People who became rich by sheer randomness r/AskReddit Reddit Stories | Top Posts

redditors who made a lot of money by sheer randomness what's your story i won five dollars zero zero zero playing bingo on a cruise i have only been on one cruise and it was the only time i have played bingo in my life i have retired from both first time i went to vegas after turning 21 i played a slot machine won three dollars zero zero zero on my first try haven't gambled since the summer after my freshman year in college i was walking my little 20-pound dog on a street near my house a neighbor lady was walking her two dogs who were a husky and some other similar sized dog the husky attacked my dog and in the process i got some teeth marks on my wrist since the neighbor's dog started it and the owner obviously couldn't control it i wanted them to pay the vet fees for my dog which was under 500. the guy ended up being a dck about it and my roommate's dad was a lawyer so about a year and a half later i ended up with about 20k worked a job for a long time got hurt on the job they instead of helping me terminated me got a lawyer a year later got 260k for the whole fiasco not sure if this counts but that's my story i was hurt off the job went back too soon and kept informing my boss i wasn't ready and still having a lot of problems bad bad severe insomnia among others my boss did nothing and kept me working i got the feeling i was being targeted to be fired because of the sick leave so i lowered up documented everything and recorded all meetings the company got wise i was being smart about handling the situation spoke to labor relations and decided to buy me out instead ended up with about 40k severance package enough to ride out my recovery at least kinda wish they were stupid and fired me instead i also only paid about 3k in lawyer fees because i found a really good lawyer my wife's aunt died she had been institutionalized her whole life and neither of us had ever even met her we kind of forgot about it for a few months until my wife's uncle emailed her and said she was going to be getting some money we were like oh okay that's kind of weird but not complaining then my wife got a phone call from the uncle one evening i heard a lot of bums okays and geez wowz turned out we were getting over three hundred dollars zero zero zero we were both grinding away making 15 an hour and barely making rent every month and then boom out of nowhere that ended up being the difference between having a house and not having a house being able to start a family and not being able to start a family and having a retirement fund versus just hoping not to get evicted every month i once got a message from reddit admin it asked if i wanted to do some contract work in my free time over the course of a few months i made like five grand for browsing subreddits and categorizing them by topic and age rating i didn't get to pick the subreddits i wanted to view though they'd send me a list of a few hundred subreddits and i'd have to spend about 10-15 minutes on each sub i check for certain things fill out a google sheets form and move on to the next sub when i finished a full list i'd email them to get a new one it was a pretty sweet gig i was a substitute teacher and a tutor at the time so anytime a kid or a teacher cancelled on me i'd do my radit thing plus it was an easy job to do while i was home sick or waiting for the repair guy to come to my house because i had no set hours i just worked whenever i felt like it i found three thousand six hundred dollars in a food takeout box in the middle of a giant field i live in a rich area and lot of drug deals happen so it's possible i stole multiple thousands of dollars from a drug dealer on accident yeah contrary to the replies i doubt anybody died over it i've known a lot of drug dealers and i can't think of one that moved enough weight to have a three thousand six hundred dollar transaction that would do some dead dropship in a field i started an amazon private label business on a whim in 2015. i made about 25 of the sale in profit after product shipping and advertising costs sales doubled every month for six months june 4 k july 8 k august 18 k september 40 k october 84 k november 175 k december 362 k i didn't know what to do i quit my job in january to focus on growing the business but my time was spent mostly trying to fend off competition copying my listing and posting fraudulent reviews and then lowering my price in the race to the bottom it went well for a few years but i never made as much as i made that first december lesson learned arbitrage isn't a long-term business playing blackjack while drunk in reno i had three hundred dollars to waste at the five dollar table got lots of free watered down drinks while i was playing so i wasn't paying attention i have a rule two piles one of cash i can't waste and another of money i won i was there for about three hours before i realized i wasn't out of betting money and the dealer had changed four times one four dollars k at that table paid for the trip and a bit left over i haven't been to a casino since but i doubt i'd have that kind of luck again when i was 17 about to turn 18 my mom told me to open a bank account because i was going to get around 500-600 from my dad opened the bank account signed the papers she needed me to and got a whopping 15 400 deposited into my bank at 18 years old two years ago 22 at this