I've also read the statistic about most lottery winners going bankrupt. I wonder if it's partly a gamblers' mentality - if you're the sort of person who buys lottery tickets, you're also the sort of person who doesn't think of money in 'real' terms, but in magic terms? I'm not putting that very well, but it's this idea of 'nothing we do now matters that much, because one day we'll make it big!'.
A close friend of mine is a lottery winner. Well, her now-ex partner was. Not sure how much, but several million.
They were both in blue-collar jobs, very modest income, she was a waitress and he worked as a gardener. When they won the money, they decided to have a baby and moved in together. Two years later, they split, she got some (less than half, but I'd guess about $AU2M?), he kept the rest - maybe $AU4M? I don't really know figures, they could easily be three times that tbh.
Three years on, she's doing very well. She went to a good accountant, invested in a diverse shares and property portfolio, from which she pays herself a modest income from the dividends but re-invests the surplus so her capital keeps growing, bought a small house for her and her daughter (2.5 bed in a middling suburb, near a train line to keep costs down!) and bought a small business to give herself ongoing employment. So she's employed, motivated, and secure. Because she was raised modestly herself, she's not extravagant; she has a cleaner, and nice clothes, and can afford things most single parents can't, like babysitting whenever she needs it, but her daughter goes to a state school with mine, she buys school uniform from K-Mart (Primark equiv) because they'll just get grubby and stained at this age anyway, she's very practical and lives well within her income.
HE, on the other hand, gave up his job and has never taken another one. He owns a 6-bed house on an acreage, in which he lives alone. He does things like buy, say, 15 statues for his garden, which just sit there. Between the no-job and the huge house, he got bored and lonely. So his once-modest pot habit escalated and now he's a meth user. Which means he's lost custody of their daughter, because he himself admitted that he was unfit to take care of her anymore, and then entered into huge court battles, so now there's also a restraining order.
He isn't through his money yet, but he will be. One of his ongoing expenditure items, and this kills me, is lottery tickets. Because magic dropped from the sky once, so why shouldn't it do so again? It's a really sad story, in fact.