Don’t Share Your Lottery Winnings With Anyone Else
In the lottery, people pay for a ticket that has a set of numbers on it and hope that those numbers will be randomly selected during a drawing. The prize money is awarded to anyone who picks the winning numbers. The chances of winning are very low, but many people play anyway. In the United States alone, people spend billions of dollars on lottery tickets every week.
Some people play the lottery just for the entertainment value. They enjoy the rush of buying a ticket and waiting for the results. Others believe that the lottery is a way to get rich quickly. However, God wants us to earn our wealth honestly by working hard. “Lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring riches” (Proverbs 10:4).
Lottery advertising often promotes the chance of a big jackpot and encourages people to try their luck. But there is a deeper problem with this practice, which is that it offers the false promise of instant wealth to people who are struggling or even barely making ends meet. This can lead to bad decisions that could be catastrophic, especially for the poorest among us.
If you do buy a lottery ticket, the first thing you should do is to make sure that you’re not sharing your winnings with any friends or family members. Instead, you should put together a team of professionals to help you with your new-found wealth, including an attorney, accountant and financial planner. This team can help you decide how to use your lottery winnings, whether that’s to invest them or to take out an annuity.