Welcome back to the podcast. I am home from a much needed vacation. Thanks for your patience

while I took a couple of weeks off, but we're back.

And today I want to talk about a topic

that I've been thinking about a lot in the last couple of years.

I'm going to call it rich and anonymous,

and you'll see where I'm going in a second. I've always had this kind of crazy idea

that there is actually an ideal net worth for everyone. There's an ideal net worth after which money not only stops bringing

pleasure, but it becomes a social liability. And that number, that ideal net worth is

probably lower than most people think.

Business Insider recently ran a story a couple weeks ago of lottery winners who lost all of

their money and people love these kind of stories

because of the schadenfreude that is involved here.

And if you go through it, a common denominator

of the stories is that lottery winnings have a very high degree of, let's call it

social debt which I would describe as friends and families and strangers who feel entitled to ask and beg and steal your money in a way that leaves the lottery winners not only broke but socially exploited.

One of the lottery winners in the story, she explained that, quote, After winning $3.9 million,

Miss Adams found that she no longer had the privilege of privacy.

I was known, she said, and I couldn't go anywhere without being recognized.

Now, a subtle problem with money is that assets are very easy to measure, but liabilities can be hidden.

Measuring your lottery winnings is very simple. In this case it was 3.9 million dollars down to the

penny. But how do you measure losing your privacy or the nagging doubt that some of

your friends only like you for your money. That is way harder to figure out.

...