Being a lottery winner can come with untold riches. In many cases, winning the lottery has become the new American Dream — why work hard and take a chance to earn it if you can just pay a few dollars each month to get the dream of winning untold millions of dollars? One real problem that is rather new may not even be that your odds of winning are so small that you would probably do better just investing lotto money. In the state of Illinois, the problem has been that the state’s finances (budget) haven’t allowed the state to pay its larger lottery winners.

It turns out now that all those Illinois state lottery winners may finally be getting paid. It might even be close to $1 billion in payouts that will be headed to the many lottery ticket winners who have won their lottery but haven’t been paid.

24/7 Wall St. has gone through many steps to outline how lottery winners can avoid the unthinkable of going broke after winning a lottery. There are many lists of things to do, but there just wasn’t a good list of things that lotto winners who win millions of dollars need to avoid like the plague. This was 12 Things Not to Do If You Win the Lottery.

Payment delays affected those lottery winners in fiscal year 2016, starting July 1, 2015. The Illinois Lottery’s official statement said:

Since July 1, 2015, some Illinois Lottery winners experienced payment delays, as the Lottery has not had the legal authority to disburse winnings due to the budget impasse in Springfield. Claims of prizes under $600 remained unimpeded, and were collected from the 8,000 Illinois Lottery retailers statewide. Legally mandated transfers to the Common School Fund were also unaffected.

Winners who have already submitted claims will have their paperwork processed in the order it was received. The Lottery expects the processing of new claims to begin the week of December 14th once funds are transferred to the Department’s accounts.

The one thing that was not addressed was what to do if the lottery you are playing is simply not paying the winners. It is unthinkable that a state could be collecting special-purpose funds from lottery players, only to tell the lottery players that they cannot be paid due to budget issues. Still, this is Illinois that we are talking about.

Another issue is what to do when you win a few thousand dollars. Sure, winning $25,000 is not exactly a bad thing, but after taxes it is almost never going to be a life-changing event.

So, let’s assume that you are one of the many recent lottery winners in Illinois who are still waiting to be paid. There are many of them because lottery winners are not just the multimillion-dollar winners. If the news turns out to actually come true, Illinois could be releasing up to $1 billion to pay its state lottery winners, according to recent reports. In recent weeks and months, winners who won more than $600 have had to accept a voucher, like a State of Illinois IOU.

What was interesting is that the media contact for the state of Illinois, in a phone conversation request on Friday, could not even put a rough figure on the real number of winners nor on how much was going to actually be paid out — referring simply back to request it under the Freedom of Information Act.

Winning the lottery for millions of dollars brings an instant life-changing event. In our 12-step program on what to do (and not do) if you win the lottery, many things are easy to forget about.

In some ways, lotto tickets are like bearer bonds. Whoever presents the winning ticket for redemption is assumed to be the rightful owner. Some lottery winners become targets of crime or financial abuse by friends and family. Some lottery winners think that the new vast sums of cash make them smart business people, and they often fail to take into consideration a few small things, like how they want it taxed and how they should seek financial planning.

While the Illinois State Lottery keeps lists of lottery winners, the reality is that its website funding must have dried up during the voucher period too. They stopped updating the lottery winner announcements for Illinois in August on the website. That leaves no winnings easily searchable for at least three full months.

Still these were the lottery bulletins combined for the month of August and July. Whether August is all the announcements is unknown.

August 2015:

• Oswego Resident Wins $1,050,000 Illinois Lottery Prize
• $250,000 Payday for Lifelong Chicago Resident
• Homer Glen Resident Wins $50,000 Illinois Lottery Prize
• Forest Park Resident Wins $400,000 Illinois Lottery Prize
• Chicago Nurse Administrator Wins $850,000 Illinois Lottery Prize
• Bourbonnais Resident Wins $400,000 Illinois Lottery Prize
• $15 million Lottery Win ‘A Blessing’ For Hanover Park Resident
• East St. Louis Resident Wins $450,000 Illinois Lottery Prize
• Chicago Resident Plans to Share $1,000,000 Illinois Lottery Prize

July 2015

• Washington Resident Wins $50,000 Illinois Lottery Prize
• Chicago Resident Wins $250,000 Illinois Lottery Prize
• Round Lake Resident Wins $500,000 Illinois Lottery Prize
• Chicago Resident Shares Lottery Prize with Nine Siblings
• Oglesby Resident Wins $250,000 playing Illinois Lottery ‘Cool Cash’ instant game
• Friends Share $262 million Mega Millions Jackpot
• Libertyville Resident Wins $1 million on ‘$300,000,000 Cash Spectacular’ IL Lottery Game
• Chicago Resident Wins Lottery on 4th of July
• Rockford Resident Wins $150,000 Illinois Lottery Prize
• Edwardsville Resident Wins $550,000 Illinois Lottery Prize
• Elmhurst Resident Wins $50,000 Illinois Lottery Prize
• Illinois Lottery $1 million Winner Captures the Moment
• Granite City Resident Wins $100,000 Illinois Lottery Prize
• Chicago Grandmother to Share $200,000 Illinois Lottery Prize
• Crystal Lake Resident Wins $100,000 Illinois Lottery Prize
• Chicago Resident wins $300,000 Lottery Prize
• $600,000 Illinois Lottery Win in Madison County
• Chicago Man Claims $250,000 Lottery Prize in the Nick of Time
• Mount Prospect Resident Relaxes with $250,000 Illinois Lottery Win
• City of Chicago Retiree Wins $1 million Illinois Lottery Prize

This came to several months of no payments being made for large lottery ticket winners in Illinois. The Illinois state lotto history showed that fiscal year 2015 sales were $2.8414 billion (unaudited). It also turned out that 2015 was a record year and was up slightly from the previous year’s $2.802 billion. Contributions to the state’s Common School Fund in 2015 grew to more than $678.5 million.

Whether 2016 will be a record remains to be seen, but maybe lottery players who worry about getting paid may think of the lottery as an “idiot tax” in two ways rather than just one.

Again, here, without the introduction, are 12 Things Not to Do If You Win the Lottery.

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