12 Things Not to Do If You Win the $1.817 Billion Lottery

The most recent mega-jackpot in U.S. history topped out at $1.817 billion, claimed by a single lucky ticket sold in Arkansas on Christmas Eve 2025. That prize ranks as the second-largest in U.S. lottery history, behind only the $2.04 billion Powerball jackpot won in California in November 2022. At 24/7 Wall St., we have evaluated the behavior of lottery winners across the board, and the pattern is striking. Far too many of them walk away with life-changing money only to lose it all within a few years.

Some winners choose the annuity payment rather than the discounted lump sum. Others give most of their winnings away or shower friends and family with purchases they have no hope of sustaining. Could you imagine winning $50 million or $100 million and then being broke?

Many guides focus on what lottery winners should do. The more useful question is what they should not do. Winners tend to overestimate how well-equipped they are to manage sudden wealth, and that blind spot costs them everything.

Lottery winners can become marked targets and make instant enemies. To appreciate the true scale of a billion-dollar windfall, consider that $1.817 billion could comfortably buy an entire major sports franchise or a fleet of the world’s most expensive superyachts. Spending $30 million in 30 days, as the hero of “Brewster’s Millions” attempted in the 1980s, might have seemed far-fetched then. Today it can be accomplished in days or even hours.

Here are the 12 things not to do if you win the lottery:

1. Forget to sign a ticket or report it to the state.

It sounds almost too simple, but failing to sign a ticket or report a win to the relevant lottery authority ranks among the most common and most costly mistakes winners make. Imagine losing a lottery ticket, then imagine someone else scooping it up and walking to the counter to collect your prize. Consider a New Jersey winner who found a $5.9 million Pick-6 ticket crumpled in an old pair of pants in his closet. He arrived at the New Jersey Lottery office on May 14, 2026, with just eight days left before the ticket expired permanently.

Fighting over the true ownership of a lottery ticket is not a simple task, and disputes over who holds the winning piece of paper have a long history. In many ways, a lottery ticket functions like a bearer instrument: whoever presents it can collect. Tickets expire on different timelines depending on the state, but the window generally runs between 90 days and one year. Sign your ticket the moment you buy it.

2. Tell everyone you know.

When you come into sudden millions, the temptation to broadcast the news is nearly irresistible. Resist it. Announcing a win before you collect your money can put you in very real, physical danger. Everyone who has ever done you a favor will show up expecting something in return, and that is the best-case outcome.

The threats that modern winners face go far beyond the grasping relative or the fake charity solicitation. Professional scammers now cross-reference public winner announcements with stolen data from breach databases to build targeted phishing and blackmail campaigns. Hyper-realistic AI tools, including voice-cloning technology and deepfake video, allow criminals to impersonate family members in fake emergencies or fabricate legal documents to extort money from new winners.

One lottery winner was even murdered. The broader lesson is clear: if your state permits it, remain anonymous for as long as possible. Modern criminal networks use long-term psychological grooming to steer newly wealthy individuals toward fraudulent investment schemes. People will eventually learn how you came into your fortune. There is no need to rush that process.

3. Automatically decide to take the upfront cash.

The appeal of a lump sum is obvious: tens of millions of dollars available immediately sounds far better than collecting a payment every year for three decades. But that instinct deserves scrutiny. In a shifting interest-rate environment, the guaranteed annual yields built into a lottery annuity may outperform what an undisciplined individual could achieve on their own with a large cash payment.

Before you choose between a lump sum and an annuity, go see a reputable tax professional and an investment advisor at a well-established, widely recognized firm with a long track record. This theme of choosing credentialed, visible professionals will appear throughout this list, and nowhere does it matter more than the very first financial decision you make.

4. Think that you are the smartest person when it comes to money and finance.

Becoming wealthy overnight does not make you an expert in managing wealth. If you have been living paycheck to paycheck, you are unlikely to know the most effective investment strategies, tax structures, or asset protection techniques. Protecting a large fortune requires sophisticated legal architecture: blind or bridge trusts to guard privacy in states that require public disclosure, irrevocable asset protection trusts to create a legal barrier against predatory lawsuits, and possibly a private family office dedicated to governance, tax management, and lifestyle oversight.

Your drinking buddy is not your financial advisor, no matter how confident they sound. A solid team of credentialed professionals acts as a buffer between you and the many people who will try to separate you from your money. Part of what that team should address is the behavioral psychology of sudden wealth, sometimes called Sudden Wealth Syndrome. Experienced advisors often recommend a mandatory cooling-off period of three to six months during which winnings sit in short-term Treasury instruments while the winner adjusts psychologically and avoids impulse-driven spending.

A final tax reminder: lottery winnings are not tax-free. You will almost certainly owe taxes at the federal top rate, plus whatever your state and local governments levy. If you do not know how to protect your estate in the event of your incapacitation or death, here is a clue: people who had that answer ready probably were not playing the lottery.

5. Let your debts remain in place.

Winning the lottery and leaving your debts in place because you feel untouchable is a fast road to ruin. One California winner wound up strapped with debt from real estate purchases and insurance policies that grew far beyond what his winnings could comfortably service. Whether you take the lump sum or the annuity, carrying debt after winning is a sign something has gone seriously wrong with your planning.

