When Jayden Clarke was 12, his mum picked him and his sister up from school and told the kids there was a big surprise for them waiting at home, which they initially thought meant another sibling was on the way.
Instead they were shown a ‘gigantic check’ from the lottery, and although Jayden didn’t really understand what the lottery was or how much the money was going to change their lives, his parents were excited and that made him excited.
His dad had always put the same lottery numbers up and this lucky time had earned his family millions.
“Overnight we went from pretty decently poor to multi-millionaires and life obviously changed from there,” Jayden explained in a TikTok video where he talked about the impact the winnings had on his family.
The Australian family had gone from ‘fighting to keep’ their home to suddenly having an awful lot of money to spend, which understandably had a major impact on their lives.
His family won the lottery when he was 12 and it has had a massive impact on his life (jaydenclark21 / TikTok)
As for what the money did to their family, Jayden said that since he was young, he at first didn’t really understand how much money it was but felt like winners ‘have no option to be a normal person’.
Jayden said his parents took the kids out of school for a couple of weeks to ‘plan how to do life’ because they had nobody to guide them through this newfound wealth.
However, there are some downsides to growing up in the wake of a lottery win, besides the obvious cases where some winners come to sorely regret their prize, as he explained that ‘you have this weird mentality on work and the value of money’.
He said: “Even though we grew up still very structured in a way that if we wanted something we had to have a reason to get it or work towards it in a way, I feel like the experience of winning the lottery makes you feel you have no option to be a normal person.
“Normal life never felt natural, it wasn’t because we had crazy money and we’d go and be lavish because we’d remain pretty normal, but it was more like my life is very different.
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His family became multi-millionaires after the numbers his dad always put on the ticket came up (Getty Stock Photo)
“Growing up, at least in Australia, it felt like when I did become aware of it we would always make it very clear that we didn’t deserve because we didn’t work hard.
“Even growing up we had the most beautiful house, like it was a blueprint for a reality show.
“Very often we’d feel out of place, in between these two realities and just not fitting in anywhere.”
He added that his parents carried ‘guilt for having the money’ and he often felt like an ‘outcast’, like the winnings weren’t anything to be proud of, but things have got better since he’d moved to LA.
Despite it all, he is still ‘grateful to this day’ for the impact the winnings had on his family as there were certainly lots of positives to go along with it.
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As part of a massive new year sale, Sky has slashed the price of its bestselling TV package for a limited time only.
In news that will make those long, January nights something to look forward to, the Essential TV and Full Fibre 150 Broadband bundle has dropped to its lowest price ever, the brand confirmed this week.
The incredible deal includes everything you could possibly need for a solid night in: Sky Stream, Sky Atlantic, Netflix, discovery+, and Full Fibre 150.
Getty/Nanci Santos
It’s a welcome chance to save pennies too, as its monthly price has dropped from £40 to £35 – that’s a total saving of £120 over a 24-month contract.
The exclusive telly bundle is a gateway to thousands of television series, documentaries, and films that will keep you entertained all winter long. Yes, you’ll finally be able to catch up on Harlan Coben’s Missing You on Netflix (and Squid Games season two if you can handle it). Still haven’t ticked off Day of the Jackal? Well, now’s your chance.
You will also be able to tune into White Lotus season three on Sky Atlantic with other small-screen big-hitters including Succession, True Detective, and Euphoria (recently renewed for a third season).
There’s even the option to upgrade to Essential TV for an extra £4 a month, which will give you access to over 40 more premium channels such as Sky Max.
The Sky Stream box will be delivered straight to your door so there’s no need for messy wires or a satellite with wall-to-wall wifi guaranteed in every room of your home. If it’s not as speedy as promised, Sky says you’ll get your money back. All you need to do is plug the Sky Stream box in, sit back, and tuck into your favourite shows.
That’s not the only Sky TV and broadband package on offer at the moment either.
Shop the best Sky TV and broadband deals 2025 now
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Lowest ever price: Essential TV and Full Fibre 150 Broadband, £35 per month
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Best value: Ultimate TV and Full Fibre 150 Broadband, £39 per month
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Newest offer: Essential TV, £15 per month
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Winning the National Lottery is a fantasy for many of those that play, but for a select few, it became a reality.
