What are the steps after winning the lottery?

If you win a lot of money in a lottery, hire competent, highly-regarded, and experienced general legal & tax counsel and financial management advisors BEFORE you redeem your ticket, and then follow their advice. Change your phone numbers and emails, try to reduce or eliminate your online and social media presence, be prepared to move from your residence and go into hiding somewhere initially, and strive to be as anonymous as possible and to avoid media attention. Pay attention to your personal, physical security and expect to be targeted by scammers, con artists, and criminals, as well as by needy, greedy or desperate friends, acquaintances and strangers.

As a rich and and only modestly well-known acquaintance once ruefully told me, “if you think you’d like to be rich and famous one day, try being just rich and not famous first.” Sudden fame is generally even more toxic than sudden wealth, and both have utterly destroyed many lives. So consider personal and marital/family psychological counseling in advance of any apparent need, to help you wisely navigate your way through the inevitably enormous stresses, strains and changes you are about to experience, with your happiness, home life, and mental well-being intact. But also expect to lose friends, alienate family, and drastically alter how you live, and can live, your day-to-day life, including those aspects that you most enjoy now.