The woman who won millions in the Powerball lottery is now penniless.

The woman who won millions in the Powerball lottery is now penniless.

More money, more problems. The woman who won one hundred & eighty-eight million dollars is now penniless.

Read the story below.

In 2015 things changed for the better for Marie Holmes, a poor single mother, who won the North Carolina Powerball lottery worth an astonishing 188 million dollars.

Today however, things have changed with the report confirming that Marie Holmes is now penniless! 

In 2015, Holmes was a 26-year-old single mother who worked two jobs to support her four children.

It was difficult for her back then to work both at McDonald’s and Walmart, but she did whatever it took to care for her children anyway.

Shortly before Holmes hit the jackpot, she had to leave both jobs as one of her children was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. During the time, for a single mother, the pressure was nearly unbearable.

In February 2015, the North Carolina Powerball jackpot was 564 million dollars, Ms. Holmes got herself a ticket for a few dollars at the local gas station.

Not long after she got back to her trailer home, did she find out that she held the winning ticket. 

When asked how she felt after winning, Holmes said, “I thought I was going to have a heart attack when I saw the ticket and checked it”. Because two other people also had winning tickets, Holmes only won a third of the jackpot. 

 The lottery commission authorizes lottery ticket sellers to pay winnings up to 599 dollars.

According to the report, Lottery winners need to fill out paperwork to verify the magic ticket, then there is a waiting period for the funds to be dispersed, and lastly, winners need to decide whether they want the money in a lump sum or to receive it in installments over thirty years.

According to experts, on many occasions, there is always a rethink from the winners whether to take their millions in a lump sum payment or spread it out over a set period of years. Marie Holmes had the option of taking the $188 million spread out over thirty years or take the lump sum of $127 million.

Reports reiterate that it’s actually not an easy choice as one may think, because the lump sum is worth significantly less.

According to experts, it makes financial sense to take the whole lump sum provided and invest it, because with interest it would be more profitable over a thirty period than what the lottery commission offers.

According to experts, Lottery winnings are taxed as if they were income, both on the federal and state level.

On lump sums, the State of North Carolina takes 5.8% and the Federal Government takes a minimum of 25%. Sometimes they can take up to 39.6% if the winnings qualify for the highest tax bracket.

Depending on how Ms. Holmes was taxed, she may have had to pay up to 50 million dollars on her winnings.

To cut the story short, after receiving her money, Ms. Holmes pledged to donate money to her church, move out of their trailer to a proper house, and set up college funds for her children.

Explaining her decision, Holmes told NBC news station after winning “All the struggle that I ever went through, it was all for them. I want them to understand that money doesn’t change you, but it can help you.”

Ms. Holmes was described as a person who understood the value of a dollar according to her friends and family. After all, she was a single mother who worked two jobs at McDonald’s and Walmart to support her four children; one of whom had cerebral palsy.

Ms. Holmes after receiving her money, understandably had to do things that benefited herself and her children’s standard of life. But there were some very dubious decisions that she made that made her go down the wrong road.

The frivolous spending began when she bought her boyfriend, LaMar McDow, a $15,000 diamond-laced Rolex.

What seems like a penny in a bucket to the amount she won was actually the tip of the iceberg of what her boyfriend ended up taking from her.

McDow only had a hundred dollars in his bank account when he was arrested in 2014, and now he has a girlfriend that has the ability to bail him out no matter what the cost.

Denying the allegation that Ms. Holmes spent $21 million on his bails, McDow said, ‘’So many people are going on that she has paid $21 million to get me out of jail, but that ain’t true. It is just 10 percent.”

McDow used to live with Ms. Holmes and the four children in her trailer before being sent to jail in 2014. When he was released from jail, McDow moved into the $350,000 home that Ms. Holmes bought it after winning the lottery, according to a report by the Daily Mail.

The report also sheds light on how much money Ms. Holmes actually received from the lump sum that she decided to take.

After taxes, she received $88 million which is a far fetch from the original 188 million dollars she won. Again, for someone that comes from rags to riches $88 million is still a mind-boggling amount of money, but Ms. Holmes would soon learn that a loss of 100 million dollars makes a big difference.

What happened next was unsurprising.

After Ms. Holmes became famous for her lottery winnings, friends, family, and many others were calling her to borrow some money or for a straight-up handout.

After all, what’s $10,000 for a good friend? What’s a new home for an aunt that bought your favorite toy in preschool?

The couple was constantly beleaguered for their money, even though their friends and family were coming to her with good intentions.

It got to the point that every time McDow fielded a call, Holmes would say to him “when money comes there are more problems’’. How right she was.

After the big jackpot win, Ms. Holmes and her boyfriend moved out of their trailer home into a very expensive home in an affluent white neighborhood.

Sadly, due to racial prejudice, the couple was constantly harassed by their neighbors both subtly, and not so subtly.

One neighbor set up a camera to record everything we were doing. If I was driving down the road and going at the speed limit, they would wave at me for going too fast. They did not want us there. They were prejudiced,” McDow told the Daily Mail.

The Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church was Ms. Holmes’s sanctuary since she was a kid. She took the church’s teachings to heart and tried to exemplify them in her day-to-day life.

To display her gratitude to God and the church, Ms. Holmes pledged 10%, also known as a ‘tithe’, of her winnings to charity.

Ten percent of 88 million dollars is a lot of cash, and Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church was a strong pillar in Ms. Holmes life. According to a press release, “The first thing she promised was to tithe – or give a tenth of her winnings to charity.”

To get things started she donated $700,000 to the church that she and her family have gone to for years.

The church used the money for long-overdue needed repairs. Today, a report indicates that Ms. Homes is financially struggling at the time of this report. 

Story credit; The American World.