'I won £800,000 on the lottery but it all went wrong and I lost my business'
For most people, winning the lottery seems like a dream come true – until the money brings less desirable associations – as one woman who lost it all in four years found out.
Single mom Lisa Arcand won almost £800,000 ($1m) on a lottery ticket she bought and began to splash out with her new-found wealth – hosting a party for friends and family, who ordered several bottles of £157 ($200) wine at the event. Not a massive sum, but then she enrolled her son in a private school with a £7.8K ($10K) annual tuition fees.
However, it was when she chased her "dream" of buying and operating a seafood restaurant in her hometown, that bigger problems began to arise as due to financial difficulties, she was forced to shut her business within six months. And at that time, the lottery advised winners should take annual payments of £28K ($35K), rather than a lump sum.
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But Arcand chose to take advice from a financial services company that offered to give her an upfront payment of £157K ($200K) in exchange for £12K ($15K) of her winnings per year. What she didn't realise was that move instantly put her in a higher tax bracket, meaning that she lost more money than she would have otherwise.
Woman was 'adamant' she would win top lottery prize - then pockets $200,000
While she also went on a few vacations and bought a brand-new furnished house, according to the Eagle Tribune, these did not put her fortune in jeopardy and in 2007, Arcand said that the experience had been "very depressing" overall. She said: "Winning the lottery is not all it’s cracked up to be. Actually, it’s been very depressing."
And Arcand's fate has been shared by many other lottery winners. David Lee Edwards, a convicted felon from Ashland, Kentucky, won a one-quarter share, about £22m ($27m) after tax, from the Powerball jackpot of £219m ($280m) million during August 2001. He got married to Shawna Maddux in Malibu, California, and got on with squandering his wealth.
The massive purchases included a mansion within a gated community in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, along with more than a dozen expensive cars and a private LearJet, according to the Courier-Journal. Just five years later, he had allegedly succumbed to drug addiction and was living in a storage shed covered in human excrement.
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And Alex Toth from Florida won £10.2m ($13m) in 1990 and opted for 20-year payments of £523K ($666,666). He lived the high Life for years but eventually went broke, was charged with filing false tax returns, split with his wife, Rhoda, and checked into a mental institution. He died penniless in 2008 aged 60, before the tax case could go to trial. His ex Rhoda told the St Petersburg Times in 1997 that the money "has torn us apart". She said: "It caused us to lose a lot of friends, some family members. Sometimes I wish we could give it back."
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