The “70% of lottery winners go broke” statistic has no study behind it. NEFE (the org everyone credits) publicly disowned it. The real research found something worse.

The number traces back to a NEFE think-tank meeting in 2001 where one participant said it offhand. No study, no dataset, no paper. The media attributed it to NEFE and it snowballed for two decades — until 2018, when NEFE put out a statement saying it wasn’t backed by their research and couldn’t be verified. They had to disown their own most-cited “finding.” The actual peer-reviewed research is more interesting anyway. Economists studied tens of thousands of Florida lottery winners (Hankins, Hoekstra & Skiba, “The Ticket to Easy Street?”) — comparing $50k-150k winners against small winners. Result: the big winners filed bankruptcy at the same rate within 5 years. Bankruptcies dipped for two years, then spiked in years 3-5. The windfall didn’t prevent the crash, it postponed it. And at bankruptcy, big winners had the same net assets as people who won basically nothing. So the meme stat is fiction, but the real finding might be bleaker: for people already struggling, cash alone didn’t change the trajectory. It bought time. What other widely-repeated finance “statistics” have no actual source? This one survived 20+ years before anyone checked.