Here are some of the most interesting ways lottery winners have spent their winnings.
And wait until you hear the single best piece of advice lottery winners almost never follow!
6 - Janite Lee Lottery winner Janite Lee was one lottery
winner with a Biiiiig heart.
She won $18 million dollars in the lottery in 1993.
This win was life changing money for her, and with it, she wanted to fulfill some dreams
she had.
However, most of her dreams didn’t involve buying things for herself like a lot of lottery
winners.
Instead, she wanted to give away her winnings!
Court filings and federal records showed that Lee was generous to a variety of causes, particularly
politics, education, and her community.
Lee began becoming well known to democratic political leaders in 1997.
She gave campaign checks of $100,000 dollars to the Democratic National Committee.
Her support of the democrats allowed her to sit next to Bill Clinton at one of the fundraisers!
Her generosity soon got prominent Missouri Democrats seeking campaign donations from
her.
She donated $277,000 dollars to various candidates.
Democratic activists were introduced to Lee through Clinton's campaign aides.
It wasn’t just politics though, it was in education as well.
She supposedly donated one and half million dollars to Washington University in Missouri.
To this day, across from the entrance to Washington University's School of Law library, there
still hangs a painting of Janite Lee!
And that’s not all, they also built and named a reading room in the library after
her.
The library is considered one of the nicest college libraries in the nation.
From this picture off twitter, the Janite Lee Reading Room still looks as fancy as it
did when it was first built!
And Janite just kept giving and giving.
She gave away a lot of money to her church.
She donated money to the local homeless shelters in St. Louis.
It seemed like she gave until she couldn’t anymore.
Because after just 8 years winning 18 million dollars, she filed for bankruptcy in 2001!
We’re not sure if she had any regrets giving away a ton of her money.
What do you think?
Let us know in the comments!
And also do us a quick favor, hit that like button!
5 - Jonathan Vargas Lotto winner Jonathan Vargas won a little
over $35 million dollars from the Powerball when he was only 19 years old!
When he was picking numbers for the ticket, he didn't just choose any random numbers.
Instead, he relied on intuition!
Vargas said that most of the numbers he picked represented the ages of his family members
at the time.
However, he definitely needed better intuition when it came to coming up with a business
to grow his winnings.
He thought that going into business for himself was the best way to maintain his wealth.
And he knew that he wanted to do something in the entertainment industry.
But his decision of starting an all girls wrestling league called Wrestlicious?
We’re gonna have to say there are better businesses out there to invest in!
He created a television show called Wrestlicious TakeDown.
That was sort of a sketch comedy featuring professional female wrestlers in bikinis.
After just one year of prime-time broadcasts, Wrestlicious was cancelled in 2010.
Vargas was out nearly half a million dollars of his lottery winnings for this venture!
Vargas said that if he had to do it all over again, he would have waited a year to decide
what he really wanted to do!
Interestingly enough, the Wrestlicious website is still up to this day…….and they’re
hinting at a comeback?!
4 - John and Linda Kutey When John and Linda Kutey first won their
share of the huge Mega Millions jackpot back in 2011, they only had one thing on their
mind.
And that was….build a water park?
John and his wife Linda decided to invest some of their $28.7 million dollars to build
a water park in honor of their parents.
Technically, it was John that won, but of course, Linda really won too.
John was one of seven employees at the New York State Homes and Community Renewal in
Albany who cashed in on the winning $319 million dollar Mega Millions ticket.
So how much does building a water park cost?
Apparently it was only around $200,000 dollars.
Or at least what the Kutey’s donated to the village of Green Island in New York!
They went to the town officials after winning the drawing to ask what they could do to help
out their hometown.
And the officials requested the installation of the spray pool.
It seems like the kids loved it.
This is the one lottery splurge that probably had the most people that got to enjoy it!
3 - Ibi Roncaioli Ibi Roncaioli won $5 million dollars in the
lottery back in 1991.
She was a Hungarian-born beauty shop owner who was married to a doctor.
Her husband being a doctor is actually relevant, and we’ll get to it in just a minute.
When she won the lottery, she first gave away roughly 800 grand to the one son she had with
her husband, Dr. Roncaioli.
She also gave away roughly the same amount to another son she had from a previous marriage.
This son also lived with them as part of the family.
Okay, this seems pretty normal so far right?
Lottery winners give away winnings to family members all the time!
However, here’s the twist in the story.
