27million lottery winner dies broke 12 yrs later after insane spending spree

[Liberal_in_LA]

Too bad someone didn't control his money for him


http://rollingout.com/obituaries/27-million-lottery-winner-lived-feces-died-broke-12-years-hitting-jackpot/



David Lee Edwards blew $27 million and died broke 12 years after hitting the lottery. According to a report by the Daily Mail, Edwards, 58, died alone in a hospice on Nov. 30.

In 2001, Edwards hit the lottery during a time when he was unemployed while living in South Florida. But soon as he got his first check, Edwards went on an insane spending spree.

He bought a $1.6 million house in Palm Beach Gardens; paid $1.9 million for a Lear Jet; bought another home for $600,000; bought three losing race horses; invested $4.5 million in a fiber optics company and limo business; he paid his ex-wife $500,000 for custody of his teenage daughter; bought a $200,000 Lamborghini Diablo and a multitude of other cars; bought a $35,000 Hummer golf cart for his daughter; paid for a $159,000 ring; and paid $30,000 for a plasma screen TV.

In the first three months of winning the lottery, Edwards spent $3 million. At the end of his first year as a lottery winner, he had spent $12 million. By 2006, he had spent nearly all of his money.

Edwards, a felon before winning the lottery, continued to struggle with drug addiction after losing  all of his money. He lost both of his homes and was forced to live in a storage unit that was infested with human feces.

Edwards’ wife drove him to his home state of Kentucky where he lived in a hospice until he passed away.

---_---

But Edwards also had a drug problem. He and Shawna contracted hepatitis from sharing tainted needles, while she had an Oxycontin addiction. The two had multiple run-ins with authorities.

Within five years, he was broke. And once the money dried up, Shawna left him and remarried.

Edwards tried to do right by his winnings. Shortly after falling into his fortune, he had vowed to spend it right, to make it last for Shawna and his daughter.

He even hired a financial adviser, James Gibbs. Gibbs invested some of the winnings in stocks and bonds. But Edwards sold them all off.
http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/pulp/2013/12/david_lee_edwards_powerball_wi.php
"If he followed my advice," Gibbs told New Times in 2007, "he'd be pulling in about $85,000 a month for the rest of his life."

On Tuesday, Edwards' daughter, Tiffani Lee Edwards, said that her father had died penniless and alone. And that he had left her nothing, not even a life insurance policy.

[underpants]

1. The house I can understand but the rest of it ...there was no "how much....for THAT?!?!?"

A jet doesn't come without housing and a crew.

[Liberal_in_LA]

2. race horses are also very expensive to keep

[Nye Bevan]

3. $27 million is nowhere near enough wealth to justify a private jet.

Just fly first class, commercial. And the racehorses? Insane.

[ChisolmTrailDem]

5. Had he followed his financial adviser's advice, I don't see why it wouldn't have been justifiable.

I mean, I would certainly do that if I had $85,000 every month. That's plenty to maintain a jet and actually use it to travel the world.

Please elaborate on why it wouldn't be prudent or justifiable.

[pipoman]

9. companies own jets

Often shared by a group of companies..Individuals...even extremely wealthy, usually charter or buy the equivalent of time shares..jets are enormous money sponges..

[ChisolmTrailDem]

10. Well, I am certainly un-qualified to know, lol. Perhaps I won't get one after all =). n/t

[awoke_in_2003]

14. it is very expensive...

I work in flight training. We simulate business jets like Gulfstreams and Falcons. Putting just one pilot through a one week recurrent course (annual renewal every year) is $40k- and these things use two pilots. A simple two or three position switch could cost $2k or more (the most I have seen so far was $12k. It is a ridiculously expensive thing to own.

[Nye Bevan]

18. If I won $27 million I would definitely spring for the JetBlue "even more space" seats

at $40 extra a pop.

