So you think you can spend $40 million a year? At that rate, you probably have less than ten years.
What happens to the money if you die? Does it just disappear, or does it go to your estate?
Anyway, having an annuity of multiple millions that will last longer than I will sounds like a very nice position to be in. And it spares me the moral stress of deciding how much to give away to whom right away.
Lottery annuities go to your estate even if you die.
I’m fairly young, so I’d take the annuity. I consider it the equivalent of the lottery doing my investing work for me, or some sort of marshmallow-experiment equivalent for delayed gratification.
I think you could find a team that would manage your money more effectively than the state of Michigan.
And you could certainly afford them.
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But the lottery has more money to invest. If you take the lump sum, the feds take their cut right off the top. The lottery can invest that money, you can’t.
Also, you are neglecting the return on investments made from investing the annual annuity payments. Unless you plan on spending $20 million a year.
Another consideration: Taking the 30-year payout, your last sum will be paid to you in 2052 dollars.
Put another way: Imagine what the value of a million of 1974 dollars is equivalent to today.
ETA: I just looked it up: $6.4 million.
mmm
With one hand tied behind my back.
I’m just taking all the money now and giving most of it to charities and other SDMB posters. Why wait?
I think I could give that much away.
I think I probably have fifteen years, maybe more. And I’d still have to decide how to give most of what I got away each year. Might be less stress to do most of that and be done with it.
But I don’t know what happens if you take the annuity and die before it finishes paying out. I think you get at least a little while to decide which; that would be one of the questions to ask, as would be the effect on taxes. – I see some of that’s been answered later in the thread; as well as the excellent point about inflation.
And we’re talking about state lotteries, aren’t we? If we’re talking about something like Publisher’s Clearinghouse, there’s also the question of whether they’ll last another 30 years. (If the state doesn’t, I figure I’ll have bigger troubles than what happened to money that was mostly data in computers.)
If you set up a blind trust for your winnings, the annuity will definitely continue to pay into it. That way, you can set up your kids as trustees (there’s no way they’d be able to touch anything until they’re thirty - making an eighteen year-old flush with cash is a recipe for disaster).
That’s why the first three calls you should make (after you’ve put the unsigned ticket in a safe deposit box) is to an estate lawyer, an accountant, and a financial advisor. Make sure the latter two sign sworn statements of fiduciary.
I would also advise the annuity payment, that way it’d be harder to piss away all your money.
Forget that! I have no family and no heirs. At my funeral I’d want everybody to quote Looney from Let It Ride: “He pissed it all away!”
“I spent half of my money on liquor, gambling, and wild women. The rest, I just wasted.”
Often attributed to W.C. Fields, though I have read that it comes from much earlier.
Lump sum for me. I don’t think I’m the “piss it away” type. I’d find a decent investment fund, set up automatic monthly payments, and forget about it.
Even if I pocketed a mere 200 million after taxes and earned no interest whatsoever, I could still pay myself over $400,000 a month until I’m 100. Spend what I want, and at the end of each month, whatever is left over goes to charity. Even living the most extravagant lifestyle I can imagine for myself, it’d be tough to go through 400 grand in a month.
I’d make an honest effort to blow through $400,000 a month.
On vacation in St Martin a few years ago we stopped in Grande Case, a little town known for their (mostly French) restaurants. There were three restaurants we were considering eating at, but those three and two others were “closed” for the evening. A guy had a group of friends all partying on his yacht. He booked the five restaurants for his party that night. They were doing tastings at each place. Extravagant stuff like that would be so much fun.
Have you bought eggs recently?
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I love it!
Have I told you lately, Maserschmidt, just what a wonderful person you are and how much I admire you?
LOL. I love it!
My sister in law is a firefighter/EMT. She’s a tiny thing but enormously strong. Her job sounds stressful to me. And usually during downtime she’s hitting the gym, not playing video games. The disrupted sleep alone would be a deal breaker.
We have a wedding photo of her at sixteen years old carrying my husband around in her arms. She got married a couple of years ago and we snapped another one of her carrying him around. This time he tried to pick her up. He failed.
I have never had a home emergency short of frozen pipes. I was in a car accident when I was sixteen that totaled the car I was driving. I was rear-ended when braking for a yellow light, which spun us out into the intersection. My Mom and I were okay, though I had neck problems for a while. Fortunately no one was in the backseat at the time… They would be missing their legs in the very least. I’ve been hyper-vigilant on the road ever since.
Are you losing weight?
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