Lotto win sets man for life

By Lachlan Ellis

A man is now ‘Set for Life’ after a very happy Monday last week, when the numbers he picked on a Ballan lotto ticket were drawn, winning him a cool $4.8 million.

The Sailors Falls man purchased the 4-game QuickPick at the Ballan Newsagency on Inglis Street, and was the only Division 1 winning entry in draw 2573 of the Set for Life Draw, drawn Monday 22 August.

The $4.8 million will be paid to the man in instalments of $20,000 a month for the next 20 years.

The anonymous lucky winner said he had been thinking about the win all day at work, and “was going a bit crazy thinking about it”.

“Last week, I spoke to someone about retiring in the next five years, but this has just brought that forward by many years. I’ll probably buy a house, retire earlier than expected, and travel around Australia. I enjoy driving in the outback, so I’ll explore Australia on the road,” he said.

The winning numbers were 6, 25, 19, 13, 41, 18, and 37, with the supplementary numbers 20 and 33.

Ian Ireland owns the Ballan Newsagency, and said the Division 1 win was exciting for the team, especially given Ballan’s relatively small population.

“It was very exciting hearing we’d sold the winning ticket…I always read my emails first thing in the morning, but I hadn’t read the email Tatts sent me at about 10 to 7, saying we’d sold a winner. Renee came to work at 11 o’clock and said she’d gotten a message from Colleen, who manages the Bacchus Marsh Tatts outlet, congratulating us for selling a Division 1 ticket,” Mr Ireland told the Moorabool News.

“Renee thought I was hiding the news from her…I couldn’t get to my computer quick enough to have a look, and sure enough, the email was there.

“It’s just good to think you can sell a winning ticket like Ballan. You take a place like Bacchus Marsh – the agency there probably does three or four times the turnover we do – and yet we still sold a winning ticket. There’s a lot of agencies around, lots have never sold one…so yes, we were very excited.”

The win is the Ballan Newsagency’s first Set for Life winning entry sold, but overall, its third Division 1 win in 31 years, with one in 1992, and a second in 2000.