Hi Jason here, let me introduce myself. In February 2016, when I was 26 I hit the lottery jackpot for 250 Million dollars. I was working at a local pizza shop as an assistant manager at the time. I didn’t even know I won until the 3 days later. I had bought my ticket at the gas station and put it in my sun visor and forgot about it until I had went into the gas station to get some monster drinks and heard that they sold the ticket. I wrote the numbers down and put them in my visor clip to check later.
At the end of my shift I checked my ticket and found I won. I immediately locked the ticket in my glove box and kept my mouth shut. When I got home I locked it in the fire safe. I really could not sleep that night.
“What the hell. This totally cannot be real. What the hell am I going to do? It’s not like I can just wake up and call work and say ‘hey I just won 250 million, I quit’. I’ll have to play it cool, I have to keep this quiet… I’ve seen what happens when everybody knows you won the lottery, they come out of the woodwork looking for money, got a business idea, scammed, and more. That is not going to happen”
The next day I put the ticket in an envelope and took it to the bank where I got a safe deposit box. I put some other stuff in there like my passport I got when I went to Canada 3 years ago. I wanted it in a safe place until I got my shit together about this.
It was so damn hard to work that week and not just run to the lottery office and cash that thing in. I spent days writing out what I needed to do. I wanted to be anonymous in claiming the winnings, I wanted nobody to know it was me, nobody.
I needed to get professionals involved. It would need to be somebody not local, because these people around here gossip. Shit there was already tons of gossip going around who bought the winning ticket. It was the only winning one sold nationwide. Freaking news was crawling all over the place.
The next week was a whirlwind. I had found a lawyer about 2 hours away to setup a blind trust, the trust claimed the ticket and I had access to a bank account with a little over 12 million in it and another 26 million in a high interest account, the rest of it was in various stocks and bonds, all smattered over the place.
I stressed over and over that I wanted nobody to know I had won; I had seen too many of those documentaries about past winners, this was not going to be me.
I hadn’t lived at home since I was 18. My dad threw me out of the house on my 18th birthday when I told them that I was gay, but wasn’t involved with anybody at that time. My mom idly sat by while my dad assaulted me and threw me out of the house. She called me a few days later to see that I had found a place to stay and wasn’t living in my car. She keeps in touch, but there is a distance between us now. I would not be telling them anything about my winnings for a very long time.
So I was not under anybody’s rules. With more money than I will ever know what to do with, there were so many things I could do. I had to be smart about this though, can’t draw attention to myself thought.
I setup an automatic payment of my rent each month until I decided what I wanted to do. I liked my place, It was a 2 bedroom house outside of town. It took me about 3 years of living in dumps before I found this place, now it was just me and my cat, my roommate moved out when he lost his job, leaving me holding the whole rent. I started by making a double rent payment to get ahead on my rent.
I knew what I wanted to do with the money, and it was not to blow it all on the stupid things that you see other people do. I wasn’t going to buy expensive cars, huge mansions, big shopping sprees (well maybe). I never wanted to work again if I didn’t want to. I certainly never wanted to be homeless and never to have to answer to somebody else. I wanted to travel at my own pace, not needing to be on a schedule to get home or anything.
I knew my parents, family and friends would soon find out about the winnings. For the time being, I am going to do whatever I could to keep it quiet. I would have to be able to keep my money quiet to others as well as things could be bad if I didn’t.
I told my mom that I had won a $2,000 on a scratcher and was going on a little trip for a week. I flew to Florida and spent a week at Disney and had the time of my life.
While I was gone, my attorney was busy carrying out my next steps, to setup investments, and such. I needed a new cellphone number, setup credit card accounts and bank accounts.
When I came back I lounged around the house a couple of days, I had all but quit my job. I wanted to still work 16 hours a week just for now, I dropped back to working part time doing deliveries.
I went out shopping for an RV, as it had been my dream to see the world. I found a used one that suited most of my needs and then I had them customize the stuff I wanted. I wanted something small enough to be able to go wherever I wanted to, but not so small that I was cramped in. I wanted something that could be spacious with the slides out, but that I could still move around in if I could not put the slides out. It would take them 2 weeks to get it all prepped, so I had to play it cool until then; while my inner thoughts were “I don’t need this (job, drama, etc)… I got more money than what I knew to do with”.
For the next week I kept the FedEx driver busy. It got to the point that I could not get my car in the garage, as I had been having fedex just stack all the stuff in my garage. I would just tell people that the landlord needed to store stuff in the garage for upcoming renovations.
With the RV included I think I dropped close to 350k those two weeks. I had asked my landlord if I got licensed contractors if I could upgrade the electric in my garage and concrete the driveway. He wondered why I wanted to do this, but I had to tell him that I just wanted to make the place better. After all I had lived there going on 3 years now, never late on rent or gave him any other problems.
I ended up putting asphalt from the road to about 50’ before the garage where it went to concrete and putting a concrete pad next to the garage. I then had 100 amp electric brought to the garage as well. By the time all my plan was ready to fall into place it had been a little over a 2 months since I had won and I had just kept carrying on like nothing was different. Friends who came over just thought the landlord was doing the work. The contractors just knew they got a check from the trust.