Hey Millionaire! You know you've thought about
it. Be honest. We've all thought about holding that scrap of paper in our hands. You know. The
one that would change your life. The one with the numbers that match the ones on the screen.
That winning lotto ticket. Who can blame you? Winning
the lottery would be life-changing, right? Well, it would be life-changing, all right,
but maybe not in the way you think. Maybe that winning ticket is the key to
living the life you've always dreamed of, but it's just as likely to be the stuff of nightmares.
Don't believe me? Keep watching. We will show you the top ten reasons why winning the lottery
is the worst thing that could happen to you. Number 1 makes the whole
thing an exercise in futility. But let's start with the big one:
10. You get murdered. OK, mostly, you don't get murdered. Mostly. That's
the main reason this isn't reason number 1. But that doesn't change the fact that more than
a few lottery winners met an untimely demise as the result of their supposed good fortune.
William Post, for example, won over sixteen million dollars in 1988,
just to have his brother take out a hit on him. The brother hoped to inherit, but all he got was
a lot of police attention. Post walked away alive,
but not every winner is so lucky. Craigory Burch Jr. was gunned down
in his home after armed robbers couldn't pry his half-million in lotto winnings from him.
And big winner Abraham Shakespeare-our most prestigiously named lotto winner-was killed
and buried under a concrete slab for his thirty-million-dollar fortune. His killer
had already successfully convinced him to sign his assets over to her, so why that wasn't enough
isn't clear. She's still in prison. And after Jeffrey Dampier won twenty million
in the Illinois state jackpot, he spent a bunch of money on gifts for the woman he was having an
affair with: his sister-in-law. She paid Jeffrey back for the lavish gifts by having her other
boyfriend kidnap and murder him. Instead of the money, she got three consecutive life sentences.
9. You don't understand what it means to win that kind of money.
If you spend upwards of two hundred dollars a year to hit the jackpot, like the average American,
you'll want to think about what to do in the unlikely event that actually happens.
And what you should do is what financial advisors tell anyone staring down a
major windfall: set up your dream team. That means being ready to hire an attorney,
a tax specialist, and a financial advisor. And you should do that before you even show
up to claim your winnings. That's because these financial professionals can help you
maximize the amount you keep, reduce the taxes you pay, and set up trusts and other financial
tools to help you do the things you want to do - like buy every family member a house - without
finding yourself worse off than you began. 8. You don't win as much as you think.
It's easy to get excited when you see an enormous dollar amount, and you're holding
a ticket that says it's yours. But don't plan how you're going to spend it yet. Your actual
number is going to be smaller. That's unavoidable. It's taxes.
The IRS gets 24% of your winnings in the US - maybe more.
And 24% adds up. You won a hundred million dollars? Give at least twenty-four to the taxman.
Jackson Whittaker actually won three hundred and fifteen million dollars, for example.
After the deduction for taking the lump-sum payment and the taxes he owed, he walked away
with only a hundred and fourteen million dollars. On top of taxes, there's another risk to
your potential pot: other lottery players. Yeah, the odds of hitting the winning numbers
are low, but that doesn't mean it's not common for multiple people to win the same pot.
In New Zealand, lotto players jumped for joy when they discovered they won
a million dollars - and crashed to earth when each they realized 39 other people did too.
Their share? About twenty-five thousand cash. Of course, that's not the only reason you might
be forced to split the pot? What if you bought the ticket with someone else? And what if you
got tripped up on the next point. 7. You have to share.
So you skipped the sharing classes in kindergarten, Big deal. It's your ticket,
after all. Why shouldn't you keep it? Well, if you do that when others have
a claim to the winnings, expect them to sue. That's what happened with other lotto winners who
declined to share the jackpot with the people who pitched in on the price of the winning ticket.
Construction worker Americo Lopes, for example, tried to walk away with the winnings after he
cashed in a thirty-eight million dollar lottery ticket he bought with his co-workers. They took
him to court, and Lopes was ordered to share. On the bright side, if you are sued, you'll be
able to afford an attorney. 6. The woodwork.
Specifically, all the people coming out of it. There's nothing like publicly piling up
fat stacks of cash to discover all the friends you never know you had.
Just kidding. They're not your friends. Not most of them, anyway. The one thing
you can really count on after a big win is that people will start asking them for money.
Some of those people will be friends, and some will be family. Some will be frauds. And some
will be all those things, so winners beware. Sandra Hayes of Missouri discovered that her
friends were exactly that kind of vampire after she split a two-hundred and twenty-four million
dollar Powerball prize with 11 other people. And while they didn't come begging for houses
and cars, they did start suddenly forgetting their wallets when they went out with her.
