In an effort to drum up business, Camelot has completed research on what new millionaires spend their money on. They interviewed one hundred of these big winners and charted their responses in this picture:
Your money paid for this picture.
I am not against playing the Lottery. I think it’s sweet to pay a pound to play a game of chance—presuming that pound isn’t earmarked for food for your family, what’s the harm, I say? However, I am extremely distressed by the choices these people are making once their prize money arrives.
If you have money, you should use it to make your life happier. However, these purchases are not about more joyful lives; they’re about other people’s perceptions.
For example, putting a hot tub into your house: stupid. In reality, wealthy people do not have hot tubs in their houses because it’s a well-known fact that hot tubs are disasters. They breed disease; they leak, doing serious damage to weight-bearing walls; and hot tubs are cited in more divorce proceedings than manufacturers care to admit. Quite frankly, nothing should be done in tubs besides bathing. If you want to have sex in water, do it in the ocean like everyone else does.
Seventeen per cent have snooker tables (which I’m assuming they have put in their so-called games rooms). These are also silly. Winners don’t enjoy snooker; no one does. I think you’ll find that these rooms and the games in them are only for show; the owners think they portray a life of leisure, but they do not. Within weeks, the baize will be stained by coffee cup rings and no one but no one will be bothered in the slightest.
The only reason gyms exist in the first place is so that unfit people can claim they are too busy to go to them, so putting one in your home blows that excuse for your fatness out of the water. Think about it, people.
The bar doesn’t surprise me but it does concern me. Here’s the thing about recreational drinking: to do it, you need a glass, ice and liquor. You do not need a bar or bar stools to enjoy a refreshing G & T. Bars are places where horny businessmen, depressed alcoholics and off duty policemen meet to pretend that their misery is normal; why anyone would want to put a place like that into their own home is beyond me.
A home cinema? An electric gate? Your numbers come up and all of a sudden you’re Phil Spector?
If you do get lucky in the lottery tonight, do yourself a favour and make better choices than your predecessors. Invest your winnings wisely. Do some travelling. Set aside enough savings. Fund a number of charitable organisations. Use the money to make your life and the lives of other happier and more fulfilled.
And for god’s sake, don’t be stingy with your love: get a cat and a dog. Otherwise it means you’re racist.
Everyone Needs an Algonquin 
Agatha’s Public Chimes In