point come to find out he gets a huge settlement for a car accident i think comer and get another 15k dispersed over to five years idk if it was back child support or what but i was really blessed i used to play minesweeper a lot some website showed up where you could play in little tournaments i started with twenty dollars and made over one thousand dollars edit i don't remember the name of the website this was like 20 years ago i'm sure it's long gone not money but i was gifted a brand new 1200 laptop for free once just because i posted about needing a new one on a forum that's cool i won a laptop like eight years ago because there was no coffee in the faculty cafeteria so i bought and iced tea the cafeteria lady told me to fill my name and phone number because the iced tea brand was giving away a laptop two weeks later i had a call telling me i won i didn't remember turns out it was a promotion with the seven cafeterias in the campus and around three k people participated i briefly worked with a guy who was in his late twenties ex-military when he got out a friend of his he served with told him to buy bitcoin he bought several thousand worth when it was nothing and forgot about it when it first started spiking and getting attention on the news he started looking for the drive because he thought he had some he did and he had a lot of it sold well before the peak dude made millions he had an 800.000 house multiple high-end cars and came to work a manual labor job because he was bored needless to say he didn't stay long and all he did was show off his money and clock hours not actually working normally did reply of not me but my friend's dad's friend he decided to open an ice business hey everyone need ice he bought an old warehouse in the ghetto because it was cheap government decided to redo the on-ramps to the bridge and needed to buy like one stroke three rd of his parking lot maybe say 20 parking spots worth he didn't care he had a staff of like four never used more than that i never heard exact numbers but i did hear he got more for those spots than he paid for the property my previous employer eliminated my position our whole department actually i got a severance of one week year which worked out to be 22 weeks of salary not only that i got paid a bonus to stay on for the last three months after that was over i got a job with a competitor company making the exact same salary and doing mostly the same job started the very next monday i actually even like working for the new company better i don't know how random that really was but it sure felt like a real fortunate way to lose a job i was celebrating my 20th birthday decided to go to the nice casino an hour away from campus with my then boyfriend we played bingo because that's what i could afford and it occupied some time we lost i called my dad he loves casinos when he has the money to go he told me to play three card poker i had watched him play before but i didn't know how and was on my last 20 to my name he told me that would be enough for a hand or two and just give it a shot the dealer would explain the rules so i sat at the table by myself i won the dealer was really excited for me but i was pretty clueless i had a straight flush then i just kept winning people would take the seat in front of me they would lose i'd win didn't matter got two more straight flushes at night and lots of other good hands i kept betting the minimum wish i was putting down more i turned 20 into 3k that night my dad didn't believe me not me but my 14 years old cousin made an abstract up piece that took him two minutes max and as a joke put it on ebay for 5k he sold it idk if he was telling the truth but he did give me you a cute 200 for my day he normally gives around you a cute 20 so it seems likely edit asked for a pick turns out he doesn't have one i think he lied nvm sorry for the inconvenience i started live streaming on twitch a few years back when i was 15. i unexpectedly blew up really quickly and a master following in only about two months of streaming i made over two thousand dollars which was a lot for a fifteen-year-old haha my friend's father was gifted an oil pencil drawing in the late seventies his family always assumed it was pretty much worthless and i always joke that it looked like my friend had drawn it as a child this still angry stick figure drawing ended up being an unsigned piece of art by jean-michel basquiat his family did some digging and eventually had it authenticated by the jmb estate before selling it at christie's auction house for an amazing sum of money i was absolutely blown away when i learned this my friend and his family were far from wealthy so to realize they had this unknown treasure just sitting out in the living room for so many years was mind-blowing when google first came out i thought it was far and away superior to the search engines of their time much more efficient interface when their ipo came out i got some looking back i have no idea why we were all so excited about google but even as kids i think i may have been a freshman in high school or maybe even still in middle school were all of a sudden trashing yahoo and msn and whatnot and acting like google was the [ __ ] when realistically we didn't even know the difference i quit a job at a startup that was a mess and i just wanted to do something relaxing so i took some time of cleaning up an old algorithm i wrote 10 years ago