[awoke_in_2003]

20. either that or charter. nt

[Liberal_in_LA]

19. note to self - no jets (If i win the lottery)

[TeamPooka]

43. a jet is something you charter

[Maraya1969]

30. He only had 27 million. After the jet he had 25 million.

85,000 a month is 1,020,000 a year. After 5 years you would be out 8 million.

Plus he actually did not start out with 27 million. A big chunk of it was taken away by taxes.

Can you see now?

These things cost more money than we realize.

[Jenoch]

38. The $27.1 million was what he won AFTER taxes.

[Tanuki]

59. No, he would NOT have been out 8 million after 5 years,

because the way the financial planner wanted to set things up, that $85,000 a month would have come from interest on the investment, without ever touching the principal. He could have lived splendidly throughout his lifetime, and left a huge estate to his heirs when he died.

[Maraya1969]

86. Yes but people do not understand that basic concept. I understand

that I forget about the link to the principal and the $85k and the fact that once you start spending things worth a million bucks or so your monthly income will go down.

But these people look at money as chunks of "what I can afford". I saw it with a friend who received $345,000 from a settlement. Sure some financial adviser had had set up CD's but she would just take the CD's out when they were due and spend them. She went through that money in about 2 years.

I know you know how to handle money. It just amazes me how other people don't.

[hfojvt]

31. with the $1.9 million that he spent on the jet

he could get 380 flights that cost $5,000. I mean, I don't fly a lot, but when I went to Europe in 2001 seems to me that round trip Minneapolois to Stuttgart was less than $1,500

With his own jet, he is going to need to
1) hire a pilot
2) pay for fuel
3) pay for maintenance
4) pay for storage

With those costs, even ONE flight to Stuttgart might cost more than a commercial ticket.

[MissB]

44. Nope. Landing fees will eat that right up.

My bro flies a private jet for a living. He's discussed what his employer spends on fees to land at foreign airports. It's serious coin, and $85k isn't going to cover a jet-setting lifestyle.

[pnwmom]

74. If you HAD bought a private jet, then you would not have had

the 85,000 a month. Buying the jet would have reduced your income.

[greytdemocrat]

4. What a moron. nt

[bluestateguy]

6. 30,000 for a plasma TV?

Somebody needs to look for the sales in the newspapers.

[Liberal_in_LA]

8. 2001 price, probably got taken by the seller also

[lordsummerisle]

7. There's missing info in this posting

Just because he lost all of his money, why did he have to die? He was a drug addict, would he have died anyway at that point had he not won the money? What did he die of, a broken heart?
And really, $30K for a TV...?

[Liberal_in_LA]

12. after winning the money, he went on big drug binge with wife, got hepatitis

Which isn't a death sentence, not sure exactly why he died

[jmowreader]

67. The broke, penniless and living-in-a-storage-unit part probably did it

You ever notice these kinds of stories always pop up when one of the national lotteries crosses the $250 million threshold? Come on...bury a big chunk in the back yard, buy a reasonably-priced house and Do Not Become A Drug Addict!

[magical thyme]

69. Hepatitis B or C?

Because C is incurable and often fatal.

[JI7]

11. do people not consider things like property tax, maintanence costs etc ?

all those actors, corporate execs etc who get these things have money that keeps coming in.

winning the lottery is a one time thing unless they are lucky enough to win it again.

[TheCowsCameHome]

13. "Too bad someone didn't control his money for him"

Others did, obviously. The airplane salesman, the car salesmen, the TV salesman, the....

He certainly didn't.

[Liberal_in_LA]

16. yep, i'm sure he got taken

[A HERETIC I AM]

21. On the other hand.......

Maybe he wasn't a victim at all.

Maybe he was just a moron.

[Liberal_in_LA]

23. had spent a good part of his pre lottery life in prison, didnt get the chance to develop financia

Financial savvy

[A HERETIC I AM]

25. But as the article indicates, he had an advisor that had his portfolio set up....

so that it would generate $85 grand a month!

But that wasn't enough.

