NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Erika, we feel your pain. Or rather, we wish we did.

Now that you've won $58.9 million in the Big Game lottery, you can quit your job at the phone company. You can dump your boyfriend (or not). You can buy a car and take care of your family.

But people may start coming out of the woodwork with hard-luck stories about how they "could use a little loan." Somebody may try to get you to invest in a business deal you don't understand.

Before you know it, you may blow through some -- even all -- of the money. Many lottery winners have done it, such as Curtis Sharp, who ate through practically all of the $5.6 million he won in the New York Lottery in 1982. (For more about Sharp, click here to read his August 2001 interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer.)

Sure, we would kill to have such problems, but the truth is a gigantic cash windfall is no picnic. In fact, it takes quite a bit of financial planning. After taxes, Greene will take home roughly $34 million, give or take a mil.

Here are two steps for any lottery winner cashing in a big jackpot.

Go on! Pamper yourself a little. Buy the car, take a vacation. Maybe you want to pay off credit card debts or take care of some other pressing financial problem. But don't go out tomorrow and buy a yacht, says Scott Kahan, a certified financial planner in New York.

Take some time to adjust to your new-found wealth. Don't quit your job right away, and don't start writing checks to your Uncle Charlie and your neighbor down the street just yet, either.

Your first priority? Get some good professional advice, whether it's from a lawyer, an accountant or a financial planner who can help you design a smart strategy. (For more help on where to go to get financial advice, click here.)

"Typically when you have people with sudden wealth, they need a long-term plan to protect it from themselves," said Mark Groesbeck, a certified financial planner in Houston. "There's this initial pent-up desire to spend. Cars, houses, and gifts of money for so-and-so. Everyone is going to be your friend."

Sharp, the New York lottery winner, told CNN that his biggest mistake was listening to bad investing advice. It also didn't help that people were "coming out of the grave" with their hands out.

"I worked eight years after I won. Thank God I did," Sharp said.

Erika Greene is luckier than other lottery winners because her windfall is so big that she probably won't have to work again. If she took the $34 million and put it in a taxable money market fund earning 2 percent, she'd earn $680,000 in income a year before taxes, Kahan said. That means she doesn't have to take big risks to live comfortably.

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Even better, if she invests the money in tax-free municipal bonds earning 4 percent, she'll have roughly $1.3 million a year -- and she won't have to pay Uncle Sam anything on the income. (For more on figuring out bonds and bond funds, click here.)

The question is whether she wants -- or needs -- any stock exposure. She may be comfortable keeping the cash in fixed income, or she may want to allocate a portion to stocks and other investments to grow the pot.

Groesbeck said Greene may want to put one-third of the cash in stocks, one-third in bonds and one-third in liquid assets such as money market funds.

In the stock portion, she could put 70 percent in large-caps, and 30 percent in small caps, mixing in some growth and some value stocks. (Growth stocks have rapidly growing earnings, while value stocks are selling cheaper than their actual worth.) She may want to put a small portion -- say 10 percent or so -- in a riskier hedge fund.

Not exactly chump change, whatever she decides.