i told a friend of mine who told some industry people about it they contacted me and i got invited to talk about it at a conference and then large companies started getting in touch so far i have signed one seven figure deal to license it it's not random but it feels very random i'm making more an interest now than i ever have earned holding down a job the world is not fair i was 10 years old me and my two friends found a paper bag in a shopping cart outside the local grocery it was stuffed with money we counted it and it was just over hundred dollars we split it three ways and went home one of my friends later crumbled under the pressure and told their moms who told our moms we had to return it i only spent like 10 bucks turns out it belonged to one of the suppliers to the grocery who accidentally left it in his cart on the way out not a ton of money but for a ten-year-old kid man we were proper rich for a minute i was a male escort for about seven-ish years not a hooker specifically an escort i would go with people usually women but sometimes men command would pretend to be their perfect boyfriend partner in front of friends and family co-workers it started out very much as an accident but ended up making me a ton of money i recently retired and started focusing on going to school cause i can't do escorting my whole life and nor did i want because i really dislike people and it was honestly a chore most of my clients were one percent percenters which is the reason i made so much money i didn't pay taxes on it before anyone asks forgot i had 11. something bitcoins from back in the day left over from buying pizza tried to set up a new account to invest in bitcoin since i'd used it before and saw i already had an account logged in and wow sold it all and made like seven dollars k imagine the feeling knowing it would eventually reach twenty dollars capercoin my neighbor died with no friends or family and left everything in her wilderness everyone always asks if we were great neighbors to her i'd say no we were just neighbors and treated her as we would want to be treated and did neighborly duties for her if it snowed we cleared her driveway without her asking took care of her cats if she went to the beach say hello if we saw her she was a tough cookie and an alpha female would be the best way to put it she hated if i played basketball in the driveway and when we were cleaning out her garage after she died we found three of my old basketballs but she was also the type of person if she wanted an apple pie she would bake an apple pie and take a slice and bring the rest over to us my ex-husband was a bad dude he currently owes me over 26 dollars cain back child support when we were together all of the bills were in my name he left me for another woman three weeks after i gave birth to our second child and defaulted on all of our bills both our cars got rapped and i ended up filing bankruptcy two years later last year i got a notice in the mail from the lender of one of the two report cars apparently there was a class action lawsuit against them for hidden fees and since the cars were in my name i was getting a refund of a few thousand dollars i was able to use the money to help move out of my mom's place my now husband's boss bet the table at the company christmas party that nobody could tell him what the name of the restaurant meant in english the silly ass did this at an italian restaurant i speak some french and guessed it instantly boss man took seven months to pay up on a 100 bet to a teenage girl edit the restaurant was called veenivay which means come go i had a co-worker who had bought a new car and within a week somebody crashed into him and the car was totaled he ended up getting a little more from their insurance than he'd paid for the car and moved on a year later he got a letter from the other guy's insurance company saying that they had audited their books and found that they owed him money they sent him a check for dollar sign 16. zero zero zero to pay for the damage to the car they had already totaled parents died when i was in my twenties and i inherited a small butt load of money the real kicker was the house i grew up in it was a three bedroom single family with an attached business in boston i was an absentee landlord for a while from another state but decided it was too much of a pain in the ass so i sold it look up what a three-bedroom house goes for in boston not fast money but i lucked in to get hired by your employee-owned business you earned 25 of your annual salary in stock i have six figures worth i hope to afford a decent retirement i built a motorcycle back in 2011 pretty well all the parts on it i built took it to a few rallies few shows made its way around the internet some magazines had a ton of people ask if i sold this part or that part so i started 2 started in my garage sold right about 10 zero zero parts out of there over the span of two years bought a shop more equipment started automating my processes friend that owns a business that supplies stuff to practically every nuclear plant in the world pops in one day asks me to design a connector for a surveillance system they sell took a day had the prototype done cut out round about 20 minutes on each individual camera installation and required no tools they sold a fck ton of those then jumped into radiation shielding big f money in that it's been nearly 10 years now sell thousands