Entertainment

Some Unusual Ways Lottery Winners Spent Their Riches

posted by Chris Valentine

What do lottery winners do with their earnings? You might have heard cautionary tales about people who spent or lost it all, or you might have imagined that some people ended up living out their dreams in expensive houses while never working again. Both of those types of stories are out there, and then there are stories of people who just followed the beat of their own drummer and did unusual things with their winnings.

Peter Lavery 

Maybe you’ve always imagined that if you won the lottery, you’d make sure you had your favorite champagne or other drink of choice flowing all the time. Irish lottery winner Peter Lavery, who won more than £10 million in the UK lottery, roughly $13 million in U.S. dollars, went one better. He turned an old Belfast jail into a whiskey distillery. Lavery, a former bus driver, first went on an exotic vacation when he won the lottery and then found himself the recipient of hundreds of letters begging for money. He took steps early on to spend and invest sensibly although he didn’t hesitate to make a few eccentric purchases including a DeLorean car.

Eric Hale 

There are a lot of sad stories of lottery winners for whom the big win alienated them from family and friends. That wasn’t the case with Eric Hale. The Oregon man made good on a pact he’d made with his brother as a child than if he ever won the lottery, he would share it with him. That call was the first he made after winning the $1 million Powerball lottery. His brother said he was shocked that he honored the pact.

Thea and Paul Bristow 

This British couple used their lottery winnings to take their local scout troop on a trip to Canada, purchase a stretch of land near their home that was under risk from developers and to buy their local flagging football club. Sadly, Paul Bristow died just a few years after the lottery win, but their example shows that plenty of good can be spread around after a lottery win. Whether you prefer scratch-off tickets or going for the big prizes, playing the lottery can be a lot of fun for not much money. There’s little risk–after all, you can literally play for the price of change you find around your house.

There are ways to increase your chances of winning the lottery. For example, paying attention to the winning numbers at Powerball in the United States can help you choose the numbers that will increase your chances of success. If you really want to get serious about participating in a lot of different lotteries, it’s easy to buy lottery tickets at WinTrillions.com. This is a fun site that gives you lots of opportunities to buy many different lottery tickets as well as participate in various types of games.

They say the likelihood of becoming a lottery winner is low, but it’s a low-risk, high-reward activity, and even if you don’t win the big prize, there are plenty of smaller ones along the way. Most of all, a lottery ticket provides a chance to dream–and to realize you might even find a way to make that dream come true if you don’t win millions.

You may also like