Jorge Milian| jmilian@pbpost.com
BOYNTON BEACH — Luis Canul regularly buys his lottery tickets at the Publix Super Market at Congress Avenue and Hypoluxo Road.
“My store for years and I never win,” Canul lamented.
On Wednesday, the 56-year-old Boynton Beach resident found himself in another part of town and bought his Powerball tickets elsewhere.
That may have been a $168.5 million mistake.
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The Florida Lottery announced Thursday that the nation’s lone winning ticket in Wednesday’s Powerball drawing -- a number combination of 2-6-18-36-37, with a Powerball number of 21 and a Power Play rating of 2 -- was sold at Canul’s go-to Publix at 4770 N. Congress Avenue.
As of Thursday afternoon, lottery officials had not identified the fledgling multi-millionaire.
The $168.5 million prize is believed to be the highest lottery game payout in Palm Beach County and for whoever won, it comes at a good time with high unemployment and financial woes because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The payout was more than twice the jackpot of the only previous winning Powerball ticket sold in Palm Beach County. A Broward County woman won $73.8 million in 2010 after buying her winning ticket at a Publix on Southern Boulevard in Royal Palm Beach.
Wednesday’s Powerball winner can be paid over a 20-year period or receive a lump sum of $140,145,006 before taxes, according to lottery spokeswoman Lizeth George. The prize must be claimed within 360 days.
The Publix in Boynton that sold the winning ticket will receive $100,000.
Powerball cut its minimum payout from $40 million to $20 million in March because of the coronavirus pandemic leading to reduced sales, according to lottery officials. But Wednesday’s jackpot was sizable - it had rolled 17 times since the June 13 drawing.
>> READ: Gaming the lottery: The Post finds improbable winnings; could it be crime?
So what does a person who falls into immense wealth overnight buy first?
Nothing, according to Susan Bradley, founder of the Palm Beach Gardens-based Sudden Money Institute, which coaches people who come into large sums of money on handling their finances.
“Your brain is not in a position to make the best decisions of your life right now,” said Bradley, author of ’“Sudden Money: Managing a Financial Windfall’. ”So back off. Life has changed and it will never be the same.“
Bradley has worked with lottery winners and said she can confidently predict that whoever won Wednesday’s jackpot “didn’t sleep much last night” because of the overwhelming sensation of being newly rich and the stresses that can create.
She counsels clients who win big to take two months before claiming the prize -- enough time to set up a small group of advisers.
The elation of literally hitting the jackpot is hard to contain, but Bradley said it’s imperative in order to maintain control of your life.
Getting a new phone number and sharing it only with a chosen few, she said, is a must. Co-workers wondering why you’re no longer clocking in should be told about a “big event” that has occurred and “I’m still trying to process it.”
“That way, people don’t feel afterward like you deceived them,” Bradley said.
Bradley relates the story of one lottery winner from West Palm Beach that she worked with that was swamped after telling just a few people about his good fortune. The client spent a week at Good Samaritan Medical Center for a week because of stress-related issues.
“It can change your marriage, your relationship with your children, you parents, your neighbors,” Bradley said. “No one sees you the same way. You’re the lottery winner. And there’s not a lot of inherent respect for lottery winners. There’s a lot of envy.”
A financial adviser and attorney are key players for lottery winners, Bradley said, but so is a certified financial transitionist, who is trained to guide people through major life events such as divorce, an inheritance or winning $168.5 million by playing Powerball.
“A lottery win this size changes everything,” Bradley said. “It can make all kinds of big good and bad things happen.”
There is no shortage of cautionary tales for lottery winners.
In 1988, William “Bud” Post collected $16.2 milion from the Pennsylvania lottery, but was $1 million in debt within a year, according to the Washington Post. A landlady forced Post to give her one-third of his share and his brother was arrested for hiring a hit man to kill him in an attempt to inherit some of the winnings.
Post was living on food stamps when he died in 2006, the newspaper said.
jmilian@pbpost.com
@caneswatch
