Wife hits $500,000 lottery jackpot after husband forgot to buy tickets

After her husband forgot to buy their lottery tickets, a woman took matters into her own hands — and hit the jackpot.

The unidentified woman recently stopped at a Redi Mart gas station in Lyman, South Carolina, and bought herself three Money Madness Extra Play scratch-off game lottery tickets. She told the South Carolina Education Lottery that the “bright, shiny, and glittery tickets caught my eye.”

She didn’t win anything from the first two tickets after scratching off the hidden numbers. However, she said her third ticket was “magical,” since it won her the top prize of $500,000.

“I felt like Jed Clampett when he discovered his bubblin’ crude,” she said, referring to the character on The Beverly Hillbillies discovering oil on his land. This resulted in Jed’s family’s new wealth and their move to California.

The woman also shared her plans for her earnings, adding: “I’ll have a little fun, take some trips, and retirement will come sooner rather than later.”

As a result of her win, the gas station where she got the lottery ticket received a commission of $5,000.

According to the South Carolina Education Lottery, the odds of winning $500,000 in the Money Madness Extra Play game are one in 1.152 million.

This isn’t the first lottery player in the U.S. who ended up winning big. Earlier this month, school bus driver Russell Ruff, who’s based in Connecticut, discovered that his lost lottery ticket was worth $150,000.

He lost the ticket shortly after purchasing it on Friday, June 13, at a gas station. So, it was “miraculous” that his 16-year-old cat was the one who later discovered the Powerball ticket.

“We lost the ticket at home. It went behind a headboard, and we didn’t think too much of it,” he said in the release shared by the Connecticut Lottery. “We didn’t really check the numbers.”

Ruff said he had to move his bed when he realized the cat was stuck behind it. With the ticket back in his possession, he realized he had four of the five winning numbers, plus the Powerball number.

He also had Power Play added to his ticket, which allows you to multiply your non-jackpot winnings by a specific amount. As a result, Ruff’s prize increased from $50,000 to $150,000.

In June, a Kentucky woman, Pamela Howard-Thornton, also won the state lottery after nearly losing the winning ticket by throwing it in the trash.

Howard-Thornton bought four tickets for the Flamingo Bingo scratch-off game at a rest stop store in nearby Lebanon Junction after having a dream about winning a large jackpot.

“The first three were not winners, so I put them in the trash,” she added. “Then I was like ‘Where’s my fourth ticket?’ I looked in the trash and I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I threw it away.’”

Luckily, Howard-Thornton was able to recover the ticket and won the game’s top prize of $80,000, or $57,600 after taxes.