If I won the lottery...

Have you ever sat down after buying a lottery ticket and thought, what would I actually do if I won the lottery? Over the last couple of months, there have been several Euromillions lottery draws, with jackpots ranging from 1 million pounds, to 22 million pounds. After each of these lottery draws, normal people became millionaires overnight, and their lives changed drastically, for good and for bad.

Its always amazed me why certain people who won lottery jackpots, decided to tell everyone, and have their names shown on t.v and in the papers. How bad must it be afterwards when all of a sudden people start to be overly nice to you, people you havent spoken to in ages start to come out of the woodwork, and certain people around you start to ask for favors. This is clearly a bad side of having so much money, of course there will be people you trust, that wouldn't treat you bad because they'd like to be apart of your new wealth, but unfortunatly there are those people who will appear, looking for ways to get part of that wealth out of you. If I was ever to win the lottery I'd immediatly want it to be kept anonymous, and once I had the money, I would only tell people who I knew I could trust.

During the week running up to the last Euromillions draw, some friends from work and myself were talking about what we'd do if we won the jackpot. At the time, the jackpot was roughly £10 million, so we kept with this figure and planned out what we'd do from there. Overall we decided that, due to getting such a large amount of money in such a small period of time, we would initially need to take a small amount of the money, and go on a shopping spree, this way we would get it out of our system, we'd get a few luxury items that we've been wanting, and it would stop us from slowly digging away at the money later on, buying random things. We also decided that having gotten such a large sum of money it would be selfish not to give a percentage of it to charity.

Several months before having this talk at work, mainly because I was very bored on the bus one day, I thought I would actually write down what I would do with £10 million. On this piece of paper, I wrote down a list of people I would like to give money too, and then I actually assigned specific amounts of money to these people. I found that when it came to my siblings and friends, I wrote that I would impose restrictions, saying that a certain percentage should go towards university loans, or ways to further their education. Although I still had some mony left over, my list at this point mainly consisted of people who I'd give money, instead of things I would buy. I didn;t want to dwell to much on the things I would like to buy like holidays or a car.

If you ever get the time, please take some time out, and try to think about what you'd do with money like this. When you actually understand how big amount of money it is, and what it buys, you then realise just how many lifes you could affect.