Today marks 30 years since the first ever National Lottery draw, with 7,400 millionaires being made as a result, and 30 of them have come together to celebrate the milestone.
Two of these winners are Brits Matt Myles, from Hereford, who took home £1 million back in 2014, and Jamie Heavens, from Bournemouth, who won the same amount in 2016.
Despite winning the same amount, the two went in different directions after taking home their lavish winnings.
Jamie is one of 30 winners that is sharing their stories on the National Lottery’s 30th anniversary (National Lottery)
Jamie found out about his winnings in a bizarre manner – he was on the way to his roofing job, and was having trouble finding a service station that would accept his fuelling card for his truck.
Finally, at the third service station he went to, a series of events would change his life forever.After getting in line at the store, he realised he had the wrong flavour drink, and he went back to change it.
Getting back in line, he saw that the man in front of him got a scratch card, to which he revealed that when he was 16, he bought a scratch card, though today the minimum age to buy one is 18, and won £100 after someone in front of him bought one, so it became a tradition.
Jamie bought one on this day in 2016, and won £1 million as a result.
Sharing the good news with his uncle, who he worked with, and the rest of his family, they were all sceptical until he got the official call to confirm his win.
The Bournemouth-based father went on to invest his money into a business, albeit after treating himself to a Mercedes GLA and his girlfriend to a BMW of her own. Not too shabby.
Matt was more extravagant in his spending (National Lottery)
Matt on the other hand, wasn’t even aware that he won, and had to find his scrunched-up ticket and check the numbers at 4am one morning in 2014.
On the same day, he told his family and then went into work to quit his job after just three weeks in the role.
He recalled: “People started to catch wind (of his win) a bit, I had a couple friends there that had obviously told people.
“But my shift manager at the time had actually been playing since the inception of the lottery, and he played every week as well – he’d never won, and it was only the third time I never played.
“Wow, yeah, he was not happy,” Matt recalled.
As soon as he won, he decided to go on a holiday to Bali with his friends, but as the funds hadn’t hit his account yet, he bizarrely had to take a loan from his dad to pay for the trip.
That wasn’t the end of his lavish spending though, as he revealed that he ‘walked into a Porsche dealership’ and went ‘that one’, which, like anyone else, he enjoyed, and that he threw himself a £30,000 birthday bash.
Matt also shared that he went travelling to Dubai, buying a table at one of the city’s exclusive clubs, as ‘it didn’t matter what the cost was’, as he explained: “It meant that the people that I was with at the time had the best night of their lives, and we still talk about it to this day.”
Jamie urged future lottery winners to have an eye on the future (National Lottery)
When asked about what advice they would pass on, Jamie said to enjoy yourself, saying: “It might be holidays, it might be cars, it might be buying a house – you can have your fun with it, but also, have a good chunk of it ready to set yourself up.”
Matt highlighted that ‘communication is really important’, adding: “Sometimes it feels like you’re going through this experience by yourself, because you’re the winner,
“If you don’t communicate your feelings and apprehensions, sometimes it can consume you a little bit,” he urged, explaining that speaking to family and friends ‘makes life a lot easier’.
After all of his travelling to the likes of Thailand, Brazil and Ibiza, Matt now has a car dealership business and is very much a family man, renovating his home for his children and wife.
Jamie has similarly opened his own breakdown business, with his family benefiting a lot from his win, as his son was born just nine weeks prior, and he married his wife Danielle in a £25,000 wedding.
But now, he has taken a step back from work and aims to get his football coaching badges, as he is currently working on getting his UEFA B coaching license.
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The Sunday Times have released the latest annual edition of their rich list – with a certain billionaire family topping the leader board for a third year in a row.
The list is essentially a long succession of people you’ve never heard of who appear to have far too much money, occasionally punctuated by names you do recognise.
The individuals on it are collectively worth hundreds of billions, but even with everyone here basically having enough wonga to last for a staggering amount of lifetimes someone has to have top spot – and you’ve probably never heard of him.
