If you play tomorrow, you're not getting a straight dollar - for - dollar return, but I'll play it anyway because I'm an idiot who thinks he has a chance at this...
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Brits Lara and Roger Griffiths’ marriage ended in divorce less than a decade after the couple won a $2.19 million jackpot. Roger chased his rock star dreams and spent big bucks for his band to release an album. Lara got a taste for the high life as the couple paid for exotic cars, an expensive house, designer clothes and accessories, and a pricey private school for their daughter.
They dumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into opening a salon, where Lara was later forced to work as an employee just to make ends meet. In the end, the couple was left with less than $10.
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Five years after Kentucky resident David Lee Edwards won a $27 million jackpot he was penniless and living in a storage shed with his wife. The couple squandered the fortune on the common goodies that sink so many lucky winners. They bought dozens of high-end cars, mansions and a plane.
They blew through $3 million in the first three months. By the end of the first year, $12 million was in the wind. By 2006, the couple had spiraled into drug addiction, and just 12 years after the win changed the course of his life, David Lee Edwards died alone and broke in hospice care at the age of 58.
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Mother's Day is 16 days away. You still
have
time to get her something nice. Like this...
Click on the picture for more details on this...
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And my all-time favorite, because I actually
knew Curtis back in the day...
When New York lottery winner Lou Eisenberg met Curtis Sharp in 1982, he knew right away they’d be pals. Sharp, a maintenance man from Newark, NJ had just hit the $5 million jackpot — exactly a year after Eisenberg famously scored the same amount, which at the time was the most in New York history.
“Because I had won $5 million in 1981, I got invited to Curtis’ Lotto event,” Eisenberg recalled.
“I liked him because he reminded me of me! He was dressed to the nines and came in singing a song. Curtis had his wife on one arm and his mistress on the other! I laughed myself silly.”
What was supposed to be a quick meet-and-greet between the men evolved into a friendship that would last a lifetime — and, as it turns out, far longer than their winnings.
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Eisenberg, now 90, and Sharp, 80, both went from blue-collar working stiffs to millionaires and then back to everymen again, struggling to make ends meet.
“In the end, I’ve got him, he’s got me — but neither of us have any more money.”
Sharp added, “We’ve got our stories, and we share those in telephone calls at least once a week. We talk all the time. We’ve been with each other through the rich good times — and now we’re together through the old and broke times.”
Eisenberg was 53, living in Brooklyn and earning $225 a week as an office light-bulb changer when he bought his usual six numbers from a Midtown convenience store in November 1981. This time, he won big.
After taxes, he received the first of his 20 payouts of about $200,000 a year and quit his job.
For 53 years, I’ve been eating bread. Now I want to eat cake,” he said at a press conference held by New York Lottery.
Overnight, “Lucky Lou” became a celebrity and performed his happy-go-lucky shtick on the “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and as a regular guest at local city events.
A year later, lottery officials asked Eisenberg to attend the jackpot party for Sharp, then 44.
“They asked me to help greet him,” Eisenberg recalled. “I was the first Jew that won $5 million in New York, he was the first black that won $5 million in New York. And we were both just working stiffs.”
Sharp was living in Newark and earning $300 a week as a maintenance man when he asked a buddy to buy him a lottery ticket from a store near the Port Authority Bus Terminal. After his win, Sharp, like Eisenberg, began receiving a similar annual payout.
“It was $239,005 a year for 20 years,” he recalled, which was more than Eisenberg’s because Sharp was living in Jersey and paying lower taxes than his buddy in New York. When lottery officials noticed how similar the two winners were, they were paired for a few local lottery commercials.
After the publicity died down, the two continued to meet and talk about the wacky world of winning the lottery.
Eisenberg talked about his fun trips to Paris and gambling in Las Vegas. He also confided about the strain of his divorce, about his young new wife — and the subsequent divorce from her, too. His alimony payments to two women began eating up more than half of his take-home winnings, he complained to Sharp. He had to hand his Brighton Beach condo over in one of the divorce settlement.
When friends and neighbors asked Eisenberg for money, he happily handed it over, he added. “It was easy come, easy go. There was always a check coming soon,” Eisenberg said.
Sharp knew exactly what his friend was going through. Several divorces and a series of fancy cars ate up Sharp’s money, never mind the dough he was dropping at casinos. Despite hanging on to his day job for another eight years in order to qualify for a pension, Sharp acknowledged that he was going on a lot of booze and drug benders. He was also giving a lot of the money away to friends and relatives. Sharp’s favorite thing was donating to charities, and he once cut a check for $15,000 to help victims of the Ethiopian famine.
“It came in, it went out,” Sharp said.
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$300 Million is generational wealth, enough money to live on forever if you just kept it dialed back, or set things up to only spend the annual interest.
ReplyDeleteSome people are born to be poor and will get that way regardless of what is put in front of them.
I think it's a white trash-kinda thing...
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