What’s your I was almost rich story?

40 comments

  1. A friend of mine was employee number 12 (or something close to that) at Amazon.com and asked if wanted to work there. I decided to stay in graduate school instead.

  2. Friend was big into mining bitcoin in like early 2010, offered me to jump on board and help invest in a set up for 500 pounds. I don’t know exactly how much he has made out of it, but he was smart and sold some off, held some and sold a large chunk in 2021, all I know is he is mid 30s retired with houses in Mexico, UK and France, and I work 9-6

  3. I held thousands of GME shares when they turned off the buy button. I still do, but I used to too.

  5. My wife and I recently graduated from college and got married. Her first full time job was a teacher in Warren, Ohio. We are not gamblers, as a I always believed that a penny saved is a penny earned. But every week, a group of teachers put money into a kitty to buy lottery tickets. My wife put in $5 and told me that night when she showed me the several pages of photocopied tickets so we could check the numbers. We watched the lottery that evening and I started to circle the winning numbers like I was playing bingo. One of the tickets hit all, but 1 number. If it had hit, our share was something like $600k after taxes. I still remember the numbness in my body as I kept circling the winning numbers on the ticket. After taxes and splitting the almost winning ticket, I think we won around $300.

    Never played the lottery again, but it was fun for that one time!

  6. Back around 2012-ish (don’t remember the exact year) a friend of mine told me about bitcoin. He hyped it up REALLY well. Around whatever time it was, they were right at $1000 per coin. I almost dumped the entirety of my $13k in savings into it.

    I really should have.

  7. I heard of and looked into bitcoin in 2009, I setup a miner on my PC but stopped within a day because I found it boring and electicity was expensive…

  8. I dated a girl in high school that was a cheerleader but also kind of nerdy, straight As and took school very seriously. I pretty much viewed high school as a place to hang out with my friends and play football and baseball. For this reason she broke up with me. She went to college, I joined the Army and we lost touch. She’s an attending physician in a large university’s learning hospital now.

  9. Our work group was 1 number away from winning The Big Game (Mega Millions now) which would have made each of us millionaires. Instead we won $10,000 when after taxes and divided we each got a $700 check.

  10. I was thinking about buying GameStop stock when it was just a dollar, before it took off. They had revamped their entire executive staff and I suspected it would take off. I didn’t buy any.

    I had a chance to get in on the class action lawsuit from 3M that settled recently and I blew it off.

    Feels bad man lol

  12. Not my story. But a coworker of mine worked at opening one of the first Walmarts in Gerogia, even met Sam Walton.

    At one point they offered him stock options at a reduced paycheck, which he declined because he considered that drinking money and he wasn’t going to give that up.

    If he had taken the stock options while continuing to work there as long as he did he would likely be bringing in six figures of passive income today.

  13. I was very aware of the Google IPO but didn’t have any money to invest. Passed on crypto too when it took off. I thought it was too volatile which is true but I still could’ve made bank.

  14. I bought bitcoins for 12000€ per bitcoin and sold them for 52000€ per bitcoin.

    ​

    Sadly I invested only about 1000€ Had I put all my money in there… damn…

  15. When smartphones first started getting popular I went to a few friends of mine who all worked in IT. I said guys we need to develop an app that would allow you to order from any restaurant and someone would deliver it for a small fee. The main reason no one wanted to do it is and I quote “no one wants to have Applebee’s delivered when they can just go there and get it.” No one wanted to get in with me to try to develop it. So I dropped it. Now look last year Doordash made $7.687 billion dollars.

  16. I realized last year that my binder of Pokémon cards from when they first launched had 6 cards in it that put the at auction value north of $600,000.

    My ex wife that had been storing my things, lost it all.

    (She didn’t hide or sell them. Just lost them. She cried when I told her cuz she bloody well knows I would’ve given her a cut, and is living low income. 💀)

  18. Not my story but dad jumped out of a telecomms startup that he and a uni mate started just before they got their license approved by the government. It took them 5 years to get there and my dad I guess lost his patience. His mate, the CEO, is now a billionaire and one of the richest people in the Uk.

  19. I was on Who Wants to be a Millionaire and tapped out at 64k. If only I had paid better attention to Literature in school.

  20. I thought of the idea of spinning rims years before they were actually invented, but I thought it would be so stupid nobody would buy them so I didn’t patent them.

  21. Not me but my dad was going to put £100 into bitcoin when it first launched. This was back when it was I think $1 a coin and I believe the exchange rate was still roughly £1=$2. Specifics aside my mum talked him out of it and he didn’t do it. We’d be worth millions now. Then my dad also wanted to make an investment in Apple in the 90s which he got talked out of.

  22. I grew up hearing this story from my dad. My birth story.

    Hospital room, 1996. My moms in labor, my dads off to the side with a video camera awaiting my arrival. My mother has had an epidural and some other drugs so she’s completely out of it. Doctor hasn’t shown yet. Nurse is in and out of the room, not paying attention. Eventually i start making my journey, and quickly. Moms not there, shes off in happy drug land while i come sliding into the world. Doctor still isn’t there. Nurse isn’t there. Dad notices I’ve made my arrival right before i fall off the hospital bed and hit the ground. He makes a split second decision, drops the camera and grabs me by the right leg midair. Camera breaks. I’m alive. Doctor still hasn’t arrived. Now the nurse comes rushing in while my dad screams expletives. If he hadn’t have dropped the camera they would have made millions in the ensuing legal battle. I would have crashed and burned on the hospital floor, and they would have won millions. But instead dad dropped the camera that had all the evidence in order to catch me. So i lived, and we were poor. End story. Thanks, dad.

