I only play the lottery if it’s above 100 million. Sooo
Call a good lawyer
Book a cruise, a longish one to someplace exotic, for about 30 people.
Invite all immediate family and close friends to cruise with me and have fun while it all sinks in. If they have any worries or reservations about being able to leave on such short notice I would pay to make it worth their while. I figure the news media, charities and basket cases can’t bother me when I’m floating in the middle of the Pacific.
Make sure my mom, sister and in-laws are taken care of with trusts, annuities etc.
Buy a couple of homes in different places for myself, and one for my Mom to retire in. Nothing fancy, no huge mansions, just nice comfy homes with big yards.
Take Mom on a tour of Europe, and then leave her in Fiji for a while.
Take my boyfriend on a much sexier tour of Europe. And anywhere else we feel like.
Med school. Why not.
Everything left after that is to keep my family living comfortably. I won’t give them everything so they can retire, but enough to be sure they never have to worry about school costs or medical costs.
Pay off house, build new house, move in new house.
Cancel insurance on old house, call fire department, ask if they’d like some practice then burn that sucker to the ground.
Everything else is negotiable.
Set up a method to recieve funds via a bank, law firm, or brokerage house via direct deposit.
Pay off all our bills.
Fix/remodel our house, possibly to become a rental property.
Set up two trust funds for both my kids. One that they get control of the money in it when they turn 25, one that they can never touch the assets of, but only derive monthly income from.
Find a bigger house in a more rural area with better schools as a primary residence.
We only play when it gets huge, so I have a list for the mega-millions:
Pay off everything (this amounts to pocket change out of the millions)
Set up a bullet-proof retirement fund that will generate, through interest and paying down the principle, $3 million post-tax a year for the next 35 years.
Distribute $10 million or so among friends and family
Set up trust fund for nieces and nephews and grandnieces and nephews
Buy condos in: San Diego (overlooking Petco Park), Las Vegas (on the Strip), Seattle (duplicating Fraser’s view as much as possible), and look into a farm in Ireland.
Secretly meet with the Chicago Reader and return the SDMB to Free.
Start a new business endowment fund for my hometown, because it desperately needs a BBQ place and someone who does delivery Chinese.
Pay off all debts for me and my fiance (that won’t take much).
Go ahead and just get the #$!@! $1200 cake for my wedding.
Buy a house.
Create a college trust fund for my future kids (or my brother’s kids).
Travel for an extremely long period of time, but not (getting morbid here) until after my dog passes on, because I couldn’t leave her for that long.
Set aside a chunk of money for my mom’s care when she gets sick, which she inevitably will since she won’t stop smoking and both her parents died of cancer, dammit.
A member of my family did will the lottery and it is a fucking nightmare. May his now 63 year old, ho useless, jobless, 300 pound, divorced, now health care insurance-less soul die quickly in mercy,
I very rarely play but, id I won:
I wouldn’t tell a soul except may for my wife’s parents. My mother is good-hearted but prone to blab which is unforgivable for these things.
Pay off the house. That is the only real debt.
Set up college funds and very carefully shielded trusts for both young kids.
Put money into retirement accounts.
All I would leave touchable is money for good vacations and entertainment. There is going to be some versions of this that really will happen to me and that is the real-life plan I have worked out.
Call our financial planner IMMEDIATELY. Tell them and meet with them before family or anyone else other than spouse. Per his recommendations, put a set amount in an interest-gathering account and live off of the interest.
Get a good lawyer to protect assets.
Hide. I would NOT want this public.
Commence fun: create security accounts for all family members, esp. parents, to ensure they are always taken care of medically and so on. Hire a home health nurse for dad immediately (he has Parkinson’s).
Find a good marital counselor. This may be a good stress, but it’s a big stress on the marriage. Want to make sure we don’t eat each other.
Create college funds.
Buy a few more homes.
Go back to Romania and build an orphanage (or ten).
Buy large horse property and under mentorship from those who know how it’s done, create a program pairing underprivileged youth with animals needing rehabilitation.
Coolest part–
10) Take my classes on a field trip to Hawaii. Heck, we’ve studied volcanoes, erosion, deposition, wave formation, beaches…ideal place to learn, ya?
One danger is that you really have to divide the jackpot by about 4 or so to account for taxes and the penalty for taking the lump sum (usually 1/2 of the prize). There is also the risk of multiple winners.
A $10 million prize would suddenly become about $2.5 million or so. That is a dangerous amount because you are a lottery winner and yet you are not quite rich. The extra money is fine as long as you can keep friends and family at bay and just use it as supplemental funds. However, things get more expensive when you get more money. Your taxes will tend to go up in general and maintenance costs will be higher if you decide to get a bigger house. Your kids can’t get financial aid for school anymore. You also have to save much more for retirement to maintain the lifestyle and that amount may not be enough to retire early on. The list goes on and on.
For the cash, you get to hear people make personal judgments about your finances for the rest of your life. In the end, you end up with some extra money and lots of extra drawbacks. It works out fine for some but many others are convinced they are actually rich and live like it until everything crashes and burns.
Invest as much as possible for retirement, including open up a Roth IRA
Future kids’ education funds
Though they are not deserving in the least:
a. buy my loser aunt/uncle shelter for their respective families, pay to house them and take care of their children for as long as possible;
AND
b. hire someone to take care of my great-grandparents 24/7
SO THAT
c. my grandparents, who are fucking SAINTS, no longer have to take care of 10 people who are not their responsibility on a single income out of what they feel is moral obligation because their kids are too damn lazy to do it themselves. I would also pay for the best possible health care for my grandmother’s fibromyalgia (or MS if it turns out to be MS) and hire them a maid. They would live like king and queen for the rest of their natural lives–I’d buy them a new house wherever the hell they wanted as far away from mooching relatives as possible.
And it would be money well spent. I wouldn’t regret a dime.
Hire a financial advisor and a lawyer, for investment and taxes, etc.
Pay off debts.
Buy house and furnish it.
Establish a retirement fund.
Provide for my in-laws in their old age.
Splurge a little bit, then be sensible. Don’t want to squander it. We’d like to see England, that’s where our ancestors are from.
I have relatives who won the lottery back in the '70s. They blew it, and didn’t have a thing to show for it but some stuff they bought, after only a few years.
[Joni Mitchell]
…the government gave 'em three thousand dollars, you shoulda seen it fly away…