The Wednesday Powerball jackpot is $160,000,000 and I’ve got the winning ticket.
What should I do? Should I claim it immediately? How do I handle the taxes? What else do I need to know and/or do?
Keep it on the DL. Otherwise you’re going to get a whole lot of friends and family hitting you up for cash in the near future (including friends & family you never knew you had!).
- Lawyer-up.
- Hire a very good accountant.
- Let said Attorney and Accountant deal with everything while getting paid handsomely.
- Get updates of their progress from Tahiti.
- Have Accountant set-up The Czarcasm Foundation to protect your money, and so you can give some of it away to various causes.
- Start a Scholarship endowment in your name at your alma-mater - if you liked your alma mater that is.
- keep track of reminders on your iPad III from Patagonia.
- Invest in a Lear Jet. With a captain on retainer.
- Hire an Architect.
- Buy someone you know a car.
in that order. - don’t forget your buddy Phlosphr…
On one of those “I won the lottery and blew it all in a few years.” shows on TV a lawyer lady said the first thing to do is set up a blind trust and put the money into that.
Also the thing about getting a lawyer and a good expensive accountant.
Pay off all your bills/mortgage and leave the rest alone and just live off an allowance of the interest.
Do not take advice on how to manage your money from random strangers on a message board.
Invest in hookers and blow stocks and shares.
Didn’t you mean to put a comma after blow?
i plan on taking this advice to heart…by immediately ignoring it.
Nope.
Also change your phone number to an unpublished one, and be very choosy to whom you give the number. (If my parents won, it would be a shame to have to do this, as they’ve had the same number for over forty years and I think there are people all over the world who know that number.)
Go buy 160 million lotto tickets to see if you can get really rich!
This is good advice. You forgot 12) Give Cat Whisperer ONE MILLION DOLLARS! (Just kidding. I’d take $100,000.)
Jim and I have long discussions about this (usually on car trips). We’ve figured that our first act would be to drive to Winnipeg to pick up our money (no planes, because of Alanis Morissette and her damned song). Our next act is to park the money in a bank account making like 1 per cent interest while we decide what to do with it, because 1% interest on millions is still a lot of money. After that we find an investment advisor, etc.
This is written slightly tongue-in-cheek, but actually I think the overall theme is probably useful:
Do not let it be publicly known that you’ve won the lottery.
Secure the services of a lawyer; once attorney-client privilege is in place, you can explain your situation and enlist his help to claim the prize anonymously.
I’d hire a good lawyer, a good accountant, and a good financial/investment guy, preferably none of whom know each other. I’d make the finances guy set his payout to mine. I make money, you make money. I lose money, you lose money. Don’t like that arrangement? Next!
I’d end up with most of it in some sort of trust or foundation, exactly what depends on the advice from those guys I hired.
Why would it need to be a blind trust? That would just mean I couldn’t find out what assets I hold; not sure I like that.
I definitely wouldn’t agree to any publicity or tell anyone except very close family and friends - people that I’d be giving money to (in one form or another) anyway. And probably not some of those - some of 'em have got big mouths.
Would waiting a couple of months to claim it help with reducing the publicity?
How would that work? How would he lose money? Unless you mean just not-make money… 
It’s not a function of the amount of time you wait, it’s whether or not you show up to get your picture taken with the giant check. If you want to be anonymous, you have to get your lawyer to setup a trust/foundation/whatever-it-is to claim the prize.
Adopt me.
In some states, you can claim the lottery prize anonymously, but in others, a real person has to claim it, and they may require that your photo and name be released.
I’d split the money four ways and then get three sets of lawyers etc to sort three portions of the loot out. Sure, the overheads will be triple, but the chances of them all of them robbing you blind and fleeing to Tahiti is much less.
That fourth set of money is for hookers, blow etc.