, that the running of the water regularly diminishes as the head subsides, whereas the running of the money does not decrease with the sinking of the stock from which it is taken, but may go on rather with an accelerated velocity, until the whole is gone. Hence it is that overgrown fortunes often come to an end sooner than moderate ones; and hence the folly, and improvidence, as it may be called, of great acquisitions for children.
John Sanderson, Robert Waln. Biography of the signers to the Declaration of Independence, Volume 3. Philadelphia. William Brown and Charles Peters. 1828
Clymer says that the more money you have the faster it goes away. I also find it interesting that he says children getting great amounts is improvidence and folly.
There are some passages from the Bible that speak to this as well.
Proverbs 20:21 (NIV)
An inheritance quickly gained at the beginning will not be blessed at the end.
Ecclesiastes 5:10-11 (NLT)
Those who love money will never have enough. How meaningless to think that wealth brings true happiness! The more you have, the more people come to help you spend it. So what good is wealth—except perhaps to watch it slip through your fingers!
I think the first reaction after reading passages like these is that we should not work so hard to get more money. I even wrote an earlier post, Don’t wear yourself out trying to get rich. While this is part of balance in life it is not the only side of the story.
I believe the point to be made here is to not work too hard at getting rich quick.
Proverbs 21:5 (NIV)
The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty.
We need to work hard at developing discipline and self control. We need to learn to manage well what we have right now. We need to teach our children how to manage money well. Then, over time, as our wealth increases, we will have the wisdom and understanding of how to manage it and sustain it and help it to continue to grow.
