An Auckland man was kicking himself after seeing his regular Lotto numbers in a winning draw — only to be delighted to hear his wife had used those numbers to buy a winning ticket.
The couple in Auckland’s north, who wished to remain anonymous, were regular Lotto players, but didn’t always buy a ticket. Their winning chance was a close call indeed.
On the night of the Wednesday, August 6 draw, the woman decided to buy a ticket online after getting a reminder about the jackpot — without mentioning it to her husband.
When buying tickets, the couple usually switched between a set of their favourite numbers or just a random set.
“I saw I had $12 in my account, so I bought one of our favourites, which is made up of family birthdays and special dates,” she said.
The next morning, while her husband was reading the newspaper, he recognised some of the numbers from the previous night’s draw.
“I said to my wife, ‘hey, if we’d have bought a ticket last night, we definitely would have won something, they look like some of our numbers’,” he said.
His wife turned to him and revealed she ended up buying one the night before.
She turned on her phone to find that all six numbers were circled, and they were the sole division one winners of $1 million.
“I just screamed at my husband ‘oh my gosh, oh my gosh, we’ve got six numbers, oh my gosh!’ – it was all I could say,” she said.
The couple shared the news with their children and opened a mini bottle of bubbles the woman had been saving in the fridge.
They said they were going to invest their winnings while they made plans for the future.
“This is a lot of money for us,” she said. “It’s not something we take for granted, so we want to make sure it’s put to good use.”