Stacey Lowry of Oregon had a similar issue after winning five million dollars. She had
to flee her neighborhood with it after people started badmouthing her for not
buying them the expensive gifts they demanded. And that's only five of the top ten reasons. It
only gets crazier from here. Keep watching! 5. You get divorced.
Don't be like Denise Rossi, either. She found her own way to lose everything after winning a modest
one-point three-million-dollar jackpot with her husband in 1996.
It turns out that Denise, like many other winners, wasn't keen on sharing, so she concocted a plan
to take the money and run. The plan went like this:
Step one: Lie. She didn't tell her husband about the money.
Step two: Divorce him and keep the money for herself.
Step three, of course, was profit, only the court had other ideas:
after her scheme was discovered, they ordered her to pay her husband the entire pot.
The results of her lotto experience can perhaps best be summed up by paraphrasing
the immortal songsmith Young MC: got no money, got no home, got no husband, she's all alone.
4. Bankruptcy. When you win the lotto,
your financial worries are over. Right? Wrong. I think we've already established
that's not always true. In fact, lottery winners can
find themselves at higher risk for bankruptcy than they were in before their windfall.
Why? Credit. Mountains of credit. Suddenly backed by lottery money,
winners find that credit offers come quickly, easily, and in large amounts. That can lead them
to make purchases with credit and find themselves overextended - leading directly to bankruptcy.
3. You might just be bad with money. Some lottery winners just get themselves
in trouble with their own bad spending habits. When Canadian winner Sharon Tirabassi hit it rich,
she blew through her jackpot by spending heavily on homes, cars, designer clothes,
vacations, handouts, lavish parties - pretty much trying to live like a queen. Unfortunately,
royalty money has a "b" in front of the "-illion," and her ten million dollars didn't stand up to
that kind of expense. Ten years later, she was riding the bus to her rented house.
Billy Bob Harrell Jr. from Texas had a similar story. He also spent his winnings on vacations,
homes, and cars, but in his case, he was probably too generous with the gifts he gave his friends.
Within a few years, he had burned through the entire thirty-one million dollar pot.
2. There's no privacy in the lotto. When you win the lottery, you may have
to announce your winnings publicly. At least, that's the case in many states.
The upshot? Not only do you need help managing all the media requests, but you're going to be
flooded by requests for investments, for charitable donations, for outright gifts,
and even guilt trips about how you really, truly owe your estranged
childhood friend's cousin a Lamborghini. You'll come to the attention of thieves,
as Jackson Whittaker did-we'll talk more about him in a moment. And you'll be the subject of
numerous lawsuits, also like Whittaker. His attorney claimed he spent at least three
million dollars fighting about 400 lawsuits. Jackson Whittaker leads us to the number one
reason winning the lottery might be the worst thing that can happen to you.
1. You get robbed. OK, technically, getting murdered
is worse, but all sorts of misadventures seem to befall unprepared lotto winners.
Jackson Whittaker, the winner who took home a hundred and fourteen million,
learned all about that when he was robbed. Repeatedly.
First, thieves took a suitcase from his trunk containing
five hundred and forty-five thousand dollars in cash while parked outside a strip club.
Actually, that brings us to a bonus lotto winner pro-tip:
don't leave half a million dollars in cash in the trunk of your car at a strip club. Really,
you should have a financial team to provide you with this kind of expert advice, but I'm happy to
provide it here. More on that later. Later, thieves stole only two
hundred thousand dollars from the trunk of his car at the strip club, so it's safe to
say Whittaker learned his lesson. It didn't really matter, though,
because thieves later stole the rest of his money by cashing 12 different checks
at 12 different banks on the same day. Also, his house burned down. It wasn't insured.
In retrospect, the lesson here might just be "don't be like Jackson Whittaker."
These things might have been prevented had winners taken better financial precautions.
So if you ever win big, take the advice of financial advisors everywhere. Set up a finance
team and listen to them. Above all, don't behave like the lottery winners on this list. If you do,
you soon may find yourself wishing you never won the lottery at all.
And that's it for our top ten reasons winning the lottery might be the worst thing that could
happen to you! What do you think the biggest downsides of winning might be? Let us know in
the comments below. If you enjoyed this video, make sure to watch our video on the Dumbest
Lottery Winners Ever, they are a true example for this video, and will show youy exactly what NOT to
do. Click the video on your screen now. Don't forget to like and subscribe!
Until next time, stay wealthy and I'll see you in the next video!