photo courtesy of www.flickr.com/photos/sadsnaps

A month ago I came across this property developer in Devon, who was selling raffle tickets for his 4 luxury apartments. For just £50 you would be in with the chance to win all 4 of the apartments and become a property developer overnight. Yup, for just 50 quid! I must admit I was tempted.

Then there’s the Spanish ones.

There’s Wayne & Dave’s San Blas villa, which they estimate is worth 1.5 million euros, which you can get a chance of winning for just a 25 euro “investment”. They’ll take away 1.9 million euros at the end of the draw.

Or, there’s the New Year Millionaire, where for just £25 you can be a millionaire and own their 8 bed villa, Wild West (really!) tourist business and a Harley Davidson (it just gets better!) and the property owners will be £5,000,000 richer.

Now what’s really clever about these raffles is that the owners of the properties will never lose. If they don’t sell the required number of tickets, they don’t raffle the house, they make a draw for the pot of money. The “winner” gets the pot minus “administration costs”.

It reminds me of my grandpa Joe.

My grandpa Joe taught me a lot – how to be enterprising, how you make your own luck through taking action, how to be poor! He was a very nice chap, working hard in the 50s to keep a big family. Anyway, one day he needed some extra cash – he’d spent all his money on fags, booze and gambling; and the rest he’d just squandered. So he came up with a surefire money making idea!

He would do donkey rides in Birmingham. He’d seen postcards from a mate’s trip to Blackpool and thought donkey rides would work along the canals of Birmingham. Not one to be daunted by commonsense, he set about finding a donkey. As luck would have it another mate had a donkey for sale, so off he went to fetch it.

When he got there in his VW Campervan he found that the donkey was dead! Darn it (or some other expletive!). Grandpa Joe wasn’t to be defeated, he thought for a while and smiled – he had a cunning plan and shoved the dead donkey in his van. His mates asked him what he was going to do with a dead donkey that had cost him a tenner. “Raffle him off!”

Now, my Grandpa Joe wasn’t exactly the brightest tool in the shed, but he was probably the most motivated.

A month later he met up with his friend in a bar – “what did you do with the dead donkey, Joe?”

photo courtesy of www.flickr.com/photos/the_moog

“Raffled him off” replied Grandpa Joe. “I sold 200 tickets at 50 pence each, made myself 90 quid in profit.”

“Didn’t anyone complain?”

“Only the fella who won, so I gave him his money back.”

The Dead Donkey Diddlum in action!

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