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It’s the windfall of lifetime…
The kind of payday most folks dream of — a dream that keeps Americans buying $113 billion in lottery tickets each year.
Obviously it’s a longshot. Your chances of hitting the jackpot in Powerball is a meager 1 in 292 million. But for a brief moment after paying $2 for your ticket (or $3 with PowerPlay), you’re free to fantasize about what you’d do with a multi-million-dollar windfall, and which lifelong dreams you’d live out first.
Unfortunately, winning the lottery often turns out to be less of a dream and more of a “rude awakening” for many. It’s estimated that upwards of 70% of all lottery winners end up going broke in just five years.
Willie Hurt won a $3.1 million Super Lotto jackpot back in 1989. Two years later, he was broke and his wife was filing for divorce.
David Edwards won $41 million from a Powerball jackpot back in 2001. He confidently told Good Morning America that “I think I can handle my own money, with the help of advisers.” By 2006, David was bankrupt and living in a storage unit.
And Callie Rogers became the United Kingdom’s youngest-ever lottery winner in 2003, taking home a £1.8 million prize that she quickly burned through before returning to work just a few years later.
Countless stories play out the same way. From the once-in-a-lifetime dream of winning the big lottery jackpot … to an unexpected downfall that comes far sooner than expected. Why does this keep happening?
The simple fact is that having money is only half the battle.
Hanging onto that money, and growing that money, is something else entirely. Advisers and asset managers spend their whole careers working out how to manage expectations and safely grow wealth. But even those advisors are working at the whim of an unpredictable market.
Many lottery winners instead turn to tangible investments, plowing their money into local businesses, exotic cars and collectibles. But these types of investments are often even more volatile, with an even greater risk of throwing good money after bad.
Without the right advisers, often without any advisers at all, and under pressure from family and friends, many lottery winners succumb to what’s been called “Sudden Wealth Syndrome,” making emotional decisions while they’re still overwhelmed and anxious from their recent windfall. They overspend, they quit their jobs, and they lose their sense of scale, often until it’s too late.
And this is true in varying degrees of any windfall.
From lottery win to family inheritance, it can be difficult to adapt to a new reality where you’re suddenly six figures richer (or more). As a result, we indulge, we spend — and before we know it, the once-in-a-lifetime windfall is gone for good.
Fortunately, there’s an alternative. And it’s whole life insurance.
I know, it’s not exactly the first thing you’d think to buy after hitting that $40 million jackpot. But before you start configuring your new Lamborghini Huracan, just hear me out…
A whole life insurance policy is one of the most practical, most stable, and most tax-advantaged assets you can fund with your lottery windfall. Lottery winnings are already taxed at a federal rate of up to 37% in 2025. But once those winnings make it into your policy, they will grow tax-deferred, and you’ll have the opportunity to borrow against the cash value of your policy tax-free at any time.
Once your policy premium is paid, the rest of your windfall cash can be added as what’s called a “paid-up addition” (PUA).
Each PUA works like a miniature, fully-funded policy of its own — instantly growing your cash value and death benefit, and earning additional dividends as a result. The more of these PUAs you add to your policy, the more you’re fast-tracking compounding on the path to investment-like returns, especially when you get started early on.
And unlike stocks, real estate, or other popular investments, life insurance is an asset that doesn’t depend on external markets in order to grow your wealth. Dividends are scheduled decades in advance, when you sign your policy, and are paid out by a group of top life insurance companies who are over a century old on average.
With whole life insurance, you don’t have to worry about waking up to a market crash or having your policy’s cash value tied up in a declining business. You’ll know exactly how much each dividend will add to your policy, and exactly when it’s going to be paid. So in exchange for giving up a few percentage points in (possible) return, whole life insurance can give you freedom from having to worry about managing your fortune.
Allocating that portion of your windfall gains straight into whole life insurance immediately takes that money off the table and gives you less to worry about. You can’t easily be tempted or pressured into spending money that’s already been used to fund a PUA for your policy.
In that sense, whole life insurance and paid-up additions are a perfect antidote for Sudden Wealth Syndrome, regardless of whether your windfall comes from lottery winnings, the sale of a successful business, or a massive bonus/commission payment for a job well done. You can still splurge with a portion of your winnings (remember, Verde Mantis Green is the best color for a Lamborghini Huracan).
But by funding those paid-up additions, you’re instantly committing a portion of your cash toward future planning, and without really having to work out any of those plans in advance. So instead of falling into the lotto winner’s trap of overindulging in the short-term, you’ve already set your future self up for long-term success.
Ready to see how this could apply to your wealth plan? Click the big yellow Clarity Call button and let’s map it out together.
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