Okay, I have clearly lost my marbles. Last weekend, I read an article about how the Powerball lottery was over $300M. I caught myself dreaming about what I’d do with that kind of money. After taxes they were saying it was somewhere around a $200M payout. Of course I wouldn’t use the winnings for anything other than generating interest income but that would still easily give me $5M a year to spend without dipping in to the principal. See, there I go again, dreaming. Anyway, I was in the store picking up a few groceries so I decided to spend $10 on Powerball. This is only the second or third time EVER that I’ve purchased a lottery ticket. I think the first time I bought one was in my 20’s.
Needless to say, I didn’t win. In fact, I didn’t even come close. Of the 5 sets of numbers I had, I only had one line that matched 2 numbers. Oh well, it was fun to dream about it for a couple minutes. Was it worth $10 to dream about it for 2 minutes? Probably not.
It’s probably just as well that I didn’t win. After I thought about how great it would be to win, I immediately started thinking about some of the people that I’ve profiled on ELYM. There was Leroy Fick from Michigan, who won $2M and is now living on food stamps. Then there was Holly Lahti who immediately faced claims from an ex-husband. And, the worst case of all, was Deborah McDonald, who was killed the same day she won the lottery. Yeah, these are just a few of the cases I profiled here but I still couldn’t help but think of the amount of drama that comes with winning the lottery. I wouldn’t look forward to all my “friends” who show up on my doorstep with their latest story of bad luck. I’ve also wondered how winning a lot of money could impact my family over time. I’d like to think that my wife, daughter and I would be fine, but who knows what would happen. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that there was one lottery winner that it worked out well for. Brad Duke won and intelligently invested most of the money.
So, in the end, it was probably just as well that I didn’t win the lottery. I’ll just keep working at my job and do my best to win the “slow motion lottery” over time. So far my luck has been going pretty good at that.
I buy one every week ;) We love it – comes out of our “fun” money anyways so if it wasn’t being spent on that, it would go to some other form of entertainment. Only sucks that it went up to $2.00 instead of $1.00 now – though it means more $$$ to be won too!