Around 2001, my wife and I had the pleasure of attending a concert to see the headlining band named Barenaked Ladies.
Back in 1993, the Canadian-born Barenaked Ladies produced a hit song titled “If I Had a Million Dollars.”
This song was iconic for several reasons.
The lyrics made it sound like what an average median household income person might do if they suddenly received one million dollars. And, how they would share that windfall with someone special in their life. It’s pretty much a guy singing about how much more he could give his girlfriend if he had a million dollars.
I’m not going to publish the lyrics verbatim, but I am going to share some highlights.
The song starts out with the guy buying practical things for his girlfriend.
He’d buy her a house, furniture, a car, a tree fort in the yard, and a refrigerator inside the tree fort.
And, while he doesn’t know what it would be like to have a million dollars, he thinks he’d probably still be the same person he was before receiving that money.
So, he sings about how he’d have pre-wrapped sausage and Kraft dinner and “all the fanciest dijon ketchups.”
Eventually, practicality turned to extravagance.
He’d buy her exotic pets like a monkey, a llama or an emu, along with a fur coat and some art (a Picasso or a Garfunkel). He’d drive her to the store in a limousine.
Toward the end of the song, he says, “If I had a million dollars, I’d buy your love,” and he concludes with, “I’d be rich.”
I thought about this song a few weeks ago when our national media encouraged Americans to believe in the possibility that they could join the ranks of billionaires for a mere investment of two George Washingtons.
I remember when I was a kid and I thought a million dollars was a lot of money. But, if you watch the various lotteries, they make a million dollars seem like pocket change. People have been conditioned to get more excited about the jackpot when it climbs to more than 500 million dollars.
Sometimes I feel like the Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (movie) character Dr. Evil, when he wakes up from a cryogenic sleep spanning decades and he realizes that a million dollars isn’t a lot of money.
The lottery a few weeks ago hit nearly $1.6 billion with a cash payout option of $904 million. That’s a ridiculous amount of money. Seriously.
Do you realize that if you retained $100 million of that bounty to take care of your next several generations of family, and took the remaining $804 million and gifted every individual in Fillmore County, Minn. (a total population of 20,980), you could give each individual $38,322. So, a household with four individuals (adults and children) would receive $153,289.
With that kind of money, a person could pay off their home and maybe even their vehicles. And, they’d be in a great position to send their kids to college along with making a sizable donation to their charity of choice. That amount of money would still be enough to change somebody’s life.
But the reality is that having that kind of money handed to a person doesn’t really help them in the long run. I’ve seen it before and it will happen again. Quite often, the money is spent just as quickly as it is received.
How many of these multi-million dollar lottery winners lose everything within a few years, including their loved ones.
If you aren’t happy before you are rich, then what makes you think you’ll be happy if you instantly become rich?