A Messy Room Almost Lost 26-Year-Old Winner $1 Million, Here's How To Prevent It Happening To You

We bet Gregory Jarrett will always keep his room tidy after cleaning it last month and finding a $1 million Powerball ticket.

Did your grandmother ever say this to you?... "A place for everything and everything in its place."

It may have been the wisest advice for 26-year-old Gregory Jarrett, after he found a discarded Powerball ticket worth $1 million while cleaning his room.

"I was sitting on the ticket and didn't even know it," Jarrett told the Atlanta Journal after he claimed his prize on February 18.

"I called for my mom, and I walked toward her, shaking," he recalled. He said she verified it, and at that point they hugged. Jarrett said he will pay off bills with the winnings.

It's easy to lose a ticket, but even easier to have your home organised so that you never lose a million dollars like Jarrett might have done.

Here's some power tips on how to keep those potentially winning lottery tickets under control:

1. Give your tickets a home spot. Find a spot for your tickets and always put them there when they are not going with you to the lottery store for checking. Give your storage a flow so you always know where the most recent ones are. For example, put your old tickets in an envelope on the left side of a drawer, the current ones for this month in an envelope in the middle, and your current ones on the right.

2. Always follow the same routine. After you buy your tickets, put them in the same place while you're still at the store... your wallet, bag or even an envelope.

It's important to carry them in a distinctive container so you don't throw them out in a cleanup. I use an old but perfectly serviceable lotto wallet supplied by my lottery organisation. Inquire - your local store may carry those also. After you come back to your home or office, immediately put them in the home spot, and don't touch them until the draw.

3. Never throw your tickets away. It takes just a second's distraction and you could misread an important number on your ticket. If you threw it away then, thinking it was worthless, that's a loss you'll always regret. Always get them checked by the store, then place them in a separate place to your current tickets so you don't get them mixed up. I store all my tickets in a series of envelopes like the one below. Your storage doesn't need to be fancy or itemised.

My winning tickets envelope from 2013.

There's very few other single pieces of paper that can represent millions of dollars, so treat every ticket as a winning one until you find out otherwise for certain. Ask Jarrett, it's not worth the risk!

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