Edited to add: As of 7:45 p.m. on Wednesday, the jackpot is up to an astounding $550M!! That’s crazy! Our lump sum would now be $244M if we have the sole winning ticket, so all numbers listed below would be adjusted upward very considerably!
So, the lottery is up to $425M this week (maybe even higher by the time this post goes live). That’s crazy high.
With a lump sum payout, that’s about $189M after all taxes are paid out. Still a hefty chunk of change.
So what would I do? It’s that time again! The lottery dreams post!
1. 10% to our church (that’s $18.9M) – I can only imagine the amazing programs our church would be able to ignite with that kind of cash flow. 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 $18.9M). Again – the things that charities would be able to do is fantastic. Charities I know I’d donate to include The Gates Foundation, Red Cross, blood:water mission, Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, as well as some 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 college paid for since her kids are older. I’ve said before that the trust funds would be large, and 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 dealing with the chaos left behind by Hurricane Sandy last month!
5. Denis and I would both quit our jobs so fast it would make our employers’ heads spin. *lol* I mentioned to the kids a couple days ago that we’d move back to NYC and they both howled in protest. “But we like where we live! We don’t want to move!” And so we compromised – I said we’d at least buy a place in NYC so that we could go there all the time but that we could stay in SC so they can continue to go to school with their friends. Either way, I presume we’d spend at least $5M for a 3-bedroom apartment (at least) in Manhattan.
And there are other things we’d be able to do – start scholarships at our alma maters ($2M in seed money for each). Travel the world during the summers when the kids are out of school. Try things we’ve wanted to try but not had the ability to do (opening a restaurant has always been something Denis and I talk about doing “ifâ€).
If we do the scholarships, traveling and business ventures, it would still leave us at least $103,000,000 or so. 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 $2M per year.
Wow.
Now I just need to make sure that Denis bought us some tickets for Wednesday’s drawing!
