Imagine winning the lottery. Now imagine winning it *twice*. OK, now imagine losing the millions you’d won in the space of a few years and hitting rock bottom. Awful, right?
Well, that’s exactly what happened to a New Jersey convenience store worker named Evelyn Adams.
Back in 1985, Adams won $3.9million on the lotto and just four months later scooped another $1.4million jackpot.
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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 Adams ended up losing all her cash and finding herself living in a trailer park thanks to a handful of bad business decisions, not to mention an awful gambling addiction.
Adams’ prize money was paid to her in annual payments of $218,000 and after winning her first jackpot, she paid off some bills and set up a college fund for her daughter.
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Adams also bought herself a car and purchased those closest to her gifts with the cash as well as increasing her weekly lotto ticket total from $25 to $100 per week.
The paper also reports that after winning two jackpots, Adams felt as though she ‘couldn't go anywhere without being recognised and had lost her privacy’.
What's more, although many of Adams’ family and friends were happy for her, others ‘resented’ her new-found wealth.
Adams made the decision to put plans to study music on hold, and instead used some of her money to buy the convenience store she once worked at - although she later put it up for sale.
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She also gave some of her winnings away as loans - most of which were never paid back.
By 2012, Adams had spent all of her money after hitting the slot machines in Atlantic City casinos too frequently.
She shared: “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: "Everybody wanted my money. Everybody had their hand out. I never learned one simple word in the English language, 'no'.
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"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.”
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."
Aisha Nozari