upon thousands of bike parts that i designed and build every year travel to motorcycle events all over generally have a blast i'm 31 pretty well have the financial freedom to go do whatever i want my last employer before i retired was matching 25 of whatever i contributed to my 401k i maxed out that btch every year even when it got to be over 30 of my salary most of my workmates were contributing like 3-5 and i couldn't for the life of me convince them that 25 plus whatever appreciation was the best deal they'd ever see in their lives i retired at age 62 and my wife retired soon after at age 55. our advisor predicts a 99 chance that we'll be able to maintain our very comfortable current lifestyle for the rest of our lives even if my wife lives to 100. my former workmates probably not so much a lot of sheer luck has put me in the position i'm currently in getting my college degree landing a stable six-figure job the path i ended up on had lots of little while i got lucky moments i could have easily had a much worse life i put myself in plenty of bad situations i ended up watching my friends get arrested drop out of school have unexpected kids etc i was just lucky and missed the shti hitting fan moments i was in a car accident when i was five about 250 000 inches medical bills my parents insurance company and my grandfather who is a lawyer went after the other dude's insurance company we also got awarded punitive damages to the tune of three one of medical bills because it's a court-ordered settlement in the particular state i don't pay taxes on it i am now 23. i have gotten a payment every year now since i was 18. the actually value when i was 18 was about 560 dollars zero zero zero i have paid for my college and will have the remainder of the money by the time i'm 27. i can effectively contribute nothing to my retirement and i will likely retire a millionaire at the time it was terrible i was near death for about 18 hours and in surgery but now i am perfectly healthy and have only minor scarring on my face all told i count myself very fortunate for not only surviving but also having a nice nest egg wasn't a lot but my best friend and i went to jack in the box for my 17th birthday we spent like 10-15 bucks max then when we came out there were two ten dollar bills in the grass outside we each took one that was a nice birthday i agreed to teach a class to a school district a new version of office and internet explorer i.e was new at the time it was a voluntary class i got paid a flat rate then i got up ahead bonus and a bonus for performance rating the students rated me on what they learned made almost 10k in three weeks basically showing people keyboard shortcuts and walking them through a slither show i made the weekend before the first class it was originally two weeks but there were so many people that signed up after that first week it got extended the beau came back and bought the slitish al for about 750 and had someone on staff teach the class after that got adopted by the two best people in the world when i was four months old they did everything they could to raise me and set me on the right path i have a pretty amazing life great job fantastic wife comfortable life great friends pretty much oh everything to a random event where i was the kid who got paired with my parents side note i recently found my birth family and discovered i have an older brother who was not put up for adoption to see his life and what he had to endure is very hard for me i hit the jackpot and i am thankful every day back in the mid when i lived in nick the musical rent was really popular but they hadn't yet published the sheet music for it i got hired by this dude who wanted to put on a performance of rent he had a bootleg cassette of the show and offered to pay me fifty dollars per song to create lead sheets i have a really strong ear so it was not time consuming it wasn't a lot of money but for a struggling college student it was great and was definitely the most random way i ever made money not me but a guy i know bit of hippy dude lazy but makes art miniatures now super high detail really good work but essentially him being lazy yes he is just lazy it was not intentional has made demonic seed supply drastically so he sells like to a year and that's enough to live off when things like kid's wedding pops up he makes one and trades it for whole wedding not a ton of money but one weekend i taught myself how to crochet so i just started crocheting tiny things and selling them at school and i made a good amount of money i got a random message from a friend who i hadn't seen since kindergarten that offered me 65 for each pick of my braces i sent i have no idea what the pics were used for and we haven't talked since oof regrets i got an alert from my pharmacy at that my oxycodone was ready for pickup the strange thing is i hadn't been to the doctor in months and didn't recognize the doctor name i had a unique last name at the time and i doubt anyone had the same name and dog as me but i guess it's somewhat possible i was with my older cousin at the time i was 18 and poor she had three kids and recently had surgery on her toe she only had painkillers for a few days post surgery but having three kids under five meant that she couldn't stay off it properly and the kids would accidentally step on her or hit her toe with a toy etc etc she wasn't healing properly in a ton of pain but these