A lucky lottery winner who bagged more than £25million discovered becoming an instant multi-millionaire wasn't quite as good as it seemed as he issued a warning to other lottery winners.
Elwood “Bunky” Bartlett, a Wicca minister and occasional Rakei healer, was on his way to his favourite New Age shop with his partner when he stopped to pick up two $5 Mega Millions tickets — and one of them just happened to be a winner. He walked away with $32.6million (£25.8millon) after splitting the $330million (£260million) jackpot with three other winners back in 2007 and credited his luck to the Mystickal Voyage store he'd been on the way to.
“If it wasn’t for this place, I wouldn’t have won the lottery,” he said of the New Age shop. But as Bunky quickly started splashing cash on a variety of outlandish business ventures he soon realised that despite his former career as an accountant, managing his new wealth came with more difficulties than he expected, as did his newfound fame.
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The recent mega millions jackpot sat at $656 million (Getty Images)Following the rise and fall of a handful of endeavours, Bunky said he regrets so openly embracing the limelight, as it has meant there was so much further for him to fall. Just five years into his new life of wealth, Bunky issued some advice to other lottery winners as he warned life after taking home a grand prize isn't as "easy" as it seems.
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Bunky told winners to “remain anonymous" and advised taking smaller, yearly payments rather than the entire lump sum in one He also noted how he was quickly inundated with requests for money. “Remain anonymous. Otherwise, everybody and their brother will find you and try to get money from you," he told the Baltimore Sun.
The lottery winner ended up giving in to many of the requests, handing out millions to friends and strangers. He also splashed cash on his friends, buying them first-class plane tickets and helping them to purchase homes, only for the long-standing friendships to eventually crumble.
“One of the mistakes I made was giving money to help other people realise their dreams instead of my own. Then, when the businesses crashed, I looked like the bad guy," he explained.
He added: "My experience has been that because I ‘won money,' everyone feels like they're somehow entitled to a part of it."
When it came to his own business decisions, Bucky admitted he made some big mistakes. A record label he started failed after releasing just two albums. He forked out $750,000 (£593,000) for an expansion of the New Age bookshop he considered his "spiritual home", which ended up closing down.
He also launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the production of his own “Massively Multiplayer Online” (MMO) game, which he said “took forever” to build as he created the entire site from his phone without knowing a single line of code - but the multi-millionaire was slammed for asking for money rather than using his own wealth.
Bunky defended the decision, explaining: "My budget for this game is at minimum $5 million, so I’m going to be investing a lot of my own money." Bunky planned to release the game in 2014 but nothing has come of it so far.
However, the lottery winner claims he did make at least one good decision — buying a pizza franchise so he could get fast food delivered to his rural home. Recalling how he came up with the idea, he said: “Basically, we’re out in the boonies and no one would deliver to us, so I said, ‘Honey, do you mind if I open a Mustang’s in Westminster?’ Now, we have a 10-mile delivery radius, which is unheard of in the business.”
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