Are stock options a smart choice?

I had the pleasure of going to my stockbroker with X thousand stock options that she converted to X*(P - SP)*1,000, where P was the price of the share price at market (when I brought the paper to her) and SP was the strike price when I had joined the company several years earlier. Yeah, it was nice. :-)

I have also had the above equation (different company) multiplied by zero (when the company closed). :-(

Mind you, I admit that when someone from the UK says "well-off" I have mental images of Downton Abbey (upstairs). I think you should have some part of your compensation as SOptions, you just never know...