He sold off the assets contrary to good advice because he wanted to buy all the stuff he bought.

It is true, as another poster mentioned above, that the majority of big money lottery winners in this country declare bankruptcy within a few years. In fact, it is 3 out of 5 do so within 5 years.

But that circumstance can't be blamed on the guy who wrote him up for the jet, or the guy at the register when he spent thirty grand on a TV. Some people are just too stupid to get good advice or when they do, follow it.

A few years ago there were two large (100 million plus) Powerball jackpots won back to back, about 6 weeks apart.
The first one was won in Ohio and the people didn't come forward for weeks. When they did, the money was collected by an attorney in the name of an obscure investment trust.

The second one was won by a young 20something man in Louisiana, if memory serves. He was on Good Morning America THE NEXT DAY!

Of the two, who do you think will be broke first?

[Decaffeinated]

36. It was all his choice...

If you have to blame someone put it squarely where it belongs.... On him with his bad choices and drug use...

[lumberjack_jeff]

63. Exactly.

What is unfortunate is that no one taught him math.

[jmowreader]

68. He hired a financial advisor like everyone says to

You have to wonder why the jet broker didn't try talking him out of it; they know how expensive jets are and that he really couldn't afford one with a lousy $27m lump sum.

[markpkessinger]

88. The benefit of a financial advisor is only as good as . . .

. . . his or her own competence combined with the client's willingness to abide by the advisor's advice.

[hobbit709]

15. Everything I would want to buy wouldn't cost me more than $1 million.

[Art_from_Ark]

56. According to the Beatles, money can't buy me what I want

[jmowreader]

70. It definitely lets you look in more places for it and helps you stay in it

Most marital fights are over money, or at least start that way. Most divorces too.

[Kaleva]

83. Probably about $25k for me would do it.

[SheilaT]

17. 27 million dollars is a very large amount of money,

but it's not an infinite amount.

A very large number of lottery winners go broke within a very few years. It's quite sad. They go on spending sprees, have no sense that there is a limit to the money, and just do everything wrong.

$85,000 a month for the rest of my life. Wow. I could live incredibly well on that.

As for the jet, buying one was a really stupid idea. I suppose if you don't want to mingle the hoi-polloi, you could afford to do charters whenever you want to fly somewhere, or do one of those time share things, where you own some fraction of a small jet.

[Liberal_in_LA]

22. from the pic, it looks like he had his house professionally decorated. that can get pricey

[hfojvt]

32. I could live incredibly well on $85,000 a year

Heck I'd even love $20,000 a year that didn't require me to work my tail off.

I am sitting here now, with my legs throbbing, needing to go back to work in another hour or so.

[XemaSab]

40. He could have gotten that A MONTH

[struggle4progress]

72. With a bit of frugal penny-pinching, I think I could probably get by on $85K/mo

[XemaSab]

80. Coupons, yo

[struggle4progress]

82. Yep! With smart use of coupons, I think I'd actually be able to get 3 million rolls of toilet paper

with that monthly budget

[Packerowner740]

24. I saw a piece about him on a lotto millionaires

He spent like a drunken sailor.

[Chakab]

26. Not surpring. Most people who win a substantial amount of money in the lottery end up worse off

financially in the long run.

[Mariana]

35. Is it really a majority?

My husband's sister and her husband won a lotto, with some others, and their share was 2 to 3 million. Five years later they were broke, up to their eyeballs in debt, and getting divorced. The thing is, no one in the family knows where the hell the money went. There were no silly spending sprees or anything like that, and they continued to work. The money was just gone, and they wouldn't tell anyone what happened to it. I suspect gambling, but I'll probably never know for sure.

[Jenoch]

39. Do have a link to support your claim?

[CFLDem]

45. Here's a place to start with:

http://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/riches-rags-why-most-lottery-winners-end-broke-180227163.html

[Jenoch]

46. There were some anecdotal stories in your link,

but I saw no hard evidence to support your claim that MOST large jackpot lottery winners end up with no money.