still aren't great reasons for what i did she offered me one thousand dollars to fill the script and give it to her being dirt poor i did i was worried for weeks after that i'd be found out and in big trouble nothing happened cousin didn't get hooked on pills kids are fine and so is her toe i started work as i t support earning around 2k to 3k per month my company turnover is around 10 which is alert of ppl since my company is quite big my company tried to lower the turnover by promoting ppl after five years i'm now assistance manager earning 7k monthly just by not quitting i had an aunt that was basically excommunicated from my family for reasons that still are unclear to me i was super young when the falling out happened four or five she was married to some super old guy who was oil wealthy and inherited his fortune when he passed when i was 23 she passed and crazily enough i was her favorite she liked me and in her letter left to me i was the son she never had i remember the way she used to play hide and seek with me but nothing else it makes me sad that she was kicked out of the family and she seemed to have really though a lot of young me she left me too four million dollars i've always in the back of my mind tried to make her proud of me cause she was the cool hide and seek aunt i never really knew okay this isn't a lot of money but it's an alright story i was driving through nevada all day and stopped in vegas for my first time ever and i decided to stay on the strip for a night i was checking into a room and was nice to the desk clerk and she upgraded me to a suite on one of the top floors in the hotel it was huge there were probably like seven couches and even more tvs and a kitchen and a sunken tub it was cool i wandered the strip and didn't gamble but had a nice time before i left the next morning i was like i'm in vegas i gotta at least say i gambled so i bet twenty dollars playing blackjack and one and i kept kept betting what i won until i was up to about 500 and i decided to quit while i was ahead it was the luckiest i've ever been i think i was looking for a new friend online got a sugar daddy he just mails me a check once every three months of a few thousand after he heard i was possibly gonna have to put my cap down cause i couldn't afford the surgery i send him pictures of my cat as a thank you and to let him know i got the check don't cash them though i feel weird doing it did cash the first one to save my cat when we had only three covered cases in california i shorted the stock market in february yeah i have a friend who lives in the us but has a lot of co-workers based in china he took most of his money out of the stock market in january or february when he heard from them how bad it was getting didn't exactly make money but avoided losing a lot of money it wasn't a lot but when bitcoin started getting crazy around nine dollars k a couple years ago i put a few hundred in watched him climb all the way to 18k i figured people were going to sell at 20k because of reasons my only experience in economics currency all commodity trading was effectively runescape so i sold literally right at the ath under 20k it was a nice 100 return in about two weeks so i was happy to get out and watch it fall right back to where i bought in a few weeks later sometimes i wonder how things would have turned out if i bet a lot more than a few hundred dollars but oh well one time i was walking down the street downtown and a guy came out of a bank got in his car and sped off cash flew out of the windows everybody on the street was confused for a minute but not me i started grabbing that cash and once it was all acclaimed i went back to work and kept my mouth shut turns out that was a bank robber making his getaway he ended up getting caught later that afternoon and presumably went to prison but i ended up with a cool 84 dollars he probably dropped dollar sign 200 total so i really took the lion's share not bad considering it was more than i made in a day at the time [Music] i was working as a stripper for a while one night i approached an older man who looked like a regular joe turned out he was actually very wealthy and he became my long-term sugar daddy i stopped stripping shortly after meeting him he's not jay howard marshall rich but i'm living a very comfortable lifestyle and i don't have to worry about working or paying bills my wife and i got some stock options when the part of the company we worked for spun off from a much larger corporation they weren't worth much when we got them this was the 90s though and every tech stock was going up eventually we jokingly decided that we'd sell when the stock price got high enough to pay off the house after we paid the taxes well one day right before we were about to leave on vacation it got there we briefly thought about holding out for mug but nope we cashed out and left in the two weeks we were gone the stock price surged up and then crashed never to see those levels again in fact the stock crashed below one dollar the company did a ten one reverse split i think they did this twice it eventually went below one dollar again and the stock was delisted funny thing is that a lot of our friends told us we were crazy to sell one friend even exercised his options when we did but put the proceeds into the stock market without having saved any money aside for taxes we did really well on the deal but it was a combination of luck