What makes a vacation one that you would consider the best ever? Is it seeing lots of new sites, discovering great new food, making new friends or maybe its just lying around and unwinding for a bit?
For Thomas Mistele the answer would be none of the above. While on vacation in Rhode Island he had the best vacation ever due to winning the lottery to the tune of $1,000,000!
Mistele, from Flemington, New Jersey needed two tries for the price of one before striking it rich. He first bought a $20 ticket for the $1,000,000 Scratch game in a pharmacy on Block Island. He won the $20 back and decided to give it another shot.
Who says third time’s the charm? On his second try he won the $1,000,000 lottery prize!
According to the CBS News article, Mistele said “he isn’t sure how he’ll use the winnings… He plans to have some fun, buy a new car and save for retirement.”
What’s funny to me about this story is that when traveling in foreign countries, I’ll often joke to Kim about the lottery when I see signs for it. I always wonder if a non-citizen is allowed to win the lottery.
I believe during one of our recent trips I asked Kim a fun questions- If you won the lottery in a foreign country but they had a rule- you must stay to get the prize, would you stay or would you go? What would you do?
Check out the full CBS News article here.
IIRC, there’s a 100% income tax on foreign lottery winnings. The story, as I heard it, was that it was a reaction to the thousands of forged “Irish Sweepstakes” lottery tickets sold in the US, by organized crime. This was before state-run lotteries were at all common.
Wow! That is definitely interesting.