Iowa woman accelerates retirement timeline Drawing Date: 6/5/2026 June 12, 2026 - A Waterloo woman says she's on “cloud nine” after winning a $2 million lottery prize that prompted her to move up her retirement plans by months. “December 25 was supposed to be my last day to work, but as soon as I realized I had this kind of money, I figured I can do it now,” Debra Bickle said Friday as she claimed her Mega Millions® prize at the Iowa Lottery’s main office in Clive. “I went in and said goodbye to everybody and turned my computer in.” Bickle, 69, matched the first five numbers in the Mega Millions drawing on June 5 to win a $2 million prize. Her ticket was just one number away from winning that night's $368 million jackpot, missing only the Mega Ball. She bought her winning ticket from the self-service kiosk at Walmart, 1334 Flammang Drive in Waterloo, but didn’t check her ticket until a couple of days after the drawing. When she scanned the ticket with the Iowa Lottery mobile app, she wasn't prepared for what appeared on her screen. “I had to double-check: 'How many zeros are there?'” she recalled with a laugh. Once the reality of her big win set in, Bickle hid the lucky ticket in her purse and hid the purse in her home. But any hope of a restful night quickly disappeared. “I was up all night,” she said. “I couldn't sleep. I didn’t let anybody know until the next day. I was pacing up and down, trying to figure out what I should do next. I was just getting acclimated to the fact that I had won it. It was mind-blowing.” Bickle, who worked for a computer services company for 26 years, said the chance to help her family is even more meaningful than the win itself. A mother of two and grandmother of five, she plans to share the winnings with her family, including paying for her grandchildren’s schooling. “I'm going to spread it around,” she said. “I don't want them to have to struggle the way I did. For a long time, I was working two jobs. I'm going to try to keep them from having to do that.” For herself, Bickle plans a pair of practical home upgrades: a kitchen remodel and new windows. The winning numbers in the June 6 drawing were 13-30-50-52-66 and Mega Ball 2. Bickle’s easy-pick ticket was the only one in the country to win at the Match-5 level. Walmart will receive a $2,000 bonus from the Iowa Lottery for selling the $2 million-winning ticket. In the $5 Mega Millions game, players choose their first five numbers from a pool of 70, and another number — called the Mega Ball — from a separate pool of 24. The game features a built-in multiplier for each play that multiplies non-jackpot prizes by up to 10 times.