If you were to spend $1/month on a lottery ticket, and never any more, I’d consider that a pretty good investment. $12 spread out oven a year is nil to almost anybody, and the chance of making millions, however tiny, is still much greater than with any other investment. Remember, the maximum risk is limited to one dollar per month.
A freind, who’s a conservative investor, had trouble swallowing this idea, but he finally did."
I never buy tickets, but I don’t invest either. Not on my own.
There you go again, taking it out of context. Drop all that silly stuff. The guy on tv (and I) are talking about selfish spending. Stuff!
So, your toys haven’t even hardly gotten to two weeks yet.
If your only goal is to get rid of it, just write a check to, i dunno, P Diddy.
Bill Gates’ pad is only 3 1/2 months or so. You still got over 150 years spending to go.
I won 2 bucks in the lottery once, but sadly, I squandered it.
Well, as you keep changing the rules, I’ll have to concede that it’s totally impossible to ever spend $57 billion, since no one would ever privately fund a personal spacecraft or buy extravagant yachts or islands or anything like that.
You can’t in Indiana.
Oh well, looks like I’m the only one here who plays the lottery.
And in New Jersey you can’t use a credit card either.
You’d think someone who spends a significant proportion of their daily income on gambling one in a hundred million shots would be better with money management.
Well $57 billion is probably an exaggeration. A lot of his money is already spent, in a sense. Presumably some of his net worth is locked away in posessions he actually wants to have. I mean, there’s probably a lot of dudes out there who’d want their own X-Box factory.
However, I’ve always wanted to own a vineyard ($100 mil). A submarine yacht ($80 mil). A nice jet ($50 mil). To finance a small revolution ($100 mil). To make an animatronic Nessie and terrorize the Scots ($30 mil). Hook up a Nintendo to a thousand Koreans in a stadium (No idea. Probably a lot). If you think I’m not creative enough to spend more than $30 million a day for the next few years by just doing whatever the fuck I wanted you clearly have not seen me with $57 billion. 
I think the guy who did the study is named Gerry Beyer though I can’t seem to find the actual study.
This is a link to a USA Today article about some winners of large lump sums that ended up broke (or dead and broke).
Money management is something that a large number of people never learn about. I am just getting into serious money management. At this point I don’t know much, though I am working on that*, but I know way more than most of the people I know.
At work we had a meeting about the investments offered to employees. There were about 20 of us in the room, most college educated (I work for a software company), and only 2 other people had a clue about investing. Most of the people in the room, ages ~25 to ~55, didn’t know anything about 401ks, mutual funds or stocks. They simply didn’t ever think about these things and had never learned anything about investing. The questions they asked were pretty amazing and showed a total lack of understanding of investments. Give most of my co-workers a couple million dollars and they’d blow it like they were a cheap hooker.
Slee
*I know the basics and I am now starting on a course for serious inestors. I plan on spending at least an hour a day on this for the near short term.
57 billion, well I could use a few vacation homes, lil something in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Miami, a remote hideaway in Montana, perhaps a flat in London, Hawaii might be a nice spot too.
OK, so theres the first 7 million.
Wanna burn 10 billion fast…
Fire up my dream business, the massive airmobile, disaster relief and recovery team capable of transporting multiple field hospitals and food, power, shelter, communications, and security for thousands of people anywhere in the US in 24 hours. Probably looking at 3,000+ staff, massive warehousing scattered around the country, and people drawing salaries to be available to respond to a disaster call out with only a couple hours notice.
How much are C-130’s each? I’m gonna need a couple dozen. Toss in 30-40 misc helicopters, amd appropriate support staff.
Evil lairs and henchmen aint cheap either. Let alone financing evil plans. Becoming president first byg spending $17 billion on advertising and lobbyist would just be a start.
I heard a story on This American Life on NPR about lottery winners who lost everything. Many of them had won one or two million, which actually meant that after taxes they got an additional $30K a year for x number of years. Regardless, they acted like they thought millionaires are supposed to act and ruined their lives with debt.
The answer to this question is “56.9 billion”.
On the other hand, if you called Karl Rove and told him you had, I dunno, maybe 2 billion, then the answer would be “1.9 billion” and he’d still make you the president.
I think the sage advice is to invest the first 90% and blow the *second * 10% 
If I hit the big lottery I’d probably spend most of it on 20 year old hookers and 40 year old scotch. I’d likely as not squander the rest.
You could easily spend USD 7 million just on a flat in London – You obviously don’t know how to spend really large sums of money.
Here in Australia the idea that “The average multi-million dollar lottery winner is broke within 18 months” is plainly a nonsense and I am sure it is overseas as well. One of the several lotto games creates about 30 millionaires a year in one state alone. All up probably over 100 people a year in Australia win over a million. The lotteries provide immediate counselling and advice to winners and put them in touch with finance experts.
You certainly hear of the occassional idiot who blows their windfall but with the media’s love of bad news I am sure every single one of them gets some coverage. I have only once ever seen a piece on “good news” lottery winners and they covered lots of people who had got out of debt, set up their family members, gone on holidays and then just settled down living a life without any