She secretly gave away a further $2 million dollars to a son she had with a third man!
His existence was a secret from the entire family.
Well, Dr. Roncaioli didn’t like this whatsoever.
So he decided to poison her!
The secret gift of 2 million dollars to a son he didn’t know about probably put him
over the edge, because their life was far from perfect at that time.
She had racked up a $1 million dollars in debt.
On top of that, after thirty years of marriage, even though they lived in the same mansion,
they hardly saw each other according to their son.
Dr. Roncaioli’s defense was that he was trying to get a sample from her to check on
her since her health had been declining at a rapid pace, and he accidentally gave her
too much sedative.
Nope, the jury didn’t buy it.
Dr. Roncaoili was charged with his wife’s murder and later convicted of manslaughter
in 2008!
2 - Alex and Rhoda Toth Alex and Rhoda Toth were two lottery winners
who became infamous pretty much as soon as they won a 13-million-dollar lottery jackpot!
When they won the lottery back in 1990, their family was living in poverty at the time.
Alex had to take care of his wife as well as six kids, some of whom were his kids from
previous relationships.
They were living paycheck to paycheck and supposedly they had less than $25 dollars
that they had to live on for 7 days at the time they won the lottery!
In initial interviews, Alex and Rhoda said that the money wasn’t going to change them.
However, as soon as they won, they went to Las Vegas.
For three months!
And they were living it up in penthouse suites at a cost of a thousand bucks per night.
Do we need to say they also gambled away a ton of money?
They finally got tired of Vegas and then moved to Florida.
To make a long story short, you guessed it, they eventually filed for bankruptcy, not
once, but twice!
They also faced charges of tax fraud.
At the time of their criminal investigation, according to investigators, there was nothing
left.
Alex and Rhoda were once again living in abysmal conditions.
They had no electricity at their home.
The only source of power was a wire that was hooked to the home to the couple’s car engine!
Rhoda eventually served time in prison for two years.
Alex didn’t serve any time because he ended up passing because of a heart attack.
What NOT to do And now we get to the what NOT to do section
of this video!
What are you NOT supposed to do if you win the lottery?
The best advice we’ve heard is to NOT buy anything immediately.
Wait something like 6 months or maybe wait a year.
Basically, don’t use the money at all until you get used to it!
This is the same advice Jonathan Vargas wished he could have given to himself before he lost
half a million with his Wrestlicious idea.
The emotions of winning a big amount of money we’re not used seriously clouds our judgement.
We also need to have the time to learn to adjust to friends and family treating us differently!
Callie Rogers was the youngest lottery winner ever back in 2003 at the age of 16.
She said that she was too young at the time to handle the money.
She caved in to the pressure of her fake friends who asked her for money, even though they
didn’t really care about her.
She revealed in interviews how after her win she gave away hundreds of thousands of dollars
and had to deal with jealousy from total strangers.
To this day, Rogers said she’s still owed hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Her “fake friends” took her debit card to buy Macbooks and gifts for themselves while
she partied at the height of her fame!
The whole point of having money is to spend it.
We can’t take it with us.
But when we use it, we want to make sure we’re actually using it to get the max value we
can get out of it!
In our opinion, the best thing money can do for us is to make sure we never have to work
out of necessity for money again!
1 - Brian Caswell And we’re gonna end on a good note with
our last entry.
When Brian Caswell and his wife Joan won the 25 million pounds in the EuroMillions, they
were in shock!
However that shock may have contributed to the fact that he had to get an emergency quadruple
bypass.
And instead of waiting, his daughter researched the top surgeon and he paid to get private
healthcare.
Well, Brian was almost 80 at the time so that was a decision that made total sense.
The lottery has kept him healthy as well as happy.
He and his wife’s lottery win seems like it’s going to be one of those stories with
a happy ending.
They haven’t blown their winnings, and it seems like their biggest splurges have been
a new house, a new heart for Brian, and a…….plot of land at his grand daughter’s school?!
Yep, Brian decided to donate some of his winnings to Egerton Primary School in Manchester England,
where 4 of his grandkids go to school!
Brian is a big gardener, and he wanted to be able to teach kids what he learned at school!
Winning the lottery gave Brian the time and the money of course, that he needed to grow
the very best fruit and vegetables.
And eating home-grown fresh produce is something he’s passionate about and tried to instil
in his children and grandchildren!
Here’s what’s next!