On Tuesday the 8th of October a single UK ticketholder is the £170m winner, making them Britain’s largest-ever single lottery winner (once they come forward and claim their prize). Now that the winner has come forward and claimed their prize, past winners and official lottery advisors are offering up their advice of what to do (or not to do) with the prize money.
Professional Advice: What to Do if You’re the £170m Winner
If you ever get a phone call from Andy Carter, that’s when you might start getting really excited. Andy works at lottery operator Camelot as a Senior Winners Advisor which means he spends his days talking to people who have won shocking amounts of money.
Andy says, “It’s a huge shock, if your thing is sitting on a beach, go and sit on a beach, if it’s climbing mountains, go and do that.”
Mr Carter says that winning the lottery “enables you to follow your dream, if you have always wanted to run a cake shop, of being a florist, or train in something… you can.”
But he says most winners don’t choose to quit their day job right away. “We get lots of winners who invest in business, or do charity work and volunteering. People need something to do, a structure, a reason to get up in the morning,” he adds.
What Have Past Lottery Winners Done?
When Dean Allen and Louise Collier from Essex won £13.8m in 2000, they flew to Hawaii straight after winning. By the time they came home, they had even more money in their bank account than when they left thanks to the interest earned!
In contrast, Michael Carroll, a bin man from Norfolk spend his entire £9.7m fortune within 8 years of winning at the age of 19 back in 2002.
When Susan Herdman won £1.2m from the lottery in 2010, she kept working in her hair salon and barely spent a pound of her winnings to begin with. She did, however, say the £170m winner is in a completely different league to herself. “You hear people say it’s too much money. It is if you’re going to be greedy with it, but how much fun can you have giving it away?” she said. She has stated, “when you first win the lottery, it is quite scary in a way, I thought I don’t really want things to change because my life is pretty good.”
However, after about a year, Susan says she realised she had been holding back too much. She sold her salon and moved to Yorkshire to be with her partner who is a farmer.
Now that she doesn’t have to work, Ms Herdman spends a lot of her time fundraising for charity. She has raised more than £50,000 for cancer research in the last year.
Could you be the UK’s next big lottery winner? Your first step is checking the latest UK lottery results to find out if you’ve hit it hig!