Winning the lottery is on almost everyone’s dream list, but imagine actually winning the lottery not once... but twice.
Well, that actually happened a New Jersey local who worked at a convenience store but her miraculous story doesn't have the ending one might expect.
Evelyn Adams won $3.9 million on the lotto in 1985 and amazingly, went on to win a further $1.4 million jackpot just four months later.
Talk about good luck!
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If the odds to win one lotto wasn’t high enough, what would be the odds on winning it twice?
Well, according to The Sun, the odds of winning the first jackpot were one in 3.2 million and odds for the second stood at one in 5.2 million.
But tragedy would strike for Adams and she ended up losing all her money and finding herself living in a trailer park due to a handful of bad business decisions on top of a serious gambling addiction.
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Because Adams’ prize money was paid to her in annual payments of $218,000, she was able to off some bills and set up a college fund for her daughter with her first jackpot win.
She then went on to treat herself to a car and splurged on her closest pals, purchasing those closest to her gifts with the cash.
With her spending habits increasing, Adams decided to increase her weekly lotto ticket total from $25 to $100 per week.
The Sun also reports that after winning two jackpots, Adams felt as though she ‘couldn't go anywhere without being recognised and had lost her privacy’ due to becoming a millionaire within the year.
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But recognition wasn’t her only issue as although many of Adams’ family and friends were happy for her, others ‘resented’ her new-found wealth.
So, it led to the New Jersey native to put her plans to study music on hold, and instead use some of her money to buy the convenience store she once worked at.
This, however, didn’t last long as she later put it up for sale and began to give away some of her winnings as loans - most of which were never paid back.
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With all of these costly expenditures adding up, the money was bound to dry up and by 2012, Adams had spent all of her money after regularly gambling at Atlantic City casinos too frequently.
She said: “Winning the lottery isn't always what it's cracked up to be. I won the American dream but I lost it, too. It was a very hard fall. It's called rock bottom."
Adams went on to talk about how her relationships changed due to her wealth: "Everybody wanted my money. Everybody had their hand out. I never learned one simple word in the English language, 'no'.
"I wish I had the chance to do it all over again. I'd be much smarter about it now. I was a big time gambler. I didn't drop a million dollars, but it was a lot of money.”
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She concluded: "I made mistakes, some I regret, some I don't. I'm human. I can't go back now so I just go forward, one step at a time."
Britt Jones