'Selfish' Daughter Refusing To Share Lottery Winnings With Her Mom Cheered

A post about a mother who told her daughter to move out when she declined to share her lottery prize money has gone viral on Reddit.

In a post shared on Reddit's Am I The A**hole (AITA) forum, the 23-year-old daughter (user Firstluckever) said she'd been living at home while working at a convenience store nearby.

The user said she spent most of her free time "helping around the house" with her three younger siblings, giving most of her paycheck to her parents to help cover rent and food. She'd been keeping $50 a week to spend on herself, while putting $100 a month aside "for my future," she said.

She buys "a scratcher [once] every blue moon" and one day she won the lottery. The prize is "not Powerball money or anything," but "you get a certain amount every week for twenty years. It is more every week than I take home in two months."

The user told her mom about the win and "now she wants it," the daughter said.

The mom told her: "It's heavenly bounty and I should give a tithe and offering to the church." When the user refused to do so, she was told to move out, so she went to a hotel.

"My mom is saying she wants to retire and I am being selfish. I don't think I am. AITA?," the user asked.

Access to sudden wealth has its challenges, as in the case of the user in the viral Reddit post. However, not every lottery winner is destined for misery at some point down the line, as some might believe.

A May 2018 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which looked at 3,362 lottery winners in Sweden (with prizes ranging from $100,000 to $800,000) who were surveyed about their well-being from five to 22 years after the lottery win, found that "large-prize winners experience sustained increases in overall life satisfaction that persist for over a decade and show no evidence of dissipating with time."

The study said: "The estimated treatment effects on happiness and mental health are significantly smaller, suggesting that wealth has greater long-run effects on evaluative measures of well-being than on affective ones."

"If you look at things like labor supply—the people who win large sums of money do cut down on work but it's quite rare for them to quit altogether," Daniel Cesarini, a co-author of the study and an economics professor at New York University, told Time back in October 2018. "They cut down mostly in the form of taking longer vacations."

The professor believed if a similar study were to be done in America, "the results would not be radically different," noting there may be "some ways in which money might help in the United States compared to Sweden," such as for health care.

"But I would not be shocked if someone did a similar study in the U.S. and reached broadly similar conclusions," he said at the time.

In a later Reddit post the user said her mom says lottery tickets are "a tax on the stupid, and against God's word because it's gambling," while her dad says she should be "contributing more to the house."

The user said: "I honestly like living at home and seeing my little sister and brother every day" and "I was going to keep working and giving my parents the money I always do. And I like working."

However, she has stopped working now because her mom told everyone about her lottery win and "everyone is asking for money."

The user said she set up education accounts for two of her siblings and put aside $5,000 from her savings to give to her brother when he gets married. The user is also buying a one-bedroom apartment for herself.

Several Redditors showed support for the original poster, criticizing her "parasitic" family and her mother for her "hypocrisy."

In a comment that got 15,200 upvotes, one user said: "What you've done for your siblings is perfect. Moving out is perfect. Take care of the things you need and want to care about. Your mother's hypocrisy is not your problem or responsibility."

In a comment that got 4,200 upvotes, another user wrote: "I hope OP [original poster] doesn't give her home address to her family. They are selfish and will harass her for money if they know where they can find her. NTA [not the a**hole] and that's one parasitic family."