Most people imagine winning the lottery as permission to finally become the ridiculous person they’ve always secretly wanted to be.
Buy the Lamborghini. Buy the yacht. Buy another Lamborghini because the first Lamborghini is the wrong shade of blue. Develop strong opinions about private jets. Start referring to ordinary supermarkets as “the shops we used to go to.”
Frances Connolly apparently missed that memo.
The Northern Ireland woman who won an absurd £115 million EuroMillions jackpot in 2019 says she has since given away roughly half of it.
Half.
That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of £57 million.
And no, apparently this wasn’t the result of a particularly aggressive Nigerian prince scam.
Connolly and her husband Paddy decided that once you have more money than you can reasonably spend without developing some extremely strange hobbies, perhaps the sensible thing is to start giving some of it away.
The Strange Problem of Having Enough
Winning £115 million changes the mathematics of your life pretty quickly.
There are expensive houses.
There are expensive cars.
There are luxurious holidays.
There are watches that cost more than somebody’s house for reasons nobody can adequately explain.
But eventually you run into a peculiar problem:
How much stuff do you actually need?
Connolly’s answer seems to be: considerably less than £115 million worth.
“It depends on what you want in life. If your ambition is to be the richest person in the world and be influencing presidents, then you need to keep all your money.”
Fair point.
If your life goal is to sit on a pile of cash like some sort of tax-efficient dragon, giving £50 million away is probably poor strategy.
But Connolly says sharing money always came naturally to her. She grew up helping people in Northern Ireland and went on to work as a teacher and social worker.
After winning the jackpot, she established the PFC Trust, a charity designed to support people and community projects.
In other words, she took the thing most lottery winners dream about — never having to work again — and somehow turned it into significantly more work.
Money Doesn't Change You. It Gives You a Bigger Budget for Being You.
There's an old cliché that money changes people.
It probably does.
But massive amounts of money may also simply amplify whatever was already there.
If you were obsessed with cars before getting rich, congratulations: now you own twelve cars.
If you loved travelling, congratulations: now you're flying business class.
And if you spent your life helping people, suddenly you've got enough money to help an enormous number of people.
For Connolly, that meant funding projects tackling loneliness, providing technology to help elderly people stay connected, supplying emergency food, supporting young athletes, installing defibrillators at sports clubs and helping families caring for people who need respite.
The interesting thing isn't merely that she gave away millions.
It's that she reached a conclusion many people spend their entire lives avoiding:
There is a point where more money stops meaning more life.
After the house is comfortable, the family is secure and nobody has to panic when the boiler breaks, the difference between £50 million and £100 million becomes increasingly theoretical.
You can only sleep in one bed.
You can only eat one dinner.
And despite what Instagram might suggest, owning five Aston Martins does not allow you to drive five times faster.
Her 60th Birthday Wasn't Exactly a Quiet Dinner
Connolly recently marked her 60th birthday with the 60 for 60 Challenge, another fundraising effort for the PFC Trust.
Seven athletes who had previously benefited from her support took part in running, swimming and cycling events covering a combined 60 miles.
The campaign began with a family fun day in Middlesbrough on Sept. 6 and finished with the Great North Run on Sept. 13.
The fundraising effort brought in more than £20,000.
One participant, Paul Hewitson, said Connolly's example inspired the athletes to give something back themselves.
And that's arguably the interesting part of philanthropy that often gets overlooked.
Giving money doesn't merely move money from one bank account to another.
Sometimes generosity becomes contagious.
Someone helps you.
Later, you help someone else.
That person helps somebody else.
And suddenly one lottery ticket purchased seven years ago is still affecting people who never met the person who bought it.
She Still Enjoys Being Rich, Obviously
None of this means Connolly has taken a vow of poverty and moved into a shed.
She and Paddy have a large home in Teesside.
They take nice holidays.
They enjoy their money.
Because giving money away doesn't require pretending money is evil.
Money is useful.
Money buys security.
Money buys freedom.
Money buys time.
And yes, money also buys Aston Martins.
The couple simply appears to have retained some sense of proportion.
They reportedly prefer buying some luxury items secondhand — a pre-owned Cartier watch or Aston Martin, for example — rather than automatically purchasing everything new.
Paddy also continues running his plastics businesses.
“We have a lovely life. We have the same life, we just live it bigger.”
That's probably one of the healthier descriptions of sudden wealth you'll hear.
Not a completely different life.
Just a bigger version of the one they already had.
The £115 Million Question
Perhaps the most revealing thing Connolly said was this:
“I think it's in mankind to share when you get to a level where you've got enough.”
And there's the uncomfortable word.
Enough.
Nobody really knows what enough means.
For someone struggling to pay rent, £100,000 sounds like enough.
For someone earning £100,000, a million might sound like enough.
For someone worth £10 million, perhaps £100 million sounds reassuring.
Human beings are spectacularly talented at moving the finish line.
Give someone twice as much money and, remarkably, they can usually discover twice as many things they suddenly require.
Connolly decided her family was secure.
Her children would be comfortable.
She and her husband could enjoy themselves.
And beyond that?
Keeping every remaining pound simply because technically she could didn't seem particularly useful.
“Unless I intended to live forever, I didn't see the point.”
Which is perhaps the uncomfortable truth hidden inside this wonderfully ridiculous lottery story.
Everybody is trying to accumulate enough money to finally feel safe.
But if you never decide what enough actually means, there is no amount of money that will ever get you there.
Not even £115 million.