One day, buckets of money appear in their bank account — maybe from an inheritance or perhaps just a banking error — and overnight they become rich beyond their wildest dreams.
We went to question and answer site, Quora, to find out what happens when $1m lands in your account?
Rags to riches and back
One day monetary theorist and trader, Andrew Bransford-Brown checked his bank account and was stunned to see a balance of more than $2m. “I had closed out my retirement money from the county (around $10,000) and somehow they gave me $2.1m.”
He wrote that he first wondered whether he could transfer it overseas but “knew it would have to be a day or two before I could.” Unfortunately for him, he added “A few hours later they yanked it.”
Robert Frederking wrote that a friend of his was accidentally sent several million dollars in a wire transfer after moving back to the US from Saudi Arabia.
She got a call from the bank, Frederking wrote, asking if she was expecting a transfer from Saudi Arabia. “She said ‘yes’. There was a pause, and they asked her to ‘please come down to the branch’.”
Frederking wrote: “When she got there, they asked her roughly how much she was expecting, and when it was a lot less than a million dollars, they explained that they had gotten (I believe) a $6m wire transfer.”
When Stephen C Allison lived as an expat in Wiesbaden, Germany, he “had a little fun with the manager of the small branch bank” where his company’s earnings landed from IBM each month.
Allison wrote that one month the bank statement showed a balance of 999,999,999.99 German marks (around $400m). “I went to the bank and the friendly manager greeted me smiling, until I said I wanted to close our account,” wrote Allison. “He looked dismayed, and asked if we had had some kind of problem that caused us to make that decision.”
Allison told him everything was fine but that he was concerned about having so much money in one small branch. “At first, he paled, then got the joke…and we both laughed over the obvious computer glitch.”
Benevolent secret
Former Maitre-D, Abbe Diaz wrote that in the late 1990`s a friend of hers received a call from her bank asking her to come down to a particular branch.
“She was anxious about it,” wrote Diaz, “because she was sure it would be bad news.” The friend arrived at “the posh bank with swanky marble floors and sky-high columns and shiny brass fixtures, and suddenly several bankers in suits ‘rose from their desks’ to greet her and shake her hand,” said Diaz. “She was led into a side-office and plopped down in a plush leather arm chair opposite a big fancy mahogany desk.”
Diaz explained that an old childhood friend had deposited a million dollars in the girl’s name after a conversation where she had revealed she was “eating cat food in order to save the better food for her young daughter.”
Diaz met the woman a couple of years after this incredible luck and “by this time she and her daughter were living entirely off the dividends from the investment of the money, around ‘$80,000 per year.’"
The royal treatment
Management consultant Percy Nikora, ran a profitable business when he was in his mid-twenties. He eventually began depositing more and more money in to his account and one day his bank manager suddenly started telling him about all their “wonderful’ products”.
Nikora wrote that all of a sudden, he no longer had to wait in the normal line, there was a special line for their ‘premier customer’ (sort of like a first class check-in). “Fees that were typically applied to my old account disappeared — free cheques, free safety-deposit box, free US wire transfers.”
Quora respondents are required to use their true names under the site’s Real Names policy. To help ensure legitimacy and quality, Quora asks some individuals, such as doctors and lawyers, to confirm their expertise.
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