I wish it had been the lottery…
Then I would know it was final.
ME! however… I’m the SMARTEST MOFO on Earth…
Or… I thought I was.
:mad:
Not true at all. I have an excellent grasp of economics, and my Bro is a Tax expert and financial advisor. I still buy a couple Lotto tickets a week. Why? Because they are a ticket to some wonderful daydreams of “what would I do if I won the Lotto”, and fully worth the few bucks. (How much is a movie ticket? 10$? For two hours. I can get two hours of daydreams a week for less than half that.) However, this “ticket to daydream” only requires the purchase of a couple tickets. Spending more than that is silly.
If I won the Lotto, I’d buy a house with cash, put a bunch aside for taxes, put most of the rest into Annuities, and then, with less than 1 Million left, I'd blow that remainder frivolously. But with a few Million in Annuities and a house fully paid for, I’d be set for life.
I also think besides bad money management skills that a lot of these people that blow through their winnings don’t have a concept of what expensive things cost, the cost of maintaining them, and how little they actually have to maintain the lifestyle.
3.5 million is so big to them that it seems like it can last a lifetime. But you buy a couple big houses and new cars for your friends and family and your about done.
Insurance, taxes, and maintenace costs on McMansions don’t come cheap and they never go away.
3.5 mil? Buy yourself a nice regular house. Get yourself a reliable set of wheels. Take the family on a 5K Disney vacation to celebrate. Then stick the rest in some interest bearing low risk account.
I think a substantial portion also realize they should “invest” the money, but have little concept of how to do that sensibly. Rather than invest in “boring” things like bonds, CDs or even blue chip stock issues, they often back dubious “business opportunities” like buying an interest in a racehorse, or simply buy the momo stocks of the moment, and get burned. Badly. I remember a news item of a few years ago about some little old lady who came into a big pot of money. She was investing a huge pile of it in stocks like KKD and TASR which were the flyers of the time. If it stayed there, she probably has about 25-50% of the capital left at this point. The number of vultures that are flapping around masquerading as “financial advisers” to trap the unwary doesn’t help matters any.
That’s fine and I do see the enjoyment out of the possibility of winning. Maybe I’m one of the very few who would rather save that money and over the course of time use it to go on a nice vacation getaway or to use it to experience something I havn’t experienced before. Or perhaps use it to invest in something to earn even more money. Or use it on a desireable charity. Lots of possibilities for me to daydream of too.
The point being of course that even if a percentage of those who play the lottery can use it wisely I doubt most can. Although that is the point of this GQ I suppose 
. To me the lottery is like giving an overweight person a small chance to lose all of that weight in an instant (or very rapidly) and then to see how many of them actually stay healthy vs. how many fall back to old habbits.
A lesser known fact is that the inverse is true as well. A study was made of several millionaires who lost their fortune due to unforeseeable circumstances. Most were unable to adjust to poverty and found themselves unable to maintain their newly poor status. Many eventually ended up getting good jobs, saving and investing their money, and becoming just as wealthy as when they started.
As I sell hundreds of lotto tickets a week, almost always to destitue individuals, I have often daydreamed of what I would do with all that money. I’ve determined that each individual of my direct and intermediate family would receive a fairly decent sum to dispose of however they wished. Upon that, I would take a small percentage and blow the crap out of it. Save some in TBills, some in stocks, fill my Roth and save some for cash. Finnaly, with whatever I had left, I think I would start a co-orporation that dealt primarily in small business loans for my local area in some attempt to raise the standard of living and give descent businesses a chance.
But yeah, I sell alot of tickets to people that need to not buy this crap. Same with cigarettes. I think, if you took a poll of those individuals who purchase these tickets on a large scale, you would find many uneducated, low income to border line poverty individuals.
I saw the program. The people that won were really.really stupid. They bought things that were way overboard. My fave was a guy from England. He bought a house with lots of yard room and set up a demolition derby on weekends. He sometimes used new cars. Strangely enough ,he went broke. He also paid a lot of lawsuits.
Yeah, for some people a million dollars means “infinity”. It is true that a million dollars could enable you to quit your job and live on the interest for the rest of your life, but only to maintain a middle-class lifestyle.
Indeed. My wife and I on occasion buy tickets usually no more than $5 worth. It’s the daydream, mostly.
However, we know that our first action after finding out we win, would be to contact a law firm, and ask for a family lawyer, and a financial lawyer.
We might be dumb sometimes, but we’re not stupid!
Assuming that $1Mil was after taxes, around $5000/mo from a $1Mil annuity.
Yeah, which is only $60,000 year.
Now, you can save a lot of money by not having to go to work…less depreciation on your car, no office wardrobe, no fast food/cafeteria lunches. And with more time during the day you can save tons of money doing things for yourself rather than paying a premium for prepared food, repair people, and such. You can save $20/week by mowing your lawn yourself rather than paying the neighbor kid.
A million dollars doesn’t make you rich! Yeah, you’re literally a millionaire, but you’ve only guaranteed yourself a middle class lifestyle. Not even upper middle class.
A pub quiz team I used to compete on had a standard thing where the guy that was running the team spent the winnings on lottery tickets, which a couple other team members used to like, too. Since I was just playing for the fun of it, it didn’t bother me, but I thought it was a rotten idea. Not just because of throwing money away, but because if one of those tickets ever DID win big, we’d have had a real mess figuring out how to divy it up. What with shifting team membership from week to week, the only sane thing to do would have been to split it among the people present for the week of the winning ticket. Then a regular player who wasn’t there that week would have been seriously pissed off, and so on … not to mention that I don’t think the guy buying the tickets was carefully recording who WAS there each week.
One I’m on now takes the far more sensible approach of saving up our winnings and blowing it on a group dinner at a fancy restaurant periodically.
Part of it is probably also impacted by the area of the country you live in. For example here in Seattle, if you wanted to buy a baseline McMansion, we’re talking 4000 SQ ft on a postage stamp lot, you’re plunking down around 1.6 mil right there. That’s before taxes and fees.
I do my share of lotto daydreaming, and sure I’d probably buy some stupid expensive things just because I could. Huge TV, top of the line media room, etc. But I think aside from that i’d keep it pretty chill. I don;t NEED 4000 sq ft of space. Maybe 3000 with a ghood size yard for the dogs to run in. Near a lake would be nice. I don’t need a Ferrari, but i might spring for something nice a cushy like a BMW.
I recall one of those shows (may be the same one, or not, who knows) they had some guy from KY. And he went all out. Bought this huge mcmansion, bough suits of armor, like you see in castles for his livingroom. All the funiture was that tacky gold leaf rococo stuff. He said he spent over 2 million just on a knife and sword collection. Just hilarious stuff.
Honestly though, and I am swearing to this so if I win you all can hold me to it. Were I to win, 10% would go to charity. Not all at once but I’d pick places each year and donate a nice sum to.
Exactly. Heck, we’ve even got the house picked out… a lovely Victorian style in our town that is BADLY in need of repair. We could probably get it for $30,000 now, but it needs at least 100,000 in repair. And I’m no handyman…
That house, a nice van for my wife, my extravagence would be a Skyline GTR for myself, and then a lawyer to get my kids.
Giving back is important, of course. If the wins were big enough, the wife and I have decided we would fund a small scholarship… just a few kids, ones who might not have gotten the best grades, who REALLY want to go to college.