How To Live A Fabulous Life After Winning Powerball. Here’s something I bet most people don’t know about winning the Powerball: If you take the cash option, you get a check for about half what is advertised on television. $150 million. Yes, that’s right, it would be cool to have over 300 million dollars in the bank, but it’s not as cool as you think when it comes down to paying bills, income tax, and continuing spending on unnecessary things. If you’re lucky enough to win the lottery, please remember what’s important in life like our troops and your personal relationships. Having millions of dollars won’t make your day-to-day life better unless it’s managed well!
Sometimes money brings nothing but trouble and unhappiness. Suddenly, the weight of the world falls on your shoulders and life doesn’t always change for the better. So, can winning the lottery destroy your life?
Often, this fabulous experience of riches can be very short-lived when a lack of experience with money occurs. If you’ve never had to handle finances before this amount can feel overwhelming and also limitless in its capacity. Suddenly there’s a world at your fingertips beyond anything that you’ve ever imagined.
In fact, there are people who would rather not have won a prize at all! There are many who make serious mistakes and poor decisions that lead to family feuds, financial ruin and in some cases may even end in death, murder or life in prison.
Take for example James Allen Hayes won $19 million on Powerball in 1998. Thanks to a guaranteed annual payout of $684,000, life for this 34-year-old Southern California security guard supervisor couldn’t get any better until his life took a turn for the worse.
His wife divorced him and took half of his assets from the lottery win. As James had taken the annual option, as we mentioned earlier when you decide not to take the annuity option you risk losing even more money in claimed taxes owed to the government. Still, it was a not inconsiderable amount to have on your person if you behaved responsibly and invested well. That sadly was not the case for James. Over the years, he developed an uncontrollable heroin addiction, brought on after an operation on his spine, leading him to spend $1,000 a week to indulge. After he totalled his beloved Ferrari James started a different habit; bank robbing. He threatened several bank tellers with an imaginary gun on several occasions and made off with a cash haul totalling $40,000 overall.
The veteran robber was finally arrested by the FBI in 2017 after robbing eleven different banks at fake gunpoint. The criminal was found in an abandoned garage and sentenced to 20 years in prison for his crimes.
For some people, winning the lottery does not end up being the fabulous experience they had always imagined. Many have stated over the years that if they could do it all over, they would have preferred not to win anything at all. People that are unprepared for success often find it hard to handle the pressure and expectation that comes with having so much money.
The key to being a good lottery winner is to manage your money properly and to have a clear and concise plan of what to do when you come across your windfall. Unfortunately, many people don’t know how to do this, or luck catches up with them too young to really process what is happening, rather like the lottery winner in the UK that became a millionaire at 16. Instead of thinking about the long-term consequences of being winners, they prefer to spend without thinking as if the money pot will never go down, without thinking that the replenishment is not coming back a second time.
The way to avoid this fate is to plan ahead and plan well. Find a financial advisory company you trust that you can contact when the time comes. Write up a “Contract” of what you will do with the money and how it will be portioned. How much will be for fun and how much to secure your future? Look at other previous winners and what they did, especially people that won decades ago and are still living comfortably.
So now you know the steps to making sure your life is amazing after a win. It’s important to take your time, and plan before you act, as well as not informing others of your win even if they’re close to you.
You can find the best things to purchase when you play and win Powerball. The jackpot amount is always going to be worth a lot more than what it was before. You should know that even if you don’t hit it big, at least you were able to have some fun and also help your local community via lottery charity programs associated with every ticket sold and won, which at the end of the day is always going to be a win.