Ingot Tree

Mark Twain, who had a lifelong penchant for dodgy investments and gimmicky inventions, lost about $4 million in today's dollars betting on a newfangled but unwanted typesetting machine in the 1890's. He subsequently had to take to the lecture circuit to stave off bankruptcy.

 

Michael Jackson, who began churning out Top 10 songs and albums as the lead singer of the Jackson 5 before reaching puberty, found it necessary to pledge a stake in his lucrative songbook of Beatles hits to secure a $270 million bank loan to forestall a slide into bankruptcy.

 

Mike Tyson, like Jackson a gifted man-child, is entangled in his own financial woes despite once having the marquee power to draw $30 million purses for a single fight. When Tyson filed for bankruptcy in 2004, he listed debts of $27 million, including about $13 million in unpaid federal taxes and about $174,000 for a diamond-studded gold chain. He had maintained a monthly budget of about $400,000 before the filing.

 

Buffalo Bill, Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, Wayne Newton, Burt Reynolds, Elton John and other public examples of spending run amok were, or are, all entertainers, and entertainers offer ready fodder for tsk-tsking - largely because gossip columns make it easy for the rest of us homely paupers to take quiet satisfaction in their plight. Entertainers, for the most part, are also peculiarly vulnerable when it comes to personal finance.

 

"You have people who are struggling for a long time and then overnight, boom, they hit it," says Shelley Finkel, Mike Tyson's manager. "If they don't have someone watching out for them, and some emotional stability, it will be very hard for them to be grounded financially."

 

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"The rich are different from you and me: they are more egotistical," says Theodore R. Aronson, managing principal of Aronson Johnson Ortiz, an investment firm in Philadelphia. "Psychologically, I think the rich, because of their egos, think they know everything. Well, they don't, and many of them repeatedly make horrible investments - because they can."

 

Financial success can breed its own peculiar set of vulnerabilities. "People who are very successful develop elevated sensibilities about their skills, and when things turn on them they won't admit they're wrong because their self-confidence has held them up so long," says Arnold S. Wood, chief executive of Martingale Asset Management in Boston. "In the face of evidence, even subjective evidence, that suggests that something bad is about to happen to someone, a funny thing happens: They reject the evidence.

 

"These kinds of people just continue spending because they think the money will keep coming in because they're so successful," adds Wood, who says he is fascinated by the possible neurological and social underpinnings of financial delusion and decision-making. He believes that gender plays a strong role in financial ruin because, he says, women tend to be more risk averse than men when it comes to money. Some interesting research backs this up.

 

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America's consumer landscape, which prizes spending and encourages people to define themselves by what they own, only makes the financial balancing act trickier for adults, especially if they have fat wallets.

 

"Someone who goes broke, or someone who goes into debt, is really somebody who isn't comfortable having their money," Gurney says. "Yes, it appears as a lack of discipline. But the lack of discipline comes from an emotional place that causes them to be undisciplined. It's not about the money. It's about our emotional relationship to money.

 

"The people who are out there just running through money have failed because they haven't come to terms with who they are and what they want the money to do for them," she adds. "I see a lot of baby boomers beginning to panic because they haven't figured this out."

// posted by Ingot Tree @ 2:19 AM