It’s never too late to strike it lucky; one woman from Michigan learned this after winning the $310.5 million Powerball jackpot. After she won, the grandmother and long-time factory worker quit her job and has taken her husband and adult children on an indefinite work exodus.
According to the NY Daily News, Julie Leach, 59, took home a lump-sum payment of $197.4 million— losing around $140 million to taxes. But when she claimed her prize at the Michigan Lottery Headquarters on Tuesday, the lottery winner didn’t seem fussed.
In her winnings photo, Leach is seen clad in her Tuesday’s best, smiling triumphantly as she holds the larger-than-life winnings check above her as if it were a sports trophy.
Since winning, Leach, along with her partner Vaugh Avery and their children, made the decision to leave their jobs. She plans to buy land and build homes for her entirely family.
“I’m going to take care of my kids,” Leach said. “I don’t want them to work like I had to work and deal with the kinds of things I had to deal with over life. I just want to make it a good life for them, take care of them.”
Typically, sweepstakes are games of chance, purchased in the form of lottery tickets and deduced by drawings. For the Powerball, Leach took a chance on the way to work one Wednesday and picked up tickets on the recommendation of Avery, who works in the factory with her.
In total, the Powerball tickets Leach purchased totaled to $20, along with a cup of coffee from the Three Rivers Shell gas station.
Early the next day, Julie Leach found out she won after checking her number in the drive-thru of a McDonald’s. She had just taken her lunch break, and after a long night shift at the factory, the win couldn’t come as any more welcome of a surprise.
Leach worked at the fiberglass factory for a total of 23 years, and described the conditions there as deplorable. She dubbed her role at the factory as “one of the dirtiest, nastiest, jobs in there.”