Livving the lotto life without the millions

I might take a gap year. Maybe even a gap decade. My brother’s planning a wardrobe makeover — dozens of Hugh Hefner-esque dressing gowns and slippers tattooed on to his feet.

Susie, my friend, has picked out her five-bedroom, Hamptons-style home with European kitchen appliances and a 25m lap pool.

“But it won’t change me,” she insists. We haven’t won lotto. But all the plans are in place. Just in case.

I estimate I’ve lost whole months of my life spent dreaming of a lotto win.

My list is well established.

I’d make huge, anonymous donations to worthy charities and never tell a soul. Perhaps take to leaving money on park benches for the people I see sleeping there at night.

There’d be the fantastic holidays in Italy, staying long enough to advance my language skills from “ciao” to fluent. Houses for the kids. Perhaps a snazzy car.

I’d buy a robot, pre-programmed to vacuum the floors, shop and cook up amazing dinners. It’d be named Drudgery and I’d love it like a daughter. In my mind, my lotto life will be rosier, shinier, easier. Certainly a lot less thrifty.

But do you really think a big win would bring peace — or would it just be an entree to a new world? One with just as many, if different, anxieties?

I see wealthy people battling the ex — or the kids — in court. Some of their most important relationships are broken. These days, their closest connections are with their lawyers — and the legal eagles are only there because they’re billing in six-minute increments. How sad.

Endless cases too, where one generation makes the cash, the next generation wastes it on stupid fripperies or dangerous addictions.

Parents who’ve done it tough so their kids can live better lives, instead breeding indulged brats lacking mettle or even common sense.

You mightn’t have the anxiety of knowing where the next mortgage payment is coming from, but there must be other stresses that follow when money flows like water.

Like knowing if it’s really your sparkling company that keeps “mates” coming back for lunch — or if they’re only there because you’re picking up the tab? Again.

Needing to be mindful of everything you say — and to whom —in case private utterances become fodder for public gossip. Even having to be careful about what you wear and where you go, what you do in case the “rotten media” splashes your dash to the shops in your uggies all over the gossip mags.

I reckon all that cash could prove too hefty a cost. The internet has tale after woeful tale of the effect on the lives of those who’ve come into unexpected, crazy wealth.

Giggling lotto winners, who were happy to bathe in champagne for the cameras when their numbers came up.

Fast forward, sometimes just a few months, and the “best thing that ever happened to them” has turned into the worst.

Cases such British man Michael Carroll who won £9.7 million, $15 million, then discovered a taste for fast cars, faster women and drugs.

He’d blown the lot within five years and was hoping to get his old job back, as a rubbish collector.

Or New Jersey woman, Evelyn Williams who won the lottery not once, but twice and pocketed $5.4 million. She gambled it all away and had to move back into a caravan park.

While we have had our own local winners pocketing $30 million in a single lotto win, the average prize pool is about $1 million. Still, as part of Lotterywest’s verification process, all Division One winners have to claim their prize in person. They’re invited into the Winners’ Room at Lotterywest’s headquarters, given a bottle of champagne to take home, and a special booklet of hints and tips to help them wrap their brains around the big win.

“We certainly wouldn’t tell them how to spend it, we would just remind them of the sorts of things they need to think about,” says Lotterywest’s Pina Compagnone.

“Have a good think about the consequences of telling close friends and close family. If you start telling that news, a lot of people are going to know. What will be the impact on your life, of that?”

On my current form, it’s not a question I’ll ever really need to answer.

“Sorry, not a winner”, the damn Lotto machine glows, as it spits the latest dud ticket at my feet.

“Wasn’t meant to be,” I tell myself as I hand over more cash for next week’s ticket on the Optimism Bus.

So, I’m not a millionaire. Still, I know I’m lucky. With so much sadness and anger in the world, I’m grateful for my daggy version of normal.

Times like last Friday night, my three oldest mates and I went to an outdoor movie. We squished our ample bottoms into beanbags, ate pizza and laughed until our faces hurt.

“Oh, this is living,” we screeched, toasting ourselves with apple cider from plastic cups. It wasn’t fancy but you couldn’t have paid me enough to have missed it. And it beat a five-star dinner, hands down.

Healthy kids, a funny husband, ridiculously sprightly parents and great mates. Every week, habit dictates that I still buy that lotto ticket. But as for the lotto life, I suspect I’m already living it.