Lotter Winner Wins Millions Loses A Lot
Reading this story, I go from feeling sorry for this guy to saying "well, hell, you should have had some more sense." Anybody who is smart enough to run their own business, with or without the benefit of a college degree (or even high school diploma, by the way), should have known that having $93 Million dropped in your lap was going to change your life, potentially for the worse…Actually, probably for the worst.
Jack Whittaker discovered that winning the lotto wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Sure, some of the things that have happened to him are the things that happen in life whether or not you’ve got money, but not everything.
"I don’t have any friends," he said in a lengthy interview with The Associated Press. "Every friend that I’ve had, practically, has wanted to borrow money or something and of course, once they borrow money from you, you can’t be friends anymore."
I’ve never won the lottery, but if I did, I’d take one of two routes.
1. No one would ever know about it (save close family, of course).
2. We’d disappear from our current life and make sure the public side of the new one didn’t mention the money.
Maybe that’s at best, naive or worst, ridiculously impossible to accomplish either one. But I’ve seen far more stories about the havoc winning (or inheriting) loads of money causes than I have the improvements to the winner’s life provides. Oprah did a story a few years ago with a panel of lottery winners, and pretty much every one of them said that winning caused more problems than it solved. The one successful winner I remember from the show basically used approach #2 from above, and though the husband and wife were little lonely, they weren’t broke, nor had they lost all the important people in their lives to the greed a windfall like that creates.
