Winning the Lottery after Separating
After you and your spouse separate, do you think all lottery winnings should be yours alone? Striking it rich should be the happiest of times for just about any person. However, the idea of being forced to share that money with someone who you are no longer with, could be enough to ruin this for many people.
There is a chance that a large amount of your winnings could be awarded to your ex-partner. There are many cases where exactly this has occurred. One example is from October of 2014. In this situation, the Eufrosins were still married, but had been separated. The money that paid for the ticket in the first place was carefully considered in this case. The wife was the winner of the lottery, but the husband claimed that the ticket was actually purchased using funds that they shared. His logic was that he had contributed to buying the winning ticket, and felt that he deserved a share of the lottery money.
The outcomes of this trial have held that the relationship’s circumstances will play a large part in deciding whether the winnings should be shared. Although an agreement was in play where they were both withdrawing money from a shared asset, the court did not consider them together in any way. Each of the couple had been living ‘separate lives’ for six months, before the wife actually bought the ticket.
