Lottery Life-Changing Stories
Is winning the lottery a good or bad thing? Read some interesting short lottery stories of previous winners. Some will make you extremely jealous, some will be glad you didn’t win!
Winning a huge sum of money overnight can be overwhelming and life-changing. It can have tremendous benefits but also terrible pitfalls. Take a look at these short lottery stories, all having different outcomes for the winners.
Spending lottery winnings the right way – good outcomes
- Following your dreams: An attorney won a Publisher’s Clearinghouse for 10 million. He resigned his associate position and opened his own office doing law that actually interested him, not law that necessarily paid the bills or padded the pockets of the partners.
- Traveling the world: A couple won the Readers Digest sweepstakes ($5 million over 30 years, so about $160,000 a year). They were both teachers, so they were able to retire in their 50s, pay off their house and our college debts, travel all over the world, buy a house in the town where they grew up for their retirement, and generally live a good, quiet life in their old age.
- Giving to charity: A man won $10,000. He didn’t want much of a change so he just bought a really nice hand-stitched leather sofa (cost: about $6000). The rest, he gave to charity.
- Giving to the family: A couple won about $100k. The entire family went on a month-long vacation, bought a boat (they’re really into sailing) and saved the rest for the kids. Nothing special, and nothing audacious.
How NOT to spend lottery winnings – bad outcomes
- More debt than before winning: A couple has won the lottery three times. Odds say that if you are within two degrees of knowing someone who won it, your chances are pretty beat. These guys won three times. 1$ million, $50k, $1.2 million. All in the span of four or five years. Bought a brand new Suburban, Mercedes and Dodge ram. Remodel the house, finish the basement, do a lot of nice work. Didn’t pay off any debts, didn’t pay off their house or cars. They are currently in more debt than they were before the lottery.
- Wasting all the money: A man won a lottery with prize money of $700,000. He was a poor guy who did a day job. We were all happy for the guy. But a few years later, we heard that the guy lost all of the money and is now back into doing day jobs.
- Destroyed a family: The Lavigueur family is a Quebec family who made headlines in Canada in the 1980s after winning a lottery jackpot of $7,650,267. The trials and troubles of the Lavigueur family have since become entrenched in Quebec popular culture. A poor family became multimillionaires overnight. There was a judicial saga of one of the family’s daughters, the only member of the family to not have participated in the purchase of the winning ticket, suing her father for a fraction of the jackpot. The subsequent family disputes tore apart the family which dissipated its fortune.
- Money not well spent: My man won a big lottery in the 1960s, quit his job and drank himself to death in a couple of years. Only the best scotch would do, a bottle a day.