and our combined conservative fiscal nature i cut my elder neighbors yard growing up and helped him with random things around the house he passed away while i was in college came home one weekend and i have a letter in the mail it was from my old neighbor's attorney advising me he left me his house money in two cars i was fairly close with the guy but never knew he had no family at all immediately sold the cars i rent the house out and i invested 50 of the money i was on a business trip that passed through lake tahoe three people in one hotel room so i went down to the casino to get some space couldn't find a blackjack table to lose my 100 dollars at so i sat down at a wheel of fortune slot machine instead ten minutes later i'm absent-mindedly pressing the spin max bet and hit the progressive jackpot one dollar one million it's the sort of thing you assume never happens but it did took a lump payment of 690 k which after i pay taxes next week will end up being about 390 k i quickly got a financial advisor bought my car now own a couple investment properties and bought my now wi-fi ring everything else is quite literally the exact same except i have an epic story to tell to strangers on reddit one of the smartest people i know convinced me to buy a bitcoin miner in 2013. i mined a few before the power bills appeared to be not worth the money then bitcoin started going crazy in late 2017 and i looked into trading i saw a one-liner on reddit somewhere that said something like xrb about to explode i was able to buy around 25k xrb now nano in a few weeks i was a millionaire xrb was only sold at q coin i think i chose the latter i didn't cash out you to greed bitcrail went belly up and now i'm in some international lawsuit that will never pay out i'm sure i now understand why people jumped off buildings in 1929 2018 was a tough year but i got through it i got into a car accident on my way home from dropping my son off to his mom i'm grateful that that's when it happened and not while he was in the car dude in a company truck blew a stop sign and creamed the sht out of me breaking my arm and giving me a concussion well a few months later after i had almost entirely healed i got a fat ass check for 70 grand i worked at a local restaurant job as a line cook for about one month and we were paid b weekly after a month the general manager laid me and one other guy off because they weren't making enough money to pay us and we were the newest people on the totem pole i'm 100 positive i received two paychecks for whatever reason about two years later i received a letter from the headquarters of the company for a potential check at one thousand dollars and they apologized for not paying me again i swear i got all of my money but since i have a common first and last name i think they got me confused with someone being the honest person i am i called the headquarters and gave my social security number but they insisted i was the right person i have no idea how it happened i still think the entire thing was an error but i received an approximate one dollar zero zero zero paycheck i loaned a friend 12k to buy inventory to sell flea and tick meds for pets online in the early 2000s he did really well and went on to make tons of money doing it he paid me back in like six months and sent me checks for 1k a month as a thank you for going on 15 years now i made him stop recently because i don't need it it's a pain to account for on my taxes and he's paid me like 10x back for the loan lol long story short accountant of a uni which i decided to resign miscalculated and told me i owe them 300 u.s dollars then right before i left i asked her smth which made her realize her mistaken that the school actually owed me 800 bucks inheritance i'm sort of surprised there aren't more inheritance stories in here i got some money and land from my grandfather when i was 21. i invested it and i've never worried about money my entire adult life because i know i can pull that out in an emergency sort of a boring story lol done with it's really sheer random my partner passed away suddenly and unexpectedly from a massive seizure had seizures before but nothing that would indicate he'd die from one and he hadn't even turned 40. about three months later i find he had a life insurance policy i didn't know about and made me primary beneficiary it gave me enough to buy our house donate to a few causes he cared about and still have a nest egg to start a real retirement savings off of i miss him every day but i guess his last act of love was setting me up for the future even without him being there a ton of people wouldn't say this is a lot of money but hear me out at the time i was a 16 y o boy and i've always had affinity with animals so one time my pretty rich neighbor went on a vacation and couldn't bring their dog so they gave me a 500 for taking care of their dog for two weeks and i got their keys to the house and everything best time of my life ia when i was younger a friend of my brothers asked me to buy him beer he said he would throw me a couple bucks for my time so i said sure i meet up with his at the store and he hands me a 20 gold coin with my coin knowledge being very low something about the coin made me curious i bought the beer with my own money he threw me ten dollars and we were all good when i got home i went online to see the value of the coin low end was around one thousand dollars i took the