The math is simple: if you later end up broke and still hold a mortgage, car payments, student loans, credit card balances, and personal bills, you have surrendered the right to complain when everyone you know points out the obvious. Pay off every debt. Then keep it that way.

6. Be a high roller or live large.

Going from a modest lifestyle to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a week is intoxicating, and it recalibrates your expectations permanently. Once you get used to that level of spending, scaling back feels impossible.

Gambling at a casino only feels satisfying once the stakes are high enough to produce a genuine thrill, and for a new millionaire that threshold can climb to absurd levels very quickly. The con artists will find you before long. A luxury cruise for 50 of your closest friends sounds like generosity; it is actually the beginning of an entourage, and entourages have bankrupted musicians and athletes with far larger incomes than any lottery jackpot provides.

7. Buy everything for everyone and yourself.

The urge to shower everyone around you with gifts is understandable. Acting on it indiscriminately is one of the surest paths to bankruptcy. Buying dozens of cars, multiple houses, and endless gifts for friends and family members does not make you generous. It makes you the family welfare department, and people will come to expect it indefinitely.

One documented case involved a winner who purchased more than 30 cars and multiple houses within three months of collecting. The money evaporated before the vehicle registrations were even renewed. You do not have to become a miser, but generosity without a plan is just spending without a ceiling.

8. Say to hell with a budget.

Smart millionaires maintain budgets. It may seem absurd to live within limits when you have just become wealthier than everyone you know combined, but a lottery jackpot is a finite sum. Serious purchases will come quickly, your lifestyle will shift, and without spending limits the trajectory heads in only one direction.

Many lottery winners go broke. The ones who do so in a few years invariably wish someone had forced them to set boundaries at the start. A budget is not a constraint on your freedom; it is the thing that preserves it.

9. Become the business backer for all your friends and family.

Leave venture capital to the venture capitalists. The moment word gets out that you have serious money, friends and family will pitch business ideas. Some will sound promising, most will not, and almost none will have been properly tested or planned. Beyond traditional business proposals, winners today face particular pressure to fund cryptocurrency projects, meme-coin launches, and speculative tech startups, which have proven to be especially destructive to new wealth.

Ask yourself this: did the person pitching you their idea have the skills or track record to run a business the day before you won the lottery? If the answer is unclear, the answer is no.

10. Give the whole thing away.

Some winners, overwhelmed by their luck, feel compelled to donate nearly everything to charity or a religious institution. The impulse comes from a good place. The outcome rarely does.

Even the truly wealthy, who built their fortunes over decades, do not give everything away outright. You can be genuinely generous without making yourself financially vulnerable. Think about how you will feel if a serious personal or family crisis arises years from now and you no longer have the resources to help.

Charitable giving is admirable. Giving away your entire fortune because an organization does good work is not. If you want your wealth to benefit others, structure your will and estate to do exactly that upon your death.

11. Get celebrity and athlete envy.

High rolling is one thing, but trying to keep pace with celebrities will drain any fortune. Keeping up with the neighbors is a well-known trap. Trying to keep up with people like the Kardashians is a different order of magnitude entirely. The 200-foot yacht, the private jet, the European castle, the Picasso painting: each item looks like a status symbol and functions as a financial black hole.

Tax avoidance, too, may sound appealing to people who are new to wealth. Add up the acquisition costs, plus the ongoing costs of staffing, maintaining, and insuring each trophy asset, and the total quickly exceeds what most lottery jackpots can sustain. Nicolas Cage, Wesley Snipes, M.C. Hammer, and Evander Holyfield all had substantial fortunes. All of them ended up broke or close to it. Dodging taxes carries a price tag heavier than penalties alone.

12. Think that laws and decency no longer apply.

Greater wealth does allow access to better legal representation, but it does not place you above the law. You will still have to pay taxes and abide by the same rules that apply to everyone else. A reckless lifestyle is just as likely to land a multimillionaire in prison as anyone else, possibly more so once prosecutorial attention finds its mark.

Coaches routinely remind star athletes that they will be ordinary humans for far longer than they will be stars. The same logic applies here. Money cannot buy the goodwill of a community, and wealth without decency is an island. It will also not travel with you when you die. Every dollar paid to attorneys defending against criminal charges or civil suits is a dollar taken from a fortune that was supposed to be life-changing.

There is now a 13th runner-up issue.

Can you imagine having to think about the financial solvency of the state running your lottery? In 2015, the state of Illinois stopped paying lottery prizes above $25,000 after failing to pass a budget, then extended that freeze to prizes above $600 by October of that year. Winners received IOUs from the Comptroller’s office rather than checks, because the state lacked the legislative authority to make payments without an approved budget. A class-action lawsuit followed, and the General Assembly eventually passed emergency legislation in December 2015 to release $3.1 billion for lottery payouts and other obligations. The situation illustrated something that most lottery players never consider: your winnings exist only when the paying entity has both the funds and the legal authorization to write you a check.

If You’re a Millionaire, These Are the States for You

Editor’s note: The opening jackpot figure was updated from $1.3 billion to $1.817 billion to reflect the Christmas Eve 2025 Powerball prize won in Arkansas, the second-largest U.S. lottery jackpot on record, and the Illinois lottery payment crisis section was expanded with confirmed details including the $600 prize threshold, the 2015 court action, and the December 2015 emergency legislation that restored payouts.

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