Easy come, easy go.

Lottery winner sues a investment adviser and accounting firm over bad advice. It's partially another dot-com bust story, but it's also a story about the need to really understand what is happening with your money. Trust and money don't go together.

He won about $5.5M and decided to take an "immediate lump sum - in his case, about $2 million - that he could roll into investments. He'd just live off the earnings and interest." This is where the real trouble started:

He alleges that within a few months, the Smith-Barney advisers had 98 percent of his money invested in individual stocks, substantially technology companies.

The year was 2000, which would prove a spectacularly bad time to sink one's entire fortune into tech stocks. Cicero's lawyer has alleged the advisers were "breathtakingly irresponsible" to put a lottery winner's windfall wholly into individual stocks.

"Fifty to 80 percent of their income ought to be in bonds and other fixed-income investments," Stoltmann said.

The court and financial-arbitration filings tell the story in flat terms, claiming Cicero lost $600,000 or more in bad investments. And he ended up paying $240,000 more to the IRS for penalties and interest after he learned the hard way that a lump-sum lottery buyout doesn't count as capital-gains income. There was also a divorce.

"You want to talk about a sob story, he's it," Stoltmann said.

So, not only did he get screwed by Smith-Barney and an incompetent tax accountant, but he also wound up in divorce court? I really do feel sorry for this guy because my guess is that he thought he was trusting real professionals that knew what they were doing.

The lesson? Even so-called professionals need to be scrutinized and double-checked.

(Photo courtesy of: Lazy_Lightning)