[CFLDem]

47. Since when is science anecdotal?

According to a 2010 study by researchers at Vanderbilt University, the University of Kentucky and the University of Pittsburgh, the more money you win in the lottery, the more likely you are to end up bankrupt.

[Jenoch]

48. You said 'most'. I never saw that word used in your links.

[CFLDem]

49. No I didn't. Chakab said most.

However winning the lotto does double your chances of going bankrupt.

[Jenoch]

50. Do you have any links with information to support your claim?

[muriel_volestrangler]

66. It does have this:

Similar research from the National Endowment for Financial Education estimates that 70 percent of people who had unexpectedly come into large sums of money ended up broke within seven years.

That's 'most', but is a bit vague - "people who had unexpectedly come into large sums of money", and we don't know how the 'estimate' was arrived at. it seems to come from here:

A R E T H E R E
D A N G E R S
to Making Impulsive Decisions?
There can be. It is estimated that up to 70% of all
people who suddenly receive large amounts of
money will lose that money within a few years.

http://www.smartaboutmoney.org/Portals/0/ResourceCenter/FinancialWindfall.pdf

But that gives no idea of who did the estimating, or how, and actually says "lose that money", not "go broke". Plus it's so sloppily produced that they repeat that an other sections, cutting them in mid-sentence - twice. I'm not convinced this came from any proper research.

[yawnmaster]

55. On reading the research (link included) it appears that lottery winners do...

have a higher rate of declaring bankruptcy in 3 to 5 years, but it is only an increase over the general population, and it doesn't say that most or even near most winners have that problem.

I've only quickly looked at the paper, so if I'm wrong, please let me know.

http://www.econ.pitt.edu/papers/Mark_lottery.pdf

[CFLDem]

58. Yeah that's pretty much the gist of it.

It says the chance of bankruptcy is 2% of all lottery winners per year but that the risk goes up with the size of the winnings.

[dickthegrouch]

71. That's why I'd prefer 100 $1M winners than One $100M winner

I understand that HUGE prizes are far more sellable, but it would be far better to have smaller prizes going to a large number of people.

[Jenoch]

73. How often do you buy lottery

tickets for Powerball, Mega Millions or whatever jackpot game is sold in your state?

[dickthegrouch]

75. Rarely

Precisely because the odds are too long.
I'd buy more frequently if I stood a better chance of winning a smaller amount.

[Jenoch]

78. The odds are always so long that it doesn't

really matter all that much. People ffequently say they would rather a hunfred people each win a million dollars instead of one person winning a hundred ion dollars. The Minnesota Lottery heard that wish and created a game called 'Daily Millions' but it did not do well because not enough people bought tickets. People said they want smaller jackpots at better odds, but then they did not play. I'm sure other states made similar attempts with similar results.

[billh58]

27. But it took the

Undertaker three days to get the smile off of his face...

[Schema Thing]

28. what an ugly ugly man.

[El_Johns]

33. ? I read a little more about him; he was a sometime drug addict but apparently was very

generous to friends and family with his windfall.

I don't know why you call him ugly.

[Maraya1969]

29. You can use basic mathematics when you win this type of money.

If you win 27 million and spend 3 million then you only have 25 million. Then if you spend 5 more million you only have 20 million. If you then spend 10 million you only have 10 million left out of 27 million.

I think people forget to count zeros.

A real sad tale though. It was his addiction that was killing him even before the money.

[ohheckyeah]

37. Apparently his math

wasn't any better than yours.

27 million - 3 million is not 25 million but 24 million

[Maraya1969]

85. OH lol. Well at least I have the idea right!

[ohheckyeah]

87. It looked like something I would do....

glad you didn't take offense.

[FarCenter]

34. $100 million makes you minimally rich; $1 Billion makes you actually rich.

With $100 million, you have about $2 million after taxes each year to spend.