coin to a collector who basically gave me the value in gold weight at the time about 1 250 0-0 easiest 1 260 dollars i've ever made i was maybe 20 years old and bought stuff at auctions and resold it full time working for myself one of the other regular auction attendees told me he found some boards in a pallet he bought and wondered if i wanted them i looked at them and they were new cisco boards but this was over 20 years ago so smartphones weren't a thing and i had no idea what they were worth i offered him fifty dollars and he was very happy i ended up selling those boards for 18 000 no joke i split the sale between two different resellers because i was uncomfortable selling them all to one company ncaa march madness pools i had a good feeling about uconn in 2004 so i picked them in all of my pools i entered two standard pools and then a winner take all pool they ended up winning which was great for me i placed first in two of them and second in another i ended up walking away with three dollars 200. my mom bought some paintings at a yard sale for no reason maybe spend fifty dollars for the three artworks she listed them on ebay and sold them for around 3 500 each plus international shipping turns out they were painted by a world-renowned japanese painter who has a museum in japan my mom packaged them and shipped them there where they are on display if there's enough interest i'll ask my mom for more details in the name of the artist and such got lucky on my first career job which paid me peanuts 40k company did exceptionally well i was living at home at the time so i invested my earnings on the company's stock my 12k turned into 230k in one five years last fall i got really into electrical engineering videos on youtube and that led to watching videos about related technologies especially solar and battery technology i wound up learning about a lot of developing and upcoming battery tech like graphene super capacitors slick and solid state batteries my brain started connecting some dots and i started thinking about how if this stuff is gonna be coming out in the next 10 or 20 years and considering all the problems with fossil fuel there's a good chance that nobody will be making ice engines by the time i'm an old man in favor of evs that can go 1000 or more miles on a single charge my recently deceased dad had left me some cash in his will so i decided that i might as well just invest it in tesla stock since then that money has more than quadrupled and it's completely saved my ass because i'm a professional musician in the us all my gigs this summer have been completely wiped out and my unemployment benefits have been stalled for weeks my casual passion for science really paid off literally 1999 living in a school bus with eight of my friends traveling down the california coast the bus started to smell pretty funky so we stopped to collect eucalyptus nuts to make it smell better found a roll of cash under a tree took it back to the bus it was three thousand and fifty dollars zero zero i randomly emailed three youtubers i watch both at the time were all small paid me twenty dollars a video this was for 2013 to 2017 and then fortnight came out and now ever since about late 2017 i still headed for the three of them they blew tf up big time i got paid about 240 k dollars for 2018 and almost 300k dollars for 2019 and i get paid monthly so you can do the math their organization pays me 25 k dollars monthly and i'm just a 21 year old living in tokyo it's stupidly high just for editing cafcoms but i'm not complaining one bit i was a broke teen and this saved me and i was able to accomplish my goals and dreams of school and etc i always loved my grandfather's old desk spent tons of time drawing and working on it and after they both passed away they left the desk and its contends to me stuffed into the back of the drawer buried in a folder there was a stock certificate for a big company from the 70s at first glance it was worth a few thousand which was awesome but an overall disappointing return for a stock purchased 40-plus years ago turns out the stock had split since then seven times thank you grandpa i got a promotion at work and was suddenly in charge of a super big super disorganized department i needed to create logical sustainable systems to track our [ __ ] so i taught myself google sheets and digitize every single process we have other departments quickly noticed so i started helping them with google sheets pretty soon everybody wanted my help but there was no way for me to help everybody during work hours so i got offered an extra seven dollars zero zero zero stipend to make google sheets for other departments during my off hours honestly i would have helped them anyway because i'm just like that but now they are organized and i'm getting new carpet yay i've been investing lately and doing a lot of day trading and on one of the trading subreddits there was this massive hype about this stock and how it was about to explode and people were suggesting everyone go all in since i'm crazy i put 10k at two zero five and exited at eleven forty and suddenly became 50k dollars richer i don't think i will ever get that lucky again so that was the first and the last time i make a huge life decision based on reddit not my story but one of my dad's friends got really drunk put 20 dollars into a penny slot machine or something like that and won a million dollars he did