Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.

Michael Carroll was an English garbage collector who won 10 million pounds in the UK National

Lottery in 2002. That would have been worth around $20 million at the time.

He became a tabloid newspaper celebrity for a while and was known as the King of the Chavs.

There was even a TV movie made about him in 2006.

In an interview shortly after his lottery win, Carol said that he would not be tempted into spending his money lavishly and only wanted to buy a three-bedroom house near a lake where he could go fishing.

That sounds like a good plan, but it's not exactly the way things worked out.

You don't usually

get nicknamed the King of the Chavs while fishing quietly at a lake.

Carroll quickly developed a taste for drugs, alcohol and partying. In 2005 he was given 240

hours of community service after it was found that while drunk, he had been

catapulting steel balls from his Mercedes van at parked cars and shop windows. You're not meant to do that.

Almost any fisherman will tell you that catapulting steel balls from a van will scare the fish away.

It was noted in court that he had accumulated 42 offences on his record by 2006.

In May 2010, less than 10 years after winning the lottery, Carol applied for his old job as a garbage collector again,

telling the press that he had no regrets about

the way in which he had spent his winnings. In 2013, he spent three months in a hotel for

the homeless after being unable to find work. He's not the only lottery winner that ran into

trouble. In 2005, Roger and Laura Griffith won

£1.8 million on the UK National Lottery. They bought a big house and Roger got to record an

album with the band he played with in University. The interest alone on the couple's lottery

winnings would have earned them more than the median UK household income at the time.

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