Lottery winners share money advice

Tuesday, March 28, 2006 posted 11:00 AM EST

Just in case you're the first one to win big money in the N.C. Education Lottery that starts Thursday, S.C. lottery winners have some advice:

Be careful about loaning money. Get a tax adviser. And if you owe anyone money, don't let lottery officials put your picture on the Internet.

Don't get them wrong. Three winners interviewed by the Observer are perfectly happy to keep the money, thank you. But they've had their headaches.

One winner says his child support payments doubled, eating into his take. Another says she lost a friend after loaning $800. A third got a big tax bill she wasn't expecting.

Susan Bradley, a Florida-based certified financial planner who has advised lottery winners, said people don't have to win millions for a lottery windfall to change their lives. Even a relatively small jackpot can cause tension with friends and family.

"It isn't as easy as it looks," she said.

Donna Moye: $100,000

Donna Moye won $100,000 in the S.C. lottery. She also lost a friend.Moye, of Gaffney, S.C., says she'd gotten lucky in the lottery several times before that -- winning a few hundred dollars here and there. But when she hit the big money just before Thanksgiving 2004 by playing numbers based on birthdays, she decided to celebrate in style.

Moye, who works as a dispatcher for a trucking company, got together with some friends and borrowed her boss's white limousine. They rode to Columbia to collect the winnings.

The money helped Moye crawl out of debt, she said. Moye had closed a money-losing NASCAR collectibles store two years earlier. The lottery money helped her pay remaining bills from the business and pay off credit cards.

She also had a little fun -- buying her sister a big-screen television and paying off her Honda CR-V, which she later traded for a truck.

She loaned a close friend $800 and later got into a fight over the money. The two haven't mended fences.

"To me, it wasn't something worth losing a friendship over," she said. "But to him, it was."

Ty Cobb: $100,000

Ty Cobb, a pro fisherman who lives in Carolina Beach, often buys lottery tickets for his buddies when he drives to South Carolina. A ticket he bought three days after his birthday in June 2004 provided his windfall.

His troubles started a little later, when the S.C. Education Lottery put a picture of him grinning and holding a $100,000 check on its Web site.

"My ex-wife caught wind of it," said Cobb. "They doubled my child support payments and they put a $100,000 lien on my home."

Cobb, who owns a small sports bar, says he kept enough money to pay some bills. Cobb says he still buys lottery tickets, but if he wins again, he'll try to keep the news quiet.

If Cobb plays North Carolina's lottery, it will be hard for him to keep his winnings a complete secret. Winners who receive $600 or more must provide their name and where they live to the lottery and that becomes public information, a lottery spokeswoman said. But winners can opt out of having their photos on the Web site or on other promotional materials. South Carolina also lets winners avoid publicity.

"It was a good blessing at the time," Cobb said. "When I was in the courtroom, it didn't seem like it."

Shirley Greer: $500,000

Shirley Greer said she was behind on her mortgage and other bills in March 2005 when she played the Powerball game, basing her numbers on a Chinese fortune cookie. Greer, of Dillon, S.C., was one of 16 people to match five Powerball numbers, earning her $500,000.Her surprise came in the form of a big tax bill. Greer said she had set aside some money for taxes, but the bill came in higher than she expected.

Greer, a single mother, says she bought a car for her oldest son and set aside money for all of her three children. She also paid off her mortgage and gave 10 percent of her winnings to her church.

She also received calls from relatives and friends, offering investment advice and seeing if they could share in her good fortune. "People came out of the woodwork," she said. "Everybody wants to be your friend then."

`It's hard to go right back'

Some lottery winners believe they can pick up a prize check, pose for photos, celebrate and go hang with their friends the next day.

It's often not that simple, said Susan Bradley, a certified financial planner who has advised lottery winners.

"It's hard to go right back into life. Everyone ... knows they're a lottery winner," said Bradley, who wrote the book "Sudden Money: Managing a Financial Windfall."

With their sudden wealth, some winners try to bridge the psychological distance from friends and relatives by sharing money with them. This also has to be managed tactfully or it can backfire, Bradley said.

She told the tale of one lottery recipient who won $5 million and gave each of her siblings $50,000. The siblings resented that the winner gave them a relatively small share. The winner, Bradley said, was annoyed at some of the purchases her siblings made.

"You can have a loss of identity, because now you're one of those people with money," Bradley said. She suggests people do something conservative with the money, such as buying municipal bonds, until they have time to think through their decisions and possibly talk with an adviser.

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