Lottery Dreams

Okay, so MegaMillions is up to $333M as of tonight’s drawing (the lottery officials said they’ve sold so many tickets today that they’ve upped it from the $325M they were originally projecting). They don’t sell MegaMillions in North or South Carolina, so I enlisted my sister Jen to get tix for us. In the last drawing we bought $10 in numbers ($5 each) and won $7. We rolled the $7 into tonight’s drawing and added another $3 to even it out. We have agreed to split the money down the middle if we win.

The Virginia net payout after all taxes is $179M, so we’d each get about $89.5 million. However, I’m sure SC will be taking their cut, so we’ll presume that Denis and I “only” (I say that with some slight sarcasm) end up with $60M.

How would we spend it?

To Help Others:

$6M spread out to some churches

$6M spread out to some charities

$6M set aside to give cash gifts to friends and family ($12K per year can be given individually without that person having to incur tax removal – we’d give these gifts for several years to family and friends).

$4M ($2M each) donations to my college and Denis’ college for scholarship funds

$3M ($1.5M each) put into two trusts for Denis’s sister’s kids, to be paid out in thirds on their 30, 35, 40th birthdays.

To Help Our Kids

$6M ($3M each) put into two trusts for the kids, to be paid out in thirds on their 30, 35 and 40th birthdays.

$4M ($2M each) for kids’ college tuitions

Real Estate

$1M apartment in New York City

$1M for acreage and custom home in the Carolinas

Investments

$250K into my mother’s business so she can pretty much do whatever she wants to make that thing go through the roof

At that point, we’d have about $22M to put into investments specifically to earn interest. It would be a mix of both high, medium and low risk investments. Presuming an average 4% return on investment, we’d earn $880K per year. Dump $440K of that back into the investments, and use the other $440K to pay for our annual expenses, continued donations to churches and charities, etc.

To tell you the truth, though, I’d be thrilled if we won the $250K second prize and split it (after taxes and such we’d probably end up with $50K). That would still end up being plenty for us – we’d be able to pay off the last of our debt (except for the mortgage), put the rest in savings and would shrink our monthly expenses to the point where I *truly* wouldn’t have to work anymore.

Wouldn’t that be cool? When I talked to my sister about getting the lottery tickets, she said, “You know we won’t win, right?” And my response was “Never say never – I bet a lot of people that won never thought they’d actually win, too.”

One comment on “Lottery Dreams”

Bev , August 31, 2009 at 6:44 am Direct link to comment

I got skunked again. Sigh. One number on each of two plays. Two dollars down the drain. Maybe I could better invest those two dollars in GM or some other sound corporation. Oh wait…….. 😉

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