As of today, the Powerball jackpot is up to $475M! Our lump sum would be $238,068,000 if we have the sole winning ticket for the next drawing. So what would I do? It’s that time again, folks! The “what I’d do if I win the lottery?” dream post!
1. 10% to our church (that’s $23.8M) – Our church would be able to continue and expand a lot of its social programs with that kind of influx of cash. I’ve said before that our church is a debt-free church, only moving forward on projects when the cash flow is there. This would certainly help them achieve a LOT of goals!
2. 10% to various charities (another $23.8M). Charities I know I’d donate to include The Gates Foundation, Red Cross, blood:water mission, Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, as well as many local food banks and non-profit programs. And who knows what else!
3. Trust funds for our kids and my sister’s kids. And Denis’s sister’s kids would get the remainder of their college years paid for since her kids are older as well as trust funds. I’ve said before that any trust funds we start for our kids would be paid out every five years beginning with a certain birthday – probably 1/3 on their 30th, 1/3 on their 35th and 1/3 on their 40th. Same goes for my sister’s family and Denis’s sister’s family. So we’ll set aside $5M for each of them, which equals $30M in trust funds for those six kids.
4. Gifts to friends and family. Annual tax-free gifts are limited to $12K per person per giver. So, if it was a family of four, Denis and I EACH would give $12K to each family member, enabling us to give $96K to each family of four that we care to give gifts to, and those families would not be required to pay taxes on a dime of that. I can easily see setting aside $10M just to go towards gifts for people in our lives with whom we wish to be generous. Obviously this would come in GREAT handy for my pal MB in Rockaway Park who is STILL dealing with the chaos left behind by Hurricane Sandy last year!
5. Denis and I would obviously both quit our jobs so fast it would make our employers’ heads spin. *lol* There’s a car commercial on TV right now that shows a woman who is attempting to travel by car to all 50 states. I’m also currently watching “Steven Fry in America” on Netflix in which the British host is doing the same. I told Denis I thought that would be a lot of fun to do during an entire summer – just drive and visit the entire country, one state at a time. And possibly do that EVERY summer, but pick a different place. Europe one summer, Asia the next. Latin America one summer, South Africa the next. And so on. $1 million set aside just for traveling.
6. Open a restaurant. Denis and I have talked often about the desire to open a restaurant. Why not try it? Invest a cool $2M and see if we can make it work. We have a good idea for it, and I think it could be successful in any college town (of which there are plenty in this country).
7. Alma Mater scholarships ($5M in seed money for each).
Even after all the above listed things, we’d have If we do the scholarships, traveling and business ventures, it would still leave us at least $137,468,000. Investments galore would follow, and presuming a MINIMUM of a 2% return on those investments, we’d be able to live off the annual interest, which would be just over $2.7M per year. Heck, at that point I’d be okay living on just 1% a year. $2.7M seems a bit…excessive.
Now I just need to make sure that Denis bought us some tickets for the next drawing!