I suppose it was destined to happen at some point or perhaps it has happened many times, this is just the first time I am hearing about it and have it be in the news.
A man in Iowa got some birthday presents from his friends and one of them was a scratch-off lottery ticket - you know the sort - where almost all of them result in you winning absolutely nothing.
I've played a few of these in my time but it wasn't really that difficult for me to not participate in them anymore since it just seems like a waste of money. I will however, admit that they are a perfect birthday present for someone that you don't really know a great deal about because I think everyone kind of enjoys the process, they just don't want to spend their own money for the tiny bit of excitement that happens when they are actually scratching them off.
His name is Christian Johnson and he didn't scratch it right when it was given to him and was just hanging out in his house perhaps days after getting the gift when he decided to let his girlfriend scratch the ticket off for him. There was an understandable point of disbelief before she even called him into the room, as she was convinced that she didn't understand the rules of the card correctly but when she did call him in, and they both re-read the rules over and over did it kick in that they had just won the top jackpot of 100,000 dollars.
Now let's not get too excited here: In USA the government is going to probably end up taking about 30-40% of that but still, for the average person getting 60 to 70 thousand dollars all at once is a pretty nice injection of cash into one's life.
It reminded me of some stand-up comedy that one of my favorite and unfortunately recently deceased comedians once did about buying a friend a lottery ticket for their birthday when he said "let's be honest, when you buy that ticket you don't actually want them to win... what a nightmare that would be. You had it in your hand and you decided to give it away!" something along those lines. I liked the part of his delivery when he said "happy birthday... here you go! Nothing!"
And honestly a vast majority of the time that is exactly what you will win with a lottery ticket, scratched or otherwise.
Then there is also the statistical damn near certainty that Christian here as well as something like 70% of all lottery winners end up broke within several years and the amount of money that they win doesn't seem to be much of a part of the equation. It could be 100,000 dollars, it could be $100 million dollars. One of the major reasons why this ends up being true is because they allow the public to know who they are, as is the case with Mr. Johnson here, and friends and family come out of the woodwork looking for a handout.
I know someone who won $50,000 in a lottery and tons of people were borrowing money off of her. She was a kind soul and she helped everyone who asked and it wasn't but a few months later before she was running around town collecting the debts from all the people because the money was all gone. The crazy thing was that I knew her before the big win and as is the stigma, I think she was better off before she ever won the money. Relationship were destroyed or made difficult because of the winning because if she did loan the money she had difficulty ever getting it back if she didn't loan the money she was seen as not "being a friend."
I am sure this contributes to a lot of the downfall of people dealing with substantially more than $100k too. There are a lot of reasons why this happens but I think much of it stems from them not really having much of a concept of having this much money at once and people who have always lived paycheck to paycheck will be frivolous with money buying things that depreciate quickly such as a nice car, or things that depreciate immediately such as vacations. Even those that do things like put down a deposit on a non-depreciating-asset maybe don't consider things like land tax and mortgage payment terms that will result in the bank taking the house away from them at a discount if they fail to pay, which they will unless the continue to win the lottery over and over.
So I am happy for Christian and find the story about the lottery ticket being a single ticket that was purchased just for a birthday. It's a great birthday present indeed but when Christian spends all of that money, his face wont be in the paper then, just at the start. 100K isn't exactly a life-changing amount of money.
For me, I was thinking about this guy who won a huge jackpot and after taxes his take-home was $200 million and lo' and behold, within 5 years he was broke. When I did some math I found out that if we were to limit his amount of expenditures to $30,000 a month, which to me would be a crazy amount of money to spend per month, that his winnings would last him more than 500 years. Why is it that almost none of these people manage to do this? Let's make it more crazy and spend $100,000 a month ok? That is still much longer than anyone ever lives.
Regardless of What Christian Johnson ends up doing with it, I hope it is a good time. Well, that is of course provided he doesn't develop some sort of untenable heroin addiction or something really Iowa-like such as that.