[XemaSab]

41. ORLY?

Tell me that if 20 million fell in your lap tomorrow, you wouldn't be set for life.

[FarCenter]

60. Sure, but I'm not into private jets, multiple mansions, or plunging into tech startup investments

I wouldn't even buy a $30,000 flat screen TV.

But if you buy a jet, multiple estates, racehorses, etc. you have to have a serious cash flow each year to maintain and operate them.

You also need to hire pilots, landscapers, house staff, stable hands, etc. as well as accountant, attorney, and a manager. Your payroll goes up pretty fast.

[Warren DeMontague]

53. This is the funniest damn thing I've read on DU all year.

I'm sorry, Jeeves, you can't join our club... you're only Minimally Rich, what with the 100 Mil.


Ah, the problems of the Minimally Rich.

[lumberjack_jeff]

62. It would have been slightly harder for Mr Edwards to blow through $1 billion, I suppose. n/t

[Jenoch]

42. I used to work closely with a state lottery in the area of public relations.

What I learned about people who won the large amounts of money (several million dollars at once) was that if a winner was basically a good person, the money would make them better. If a Powerball winner was basically a not so good person, it woild make them worse. The large sum of money would magnify their personality traits they already possess. Saying that a lottery winner will always lose all of their money and be destitute is not factual.

[exboyfil]

51. Maybe those who play the lottery already are self selecting

Math challenged with magical thinking. That type of behavior is then magnified by their winnings. Also dog bites man vs. man bites dog. Those who live quietly with their winnings don't make the media. Those who make a splash and lose it are a story.

I spend $2/wk on the lottery in an office pool. I do it for the camaraderie of a shared goal. I would never think of buying a lottery ticket on my own (kind of like drinking alone in my opinion).

I would love the chance to control my baser nature though.

[Jenoch]

52. The 'lottery' doesn't need to use

media reports.

I infrequently buy a lottery ticket. The long odds mostly take care of it for me.

I remember that the only time the state lottery whom I used to work with only had one winner with whom they did not have a news conference. The winner complained that to get his $2M ($l00,000/year for 20 years) he had to go to 'nigger town' (Minneapolis) to get his money.

[lumberjack_jeff]

64. .

[JHB]

65. My observation is that lottery ticket buying is proportionate to...

...the "I hate my f***ing job" factor.

[yawnmaster]

54. Well, he may have ended up in the storage bin 6 years earlier if he hadn't of won. eom

[Nine]

57. The story originated in the Daily Mail. Providing fodder for looking down on others is what they do.

The guy made mistakes. A lot of them. He was an addict with self-destructive tendencies before he won that money, and those issues didn't disappear after he got the money. The very wealthy can be plagued with drug problems like the rest of us, and buying all that junk was probably also related to the addictive part of his psyche. And the homeless often have problems that go deeper than just poverty. Many of them probably had some measure of financial stability at some point in their lives, but untreated mental health issues, including addiction, is typically a good path to financial ruin.

[lumberjack_jeff]

61. But it's insulting to the poor to suggest that some of them have counterproductive spending habits.

This case study shows definitively that for some people, literally no amount of money is enough to mitigate inability to budget and spend rationally.

For some, the cure for poverty isn't just more money.

[narnian60]

76. Out of all the things mentioned that he purchased,

the thing that bugs me the most is the Hummer golfcart.

[d_b]

79. lol

i wonder how much he blew on that stupid panther

[cthulu2016]

77. So what? Why not spend all the money?

I think the lottery is idiotic, and government hostility toward the people, but from the perspective of a winner... yeah. Spend up all the money. Whatever.

That is the dream being marketed.

[ileus]

81. But it was a fun ride for a while...

[Number23]

84. 27-million-lottery-winner-lived-feces-died-broke-12-years-hitting-jackpot/

That is the most bizarre URL I've ever seen.

[LeftyMom]

89. All across America people snort up bigger inheritances than that.

Oddly enough that's rarely news.