After a few rounds, my stack of tickets was notably smaller than everyone else’s because I kept missing the bucket. When I missed again, my mother allowed me to take another turn, and when the beanbag made it in, I grabbed a $5 Silver Bells holiday scratcher and added it to my pile.
When all the tickets were accounted for, we all sat quietly and scratched at them. Occasionally, one of us would call out a $5 or $20 win. My Silver Bells ticket had five winning numbers at the top: 47, 44, 21, 41 and 39. If you uncovered one of the numbers, you would win a prize. It wasn’t until I got to the last row of the ticket that I uncovered the number 39. Just below the number was a cash prize of $50,000. I sat there quietly, rereading the rules.
“I think I won,” I announced incredulously to the room.
Everyone rushed over to examine the ticket and agreed that it looked like a winner, but to be sure, we all piled into a car and drove to the one gas station in town that was open on Christmas Eve. I walked up to the scanner and checked my ticket. In small letters on the blue screen was the word “Winner.”
I offered to share the money with my family, but my older brother said I should keep it. He and my family were genuinely happy for me — they didn’t want a dime of my winnings. With their blessing, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the money: buy a house.
I was given a check for $37,000 at the Idaho Lottery headquarters the following Monday, after I was told I could pay the taxes on the gambling winnings upfront.
The search for a house I could afford came next. All the time I had spent on Zillow in the previous months came in handy because I was familiar with the market. I knew I could afford a house between $90,000 and $150,000, but I wanted to stay on the lower end of that range. My goals were to pay the lowest monthly mortgage possible and to pay less than what I would normally spend on rent.
