Ready to Retire Early with an $8.2M Lotto Win
A couple from Nelson in the South Island are ready to retire after taking out a jackpot worth over $8 million this weekend.
The couple say that they will now retire earlier than anticipated now that they have enough money from winning the Powerball and Lotto combined.
The $8.2 million prize pool is a combination of $6 million with Powerball and 10 wins of $214,286 with Lotto first division.
The man said that they had decided to play using an unusual combination of self-select numbers because he wanted to increase their chances of winning big if the numbers ever did come up.
This has been their method for several years; playing 10 lines of the same Lotto numbers, with all the variations of the Powerball numbers.
Their faith in their lottery numbers finally paid off on Saturday night when they did indeed come up and they walked away with the multimillion dollar jackpot.
"We were flicking through the TV channels on Saturday night and saw the Lotto draw was on, so stopped to watch it,'' he said.
"We have been playing these lottery numbers for so long that I realised straight away that we could win big."
The winning numbers for the Saturday Night Lotto game were 9, 13, 19, 23, 31, 49 and 24 with the Powerball number 3.