• Olivia Love, 37, won £10,000 ($13,400) a month for a year in a lottery. In total, that's over $160,000.
• She and her husband thought about buying a house, but spent the money on making memories instead.
• Love didn't save any money, but spent thousands of pounds on starting her dream wedding business.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Olivia Love, 37, a wedding content creator from Glasgow. She won £10,000 a month on the UK's National Lottery Set for Life game. Business Insider has verified her winnings and business expenditure. This piece has been edited for length and clarity.

I used to work on the kiosk at a supermarket that sold lottery tickets. Occasionally, I'd buy a few myself, but I never won anything significant.

One evening in May 2025, I bought six lottery tickets. I went to bed, and when I woke up, I found out we'd won a heck of a lot of money: £10,000 ($13,400) a month for a year, the equivalent of more than $160,000 in total.

We could have bought a house with that money, or we could have saved every penny. Instead, we carried on renting, saved nothing, and I created my dream job while giving my family the best year of our lives.

Money was always a source of stress

My husband was a truck driver, and I worked 17 hours a week at the supermarket to help pay for childcare for our kids, who are now 16, 6, 4, and 2. Money was always a source of stress. I'd say we were on the breadline.

We always had enough to pay the rent and the bills, but there was never anything left over at the end of the month. We often couldn't afford to fill up the petrol tank in one go or pay for our children's birthday parties, and we tended to buy their presents at secondhand markets. If the washing machine had broken, for example, we wouldn't have been able to afford to replace it.

We were getting by and were happy, but a little more money would have helped us a lot.

Winning didn't feel real

On the morning of May 15, 2025, I was in bed scrolling through my phone when I received an email from the National Lottery saying I'd won a prize. I assumed it would be £5 or something small.

When I logged onto the National Lottery website, I saw that we'd won £10,000 a month for a year. I called my husband, who was already at work. Even after someone from the National Lottery called later that morning to confirm the prize, it still didn't really sink in.

For days, it felt like someone would pinch me, and I'd wake up from this really vivid dream. Over time, though, a new feeling emerged: I no longer had this niggling worry about how many miles I had left in the tank or how much money was left until the end of the week. I felt far less stressed.

We chose not to spend our money on buying a house

My husband and I sat down and talked about what we wanted to achieve with our winnings.

Our natural instinct was to buy a house, but we quickly decided against it. We hadn't won enough to buy a house outright, so we'd need a mortgage, and we didn't even know whether the bank would give us one.

We worried it would make us less financially secure. Instead, we decided to keep renting our place and have the best year of our lives. Our strategy was simple: pay the bills, and whatever was left was ours to spend.

The first thing we bought was a new car for my husband. His old one was about 15 years old, had 140,000 miles on it, and the air conditioning didn't work. We couldn't afford to fix it and put off replacing it.

We also decided to have a second wedding. We first got married in December 2024 in a very small registry office ceremony with our immediate family. We scrimped and saved for months to pay for it, with financial help from both of our parents.

For our second wedding, in December 2025, we hired the pub where we'd had our first date. We had a photobooth, a buffet, a DJ, a saxophonist, a magician, and a celebrant to renew our vows. It was the best night ever.

We also had our first family holiday abroad this year, to Turkey. It has been the perfect year.

I created my dream job as a wedding content creator

I initially decided to give up work for a year, but then I worried about explaining a gap on my résumé to future employers. I figured that after 20 years in retail, it was the perfect time to change careers.

I love weddings and capturing all the joyous moments, and I suddenly had the money to start a wedding content creation business.

In the first six months, I spent about £7,500 setting up Moments by Love. I bought everything I needed, from new phones to microphone equipment. I did my first few weddings for free or very cheaply to build up a portfolio. You have to spend money to make money.

The job makes me so happy, and because I mostly work weekends, I'm at home during the week to take my children to and from school, and put them to bed. I wasn't always able to do that before.

This new career has given me freedom. I've basically created my dream job.

I don't regret spending all the winnings

The final instalment from the National Lottery came in April 2026. It was a complicated feeling, almost bittersweet. On the one hand, it was sad, but I'm also excited about my business. I truly believe I've put myself in a good position for the future.

In the end, I made the decision that was right for my career, for me, and for my family. I didn't save any of our winnings. I could have, but because we'd struggled for so long, I don't regret a thing about choosing to live our best lives.

• The age of freewheeling AI spending may be coming to an end.
• Consulting firms are rethinking how much they, and their clients, spend on AI.
• Tell us how spending at your consulting firm has changed.

Companies are learning that there's such a thing as spending too much on AI.

As the cost of AI tools grows, executives are recalibrating. Amazon recently removed its employee-made leaderboard for tracking AI token usage because it encouraged excessive spending. Walmart, which developed a vibe-coding tool for employees, recently set limits on the use of tokens. Uber COO Andrew MacDonald said it's hard to justify the money his company is spending on AI.

Cisco Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel also pushed back on the cost of tokens. He said at an event recently that the price is "far higher than the actual value these tokens are generating at scale."