  23. I bought over 100 bitcoins way back in the day. I was a teen and didn’t know how wallets and transactions worked, but I knew I could buy weed off the web.

    Was afraid the FBI could track down my Username and Password so I made sure it wasn’t linked to any current accounts. Spent about $120~ dollars, to have some pot shipped to a local church. I know there is still some change in that wallet. I bought more than was needed, because transaction fees could change based on demand so I didn’t want to spend it twice.

    Those 5 or so BTC are gone forever now. Never managed to get them back and didn’t foresee BTC ever being over $10 per.

  24. I was almost rich but when I fell out the womb the woman laying there wasn’t a politician or criminal’s wife but a mechanic’s. Better luck next time I guess

  25. When I was about 8 years old, I was playing with some friends in an abandoned lot. What can I say, we lived in the hood and in the 70’s, we were free to explore the outside world.

    Anyway, the foundation of the former house was still there. At one point I look down and see a brown paper bag. I pick it up and low and behold, it’s full of cash. It certainly LOOKED like a lot of money for an eight year old in the 70’s. I show it to my friends and end up taking it home.

    At the time, my uncle was living with us. He was maybe 13-14 years older than me, which is to say he had some sense. The people that left that money there were probably going to come looking for it. The lot was maybe 4-5 houses away from mine.

    So he made me take it back. That’s as close as I got to getting rich quick :).

  26. Once I was caught in a scam. The guy made me believe we were growing money from my money, which money I’ve never seen again.

    I’m glad I’ve survived the shame.

  28. I bought a few hundred bitcoins back in 2011 just for fun. Stored them on a USB-stick and kinda forgot about it.

    Still looking for that USB stick.

  29. I worked for a small software company and was offered stock options while it was private. I didn’t buy them because I was newly married and expecting a child. The company was acquired by a massive software company and my equity would have been about $1.3 million when I was 27 years old. I probably still would have worked, but that would have been phenomenal to get a start in real estate and other investing to retire young.

  30. I played the same numbers in the powerball every drawing for a little over 2 years. I decided to change to some fresh numbers, and 2 weeks later, the winning numbers were my old ones. I’d be almost a billionaire right now if I didn’t change them.

  31. back in the early 2010s before the bitcoin craze there was this site that gifted you 5 bitcoins for learning about bitcoin and opening a wallet with them, I did it but as I saw it wasnt like easy to withdraw or anything never gave much into it, I gifted that macbook to my by then gf because I got a new one, in 2018-19 craze I rememberd but I was never able to remember the name of the site, I try checking all my email accounts and nothing, I even went as far as contacting my 8+ years exgf to see if she still had the laptop, she did got a hold of it she had added a new hdd because the other one was too small, I punched my pillows everynight every time I remembered for 2 years straight

  32. Worked for Tesla from 2013-2014. Had I been fully vested and keep my RSUs I’d be a multimillionaire. Instead, I quit and sold what I had to go on some epic adventures.

  33. I got all the numbers to the powerball correct, but ithe ticket was for the state lottery. Not the powerball. 😔

  34. My dad had two lobster licenses given to him by his grandfather in the late 70s/early 80s. Sold them both and bought a Toyota Celica to try to pick up chick’s. He wrecked the car within a year. If he kept them I’d be the proud owner of two lobster licenses worth over a million each. Plus I’d make huge money to work 8 weeks a year. Thanks Dad.

  36. My grandfather used to own a import export business and invested in apple early. He also has a 1960’s Aston Martin in his garage he let fall into disrepair. As I’ve gotten older I’ve learned that he’s quite impatient. He got out of both way to early and now has nothing but stories to show for it.

    Not necessarily me being rich, but could’ve been much better off as a family than we are (not very).

  37. My grandfather was the co founder of the city I currently live in. He had a lot of land and money. He died when my mom was 10, and his brother stole all the documents in his funeral and ran away. My mom was too young to understand. He gave her and her sisters 10 cents for them to shut up. He sold the lands and lived happily in Japan where he died. His son (who is 60+ now) is living here in Brazil but he doesn’t acknowledge the things his father did. He is a doctor.

  38. My uncle is probably worth over 30 million. It’s my dads brother so I was nutsack away from making it

  39. I found out about bitcoin in 2012, decided to buy it in early 2013. I was gonna buy it and called my dad to ask his opinion. He advised not to do that. I listened to him.

  40. Which one? The time where I was a streamer but realized I had no desire to be famous (I don’t regret this, fame is fucking creepy)?

    The one where I was knocked out of a giant multi-million dollar poker tourney 6 seats before the cutoff (to a fucking rivered four of a kind no less, I’ve never been so fucking angry)?

    The one where I won an actual NASCAR car but never got the prize (god please don’t ask me to explain this one, I was 11 and still get pissed about it)?

    The one where I was from a rich family who wound up poor?

    Or how about the time I joined this weird Reddit sub called “WallStreetBets” but never really paid it much attention(yup, missed the Gamestop train too)?

    Edit: Grammar

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