Before we get there, let’s run through the top five of the Sunday Times Rich List 2024, and there are some names you might recognise.
Do you even know who this guy is? He’s the wealthiest person in the UK. (PA)
Fifth on the list is Sir James Dyson, the guy responsible for that vacuum cleaner you probably have and those airblade hand dryers you find in some toilets.
It turns out a lot of people buy his stuff, because he’s worth £20.8 billion.
Coming in at number four is the new broom at Manchester United, Sir Jim Ratcliffe.
The Ineos founder is worth around £23.52 billion, though last year he had around six billion more in net worth and was second on the list.
Number three on the list are brothers David and Simon Reuben, whose Reuben Brothers investment makes them worth a combined £24.98 billion.
I can’t really think of any fun pieces of trivia about them, so let’s move onto number two on the list and Sir Leonard Blavatnik, who made his fortune after the collapse of the Soviet Union and now owns the Warner Music Group, which makes him worth £29.25 billion.
However, they’re all some way off the man at the top spot who takes the cake for the wealthiest person in the UK, who keeps his top spot from last year.
With a net worth of £37.2 billion, Indian-British billionaire Gopi Hinduja, whose Hinduja Group conglomerate has its fingers in all sorts of pies – ranging from banking, finance to media and entertainment.
The Hinduja family has been top of the UK’s rich list for the past three years now. (David M Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images)
You’ve probably never even heard of him, but that’s the thing about some of these monstrously wealthy individuals, they just sort of look a bit normal.
It might help if they walked around in a suit made of gold while sporting a top hat constructed entirely out of money.
However, according to The Independent, the family’s fortune is the largest to have ever existed on the list.
One of the other names on the list, Michael Platt, managed to not be recognised by the secretary at his own London office.
In the Sunday Times Rich List 2024, he occupies the unlucky number 13 spot, though with a worth of £12 billion he’s probably not feeling all that unlucky.
Winning the lottery even once is an absolute dream of many. When you’re sat in the pub chatting about what you’d do with the money, you only imagine it being one pot of cash.
Maybe you’d splash it all out on a big holiday or move onto a cruise ship or perhaps buy a big property.
And those kinds of chats are all well and good but realistically, it’s all just dream stuff – the chances of winning aren’t exactly high. Let alone cashing in multiple times.
Well, except for Stefan Mandel – that bloke’s managed to win the lottery a whopping 14 times. But unlike others, he doesn’t base the lottery on a case of luck. Instead, he uses some easy maths to ‘beat the system’.
The Romanian mathematician came up with a genius method, leading to him and many others bagging an absolute fortune.
He used maths to help. (CBS)
Teaming up with a group of investors to form a syndicate called he International Lotto Fund, Mandel targeted a series of lotteries around the world.
In a resurfaced interview on YouTube, the economist explained his theory, which he called ‘combinatorial condensation’.
“Theoretically, anybody can buy all the possible combinations,” he said. “Any high school boy or girl can calculate those combinations.
“Nobody has ever developed a logistical system to lodge such a large amount of play slips. We were the only winners and that was it.”
So, take the lottery in Virginia in the US, for example. Mandel calculated that with players picking six numbers from one to 44, there were 7,059,052 combinations to choose from.
14 times is mega. (CBS)
And to make matters even more favourable with this particular game, players were allowed to print their play slips/coupons at home, meaning Mandel and his gang could do so without alerting suspicion – even though what they were doing was totally legal.
In February 1992, on top of the $27 million jackpot, they took home $900,000 in additional prizes for the tickets that placed second, third, fourth and so on.
This plan alerted the suspicions of the authorities, with an investigator in Australia contacting the Virginia Lottery to tell them not to pay out.
They claimed Mandel and his syndicate were involved in money laundering, mafia. However, they found that the team had done nothing wrong.
Mandel is now said to live in Vanuatu, having ‘retired from the lottery’. Speaking to Romanian newspaper Bursa back in 2012, he said: “I’m a man who takes risks, but in a calculated way.
“Trimming my beard is a lottery: There is always the possibility that I’ll cut myself, get an infection in my blood and die — but I do it anyway. The chances are in my favour.”
