Because on $1 billion winnings (or adjust for the lump sum) you’d owe $123 million taxes to the CA Franchise Tax Board as out of state taxation. Looks like you could potentially owe $25 million to AZ, though it’s possible CA tax would be reduced by the same amount.
What price anonymity?
Setting up an LLC in California wouldn’t give you anonymity anyway. The actual name of the winner must be published.
If you’re saying that price is worth your anonymity, sure. Other people may disagree and not want to pay the tax too. I’m not familiar with AZ policies but looks like the right to anonymity is extended to non-residents.
My plan for winning the lottery (my state does not have a lottery and we only get an occasional “fun” Scratcher on road trips, so the chance for anything big is lower than the low chance) is to put it in a safe deposit box for most of the legal time to claim it, and figure it out with legal consultation prior to claiming it.
Yeah, as I keep arguing the best anonymity in CA when it comes to lottery wins is to win $5-10 million instead of a billion. Stop being greedy people! Wait until someone wins the big prize and then buy a ticket. Then when you win (which you inevitably will do 
), nobody will give a shit about you and your comparatively paltry but still life-altering haul.
I was wondering if it’s ONLY the name that gets published. Like, if your name is Acantha Birdwhistle, you’re going to have a ton of people getting in touch with you, but if your name is John Williams, how are they going to find you?
I think they also list the city of residence of the winner, so just make sure in advance that multiple John Williams live in your town.
There are three people with my last name in the entire Western US and one person who ever lived with my first name and that last name. Fortunately I don’t play the lottery.
You’ve got to plan ahead; first change your name to something really common, like Michael Smith or Mary Johnson and only then buy the lottery ticket with the big jackpot. Or first move to one of those states that allowed anonymous winners and then win the big jackpot.
How about put the ticket in storage, change your name to the same as an enemy, cash the ticket, change the name back.
Change your name to Tom Cruise or Ryan Gosling and Google will never find you. (I googled my name, and apparently most of me on Google is black and lives in southern states, not Canada). Although John Williams (or John Smith) is a good start, maybe Tom Jones for the double impact of commonality and a famous namesake.
Really, though, for $1B or significant fractions thereof, you can afford security. Better yet, change your name after you win and collect.
Until you substantiate its value it’s just a worthless piece of paper, imagine if I could put $100 million of insurance on a LOSING lottery ticket and then just claim it was stolen and collect on it.
To substantiate its value you’d have to get its winning status confirmed by the lottery people, and at that point there’s no reason to keep the ticket because that constitutes a claim.
Nice problem to have.
What you’d want to do is avoid intermediaries. There’s no reason I can think of to take unnecessary risk with large amounts of money, no need to worry about your local bank or Chuck Scwhab, anyone can open a Treasury Direct account for free through the Federal government. They offer everything from overnight to 30 year Treasuries and everything in between. If they go Tango Uniform, you’ve got other things to worry about.
I had no idea that this was possible. Thank you. I’ll google that for more info
I created a Treasury Direct account four years ago, when the interest rate on Series I Savings Bond hit 9.62%. I bought the maximum allowable $10,000 and then invested again the next year. The account is kind of a pain to deal with, so I’ve just left the money there.
It used to be sort of a pain to Login, they had a kind of one-time use pad, in the form of a wallet sized card with a grid code of letters and numbers. But buying or selling was easy, the funds would get transferred to a bank or checking account overnight, usually.
The risk of an ordinary bank or brokerage firm failing might be low, but the consequences would be high, esp. assuming we’re talking about massive amounts of Powerball winnings. Having the money on deposit directly with the Treasury obviates this risk, however remote. It would be a good place to “park” the money for a few weeks or months, and then maybe the idea could be to spread it around a bit between institutions.
Eh.
Major corporations have vast sums sitting in banks for their normal daily cashflow churn. They’re not worried that e.g. Bank of America will evaporate overnight nor forget that their customer, e.g. Apple, has $500M deposited in various accounts at BofA.
People are weird, I just pointed out all the anguish or worry, justified or not can be avoided altogether by deposit directly with Treasury.