Its scary how some folk handle money, I was just reading this account of how a successful businessman who already was a millionaire mishandled his winnings:
Lottery Winner Jack Whittaker's Losing Ticket
-Jack Whittaker, a 55-year-old contractor from Scott Depot, W. Va., had worked his way up from backcountry poverty to build a water-and-sewer-pipe business that employed over 100 people. He was a millionaire several times over. But when he awoke at 5:45 a.m. on Christmas morning in 2002, everything he'd built in his life held only passing significance next to a scrap of paper in his worn leather wallet—a $1 Powerball lottery ticket bearing the numbers 5, 14, 16, 29, 53, and 7.
Whittaker had purchased his lucky ticket, along with two bacon-stuffed biscuits, at the C&L Super Serve convenience store in the town of Hurricane on Dec. 24, 2002. That night, Whittaker went to bed thinking he'd missed winning the lottery by one digit—only to wake up on Christmas Day to find that the number had been broadcast incorrectly and the winning ticket was in his hand. "I got sick at my stomach, and I just was [at] a loss for words and advice," he later remembered. When he returned to the convenience store on Monday, he quietly told the woman at the cash register he'd won. "No you didn't," she replied. "You're not excited enough to win the lottery."
The day after Christmas, Whittaker put on his Stetson cowboy hat, black suit, and white shirt—he always dressed this way—and appeared on live TV together with his wife Jewel, daughter Ginger, and 15-year-old granddaughter Brandi Bragg, to accept a check for $10 million from West Virginia Governor Bob Wise. It was the first portion of a jackpot that had been building since Halloween. On Christmas Eve, when he bought the ticket, the prize stood at $280 million. A late surge of buyers pushed it to $314.9 million, making Whittaker the winner of the biggest single undivided jackpot in lottery history...
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles...-losing-ticket