Sounds like he wasted all that money. A £500k bungalow? JFC with a million bucks I could buy a prefab house and a lot to plop it on and live the rest of my life until I inevitable drop dead from heart disease. Also RIP Bob. I wouldn't be surprised if whoever hit him didn't even realize it.
A million dollars spread out over 12 years is not amazing money.
It's not like he got a million dollars and could have bought the house outright. He took out a mortgage because he had a respectable middle class income for 12 years.
I could easily retire for life on that money and live very comfortably. Shit, it would give me a higher yearly wage than I'm on now.
I don't get why people online frequently act like that's not a lot of money. It's £750k.
You could buy an alright house (outside of London) on that, retire at 30, and enjoy an above average amount of after-bills spending money for the rest of your life, without having to work at all.
How does the math work out on that? I'm not quite sure what home prices are like in the UK, but let's say you bought a house for 350k and paid cash. That leaves 400k. You retire at 30, and conservatively have 40 more years to live. That's only 10k/year for the rest of your life. You still have expenses such as home insurance, car insurance, consumables, etc. Doesn't seem like much. To be fair I'm also not factoring in any kind of pension or social security or anything like that.
In the UK, that's pretty damn good money. If you are able to plan financially at all you can comfortably pay off a mortgage and live off that amount of money for the 12 years.