What is the price of having it all?
Everything costs too much these days. You can look at a grocery bill from three months ago, blink, and those same items will cost you $10 more just three months later. And if you think you’re losing your mind – you’re not. Shrinkflation means the same stuff you used to buy can be in smaller packages – and cost the same. Now, wouldn’t it be awesome if some money could just fall from the sky?
Imagine if you could have it all. Because now would be a great time to be rich. Case in point: I’m about to lose my job, but I haven’t told my wife. She would panic. We have mortgage payments. Car payments. So today, after work, I bought myself a lottery ticket. It was time to change it all.
I told the guy at the counter, “I gotta win this. If I win a million dollars, I’ll have everything I could ever want!” I scratched the paper in front of me, rubbed my eyes, blinked, and read the ticket again. I won! I actually won! I was about to be the best husband ever!
The guy at the counter congratulated me. “Now spend your winnings wisely. And then you’ll have everything.”
Ok, that was some weird advice. I opened my wallet and placed the ticket inside. To my surprise, my wallet was thicker than usual. “What the….” Several hundred-dollar bills were stuffed inside. Were they real? I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a hundred-dollar bill. I slammed the wallet shut. I didn’t want to be robbed. What was going on?
I rushed home and found Mara in the kitchen making dinner. “Babe!” I caught my breath after running in from the garage. “Honey!”
My wife set the potatoes she’d been peeling on the counter. “You ok, hon?”
“The…” I grabbed the stack of cash from my wallet. “The money! We have money! It just appeared out of nowhere!”
“How?” She took the hundred-dollar bill that I had handed to her and studied it with her bank-teller expertise. “It’s the real thing!” she said, astonished.
“I won the lottery! I bought this ticket,” I said, taking it out. “Then I put it in my wallet, and just like that! All this cash before I even cashed in my ticket!” I gave the wallet a dramatic flourish that caused it to fly out from my fingers. It fell into a bowl of salad and the salad fell to the floor as thousands of bills scattered over the kitchen floor, like a pile of autumn leaves that came up to our knees.
I was speechless as Mara started counting just a portion of the cash. “That’s five thousand right here,” she said, holding out the small wad of bills in her hand. The pile of hundreds was so thick I couldn’t see the kitchen floor. When I saw her mouth was open in amazement, I realized I needed to shut my own.
“Is this for real?” she finally asked. “We could pay off the car with this! And buy groceries. And a few mortgage payments! How did you do this? Can you make more money?” She started to gather the cash into piles and stuff them into garbage bags.
“I don’t know,” I said, picking up my wallet and the ticket next to it. “The guy said, ‘Now spend your winnings wisely. And then you’ll have everything.’ That’s some oddball advice. But we’ll be ok now. We can finally go on vacation! How cool is that? We can have everything we want! I can buy you that necklace you wanted! And all because I stopped to buy a ticket!”
“What ticket?”
“This!” I put the ticket in her hand. She didn’t say a word. I saw money, so much money, flying into the air like thick snow. For a moment, I couldn’t see anything but swirling paper. Then the cash settled in a pile up to my waist.
Mara was gone. The ticket lay at the top of the pile, where she had once been standing.
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