the rational thing he went to the nearest chevrolet dealership and bought a brand new at the time 2019 camaro zl1 1le bitcoin i didn't know what it was but someone traded me bitcoin for real money as they were in need i considered it a donation and didn't care until it became valuable i decided land and a home and not needing to work again was worth more and that's that i still work because i enjoy the learning of what i do but i'm not hindered by playing the game of just nodding to superiors when they suggest doing dumb things so that's another perk went to burning man with a buddy we decided to leave early and gave our burning man neighbor all our excess alcohol so you guys going to reno yay we're going to get a hotel and then drive home cool make sure you go to the atlantis and play these exact slot machines at this time yay sure dart i'm the slot boss double quote at this point we decide fck it so when we get to reno and decide to put one hundred dollars into the machine he said one two thousand dollars does you acute 70 count i brought a beanie hat for you a cute one at a thrift shop found out it was an exclusive from a paramore tour that everyone had been dying to get and threw it on ebay as an auction good times nearly screamed in surprise when i saw what it went for brought pokemon's game and had plenty left over so my buddy and his brother decided to make an online perfume resale company i was like your two dudes and you sell beauty products and perfume kinda weird but okay i helped them pack and ship items a few times and around christmas their second year they asked me to help and they had a thousand orders they needed packed and shipped that night and for the next couple weeks it continued like that they branched out into candles a few years ago and were bought by walmart both now have ferraris and other exotic cars as well as huge houses in the los angeles area tld are two masculine football players made millions from selling beauty products i graduated in 1990 with an advertising related degree that was suddenly worthless due to desktop computers showing up in businesses everywhere not knowing what to do i picked up some programming books and started playing around with code i heard about hyper text markup language and played around with it and by 93 i was coding sites for companies around the us on compuserve and aol and i was in high demand the portfolio i built up there landed me a job running a high profile website by 97 and that income paid for my grad school program so i could go back to doing what i love teaching my retirement is set my house is practically paid for and i will do what i love until the day i retire i'm not filthy rich just immensely happy with the random way it all worked out [Music] stay with me for a minute there's this guy in my hometown who is one of the very first guys i've slept with i'm in my mid-twenties now and we have been fwbs since i was like 16. he sold me sh t weed 150 worth very recently and said he would switch out for better weed a week after dodging me he finally said no fck off basically i was so pissed because we have always been good to each other anyway last week he literally won ninety three dollars zero zero zero on some card game at our local casino the casino posted about it and everything i hate life sometimes i change jobs in spring of 2001. it took a few months to get things set up and then i contacted my previous 401k company to move my money over to the new place after the old one closed the account and cut the check but before it got to me nine stroke 11 happened maybe not so much made a lot of money but i definitely avoided losing a bunch as i had nothing invested at the time some years ago we found 500 a in the street just like that there was also an atm ticket with the account owner's name after a quick google search we found out that the guy was a businessman that sponsored art at the time there was a contemporary art biennial going on in the city so we went there and asked for this person i think the guy didn't even notice that he lost the money before talking to us it was a good day this was in coimbra portugal was at a concert a random lady gave me her vip swag went outside the arena to get a power raid random dude offered me 200 for it in cash right then and there said yes later a family friend who also went gave me his vip swag i won a trip to hawaii that was entirely paid for by my company but it got cancelled due to coronavirus this past may got cashed out instead and received 8 k not too shabby not me but my dad he went with his nephew to the casino my dad doesn't really gamble and spend 500 total my dad plays one hand of machine poker and wins four zero zero zero [Music] so [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Reddit Jar

Views: 132,737

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Keywords: reddit, r/AskReddit, ask reddit, askreddit, updoot, toadfilms, sir reddit, reddit jar, askreddit funny, askreddit dumb, reddit ama, reddit ask me anything, r/askreddit, reddit stories, reddit story, askreddit scary, askreddit stupid, scary stories, askreddit new, top posts, reddit top posts, reddit cringe, comedy, askreddit top posts, subreddit, funny reddit, best reddit posts, askreddit stories, best of reddit, reddit best, funny askreddit, storytime with reddit, memes, r/

Id: UCji0kOZZKw

Length: 50min 37sec (3037 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020