Millionaire lottery winner 'addicted to jackpots' shares hardest thing about winning
An incredibly lucky lottery winner who has bagged $4.6 million over four jackpots claims there are some problems about getting a lifechanging amount of money.
Since 1999, Mike Luciano has won four separate jackpots and amassed the sort of fortune that should have anyone set for life, but in the case of many lottery winners it doesn't work out that way.
Winning the lottery can cause all sorts of problems in your personal life as the money changes your circumstances so dramatically, and plenty of winners end up losing the lot.
Some people can end up winning multiple times and still lose it all, somehow managing to fritter away two fortunes of a lifetime in just one life.
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Others end up getting inundated with all sorts of requests from friends and family to the point that they wish they'd never even won the lottery in the first place.
A few keep their winnings a secret to try and avoid exactly this problem, though you can imagine there'd be hell to pay if your nearest and dearest ever actually found out.
However, there's one thing four-time lottery winner Luciano says is the hardest about winning the jackpot and he would know having won it four times in his life.
He picked up his first win in 1999 after winning $100,000 (£82,000), and then in 2016 won a $3 million (£2.47 million) jackpot in 2016.
His luck continued throughout last year as he won the Pennsylvania state lottery and bagged $500,000 (£412,000) in yet another win.
That wasn't the end of his good fortune, however, as in January 2022 he picked up $1 million (£823,000) and has continued to play the odds, though he hasn't won more than $5,000 (£4,100) since his million dollar haul at the beginning of the year.
With all that experience under his belt he surely knows more than anyone the kind of impact winning the jackpot can have on your life, and he's sure he knows what's hardest about striking it so lucky.
In Luciano's opinion the biggest difficulty is a problem plenty of other lottery winners seem to suffer from, and it's figuring out how to control your spending habits when you've got more money than you know what to do with.
The four time lottery winner told the Daily Star there were downsides to a huge jackpot prize and if you're not careful that fortune can quickly disappear.
He said: "Winning money in the lottery obviously is very helpful, it helps the family, helps you get that little break in life. But there’s also drawbacks to winning money.
"The hardest thing with winning money is, you know, you have to control your spending habits. Winning a lot of money like that isn’t as much money as you think, it can go pretty fast, and you have to be careful.
"It's been well-documented that I played a lot of lottery in my life and I’m trying to cut back, trying to control this. I should probably quit or cut back. I've been trying for several years now."
Rather than packing it all in to live the life of luxury, Luciano has continued to operate his bar business, though he does want to put some of his winnings towards a dream trip to Italy.
Joe Harker