Washington Lottery Awarded 9.6 Million Dollar Winner To Pasco Resident
If you would've told Deborah Harden that she was going to be a millionaire a day earlier, she'd have called you crazy, but that's not the case anymore. Deborah Harden of Pasco has stepped forward as the Washington Lottery winner of 9.6 million dollars.
It turns out this is along a string of good luck she's had recently. About 4 years ago she won a new car and a couple years before that she took home $9,720 in Las Vegas.
That night after her husband went to bed, she decided to check her lotto number via email she receives daily. "I started checking them and they started to go along pretty good" she told us at a Washington Lotto press conference. She double checked her numbers on the official Washington Lottery website. Then called her husband to check again. She had a winning ticket in her hands to the tune of 9.6 million dollars. She decided to invest the money to plan towards her and her husbands retirement. "We were afraid we were going to work until we were 66 or 67, they keep raising the retirement age." Some of her winnings will also be used to take the kids to Disneyland as well as setting up education funds for her grand children. She's going to tell her grand kids tonight over dinner at Applebee's.
When I asked her what would happen if someone comes up that she hasn't seen in years asking for a personal loan, she told me "I'm sure that's going to happen" and the way around it is "have it invested and not really accessible." Smart move. She said the key is to stay positive. She joked by saying her husband always goes to Las Vegas with the notion that he's going to lose money - and he always does. She also said when you play the scratch games, check the website to see which games have already had big winners and avoid those.