For the consulting industry, the rise of AI was a near-existential threat. At first glance, chatbots can do a lot of the work of consultants, particularly those early in their careers. Most firms moved quickly to attract clients who needed help integrating the technology into their own companies. And they quickly adopted it themselves.

KPMG, for example, has built a dashboard to track how often employees in its US advisory division use AI tools, part of a broader effort to move from basic adoption to more sophisticated use. McKinsey plans to go further. CEO Bob Sternfels said in January that the firm uses roughly 25,000 AI agents alongside its 40,000 human employees, and hopes one or more agents will eventually support every employee.

The surge in spending, however, has raised a question: Are companies investing in AI strategically or simply spending to avoid being left behind? It's something consulting firms are working to answer for both their clients and themselves.

Tell us how AI spending has changed at your consulting firm:

For now, the answer appears to be: keep spending, but more strategically.

In a recent report on corporate AI investment, Boston Consulting Group found that companies expect to more than double their AI spending in 2026, from roughly 0.8% of revenue to about 1.7%. For large enterprises, that shift represents billions of dollars flowing into AI strategies that remain, in many cases, experimental and difficult to measure.

Russell Fradin, CEO and cofounder of Larridin, a platform that helps companies — including major consulting firms — measure the returns on AI usage, said the spending trend will continue.

"We haven't seen anyone talking about spending less in AI next year," Fradin told Business Insider. "They're just talking about instrumenting to understand where it goes."

Companies, Fradin said, are coming to the consensus that they "can't 10x spend every year forever."

• Inflation is picking back up, stretching household budgets.
• High prices are pushing many to get creative with grocery and restaurant spending.
• Business Insider wants to know: How are you balancing your food costs?

"What's for dinner?"

For many Americans, the nightly question is often as much about taste preferences as it is about economic realities.

My own family's mealtimes invariably require tradeoffs of time, money, and skill that we must navigate every single day.

Now, rising inflation is once again squeezing families' finances across the US.

Food costs have so far held relatively steady this year, with increases and decreases mostly offsetting each other in a basket of goods. But soaring gas prices and other consumer expenses are eating up a larger share of household budgets, according to the latest consumer price index.

For some families, that might mean cutting down on restaurant dining in favor of home-cooked meals. For others, it's swapping out beef for a less expensive protein.

Time-strapped shoppers may find themselves increasingly eyeing their grocery store's prepared foods options as a lower-cost alternative to getting delivery.

At Business Insider, we want to know how our readers are navigating these decisions, and how that has changed in the past year.

In my family of four, for example, my wife and I decided to sharply reduce restaurant and delivery spending. By cooking more meals at home, we have basically stopped ordering delivery, and we eat out at restaurants about once a week. According to our budgeting app, we've cut our spending in that category in half.

How have you been balancing food costs with other expenses over the past year? What changes, big and small, have helped you feed yourself well and save money?

We also want to see the receipts.

What have you stopped buying? What do you now spend more on? What do you splurge on? How have gas prices affected you?

Please get in touch via email or share your info in the survey below:

• The effects of higher oil prices could cut slash 10,000 jobs a month, Goldman Sachs says.
• The bank said it expects the unemployment rate to rise to 4.6% by the end of the year.
• Higher oil prices can raise inflation and hurt consumer spending, which could worsen the hiring slowdown.

The oil price shock could cost the US economy thousands of jobs a month, according to a new analysis from Goldman Sachs.

In a note to clients on Thursday, a team of economists at the bank said they anticipate higher unemployment and slower job growth through the end of the year as the impact of higher oil prices ripples across the US economy. In the bank's baseline scenario, the oil price shock could shave off around 10,000 new jobs a month through the end of the year, even after accounting for expected job gains in the energy sector.

While higher oil prices have historically led to new jobs in the energy sector, those gains could be more muted this time around, given how the oil extraction business has become more efficient in recent years, Goldman said.

The bank also said it expects the unemployment rate to tick higher to 4.6% by the end of the third quarter. The unemployment rate rose unexpectedly to 4.4% in February, while the economy lost 92,000 jobs, according to the latest nonfarm payrolls report.

"The upward pressure on unemployment primarily reflects lower hiring, with a smaller contribution from higher layoffs, in industries most exposed to weaker consumer spending," the economists wrote.

Markets have been anxious about how much damage the Iran war could cause to the US economy. Higher oil prices could push up the prices of other goods and raise inflation — but the fallout could extend much further, given that consumers are likely to pull back spending in other areas, hurting growth and potentially causing hiring to slow.

Goldman said it expected the hiring slowdown to be the most pronounced in leisure and hospitality. In the bank's baseline scenario, the sector could lose around 5,000 jobs a month through the end of the fourth quarter.

Retail trade, manufacturing, and education and health services were also among the bank's most affected sectors.

The risks stemming from higher crude prices are coming at a time when the labor market has already been steadily cooling, with hiring slowing for most of the past year while job cuts have crept higher. After accounting for downward revisions, the US added 181,000 jobs last year, down from the 1.4 million added the year prior, according to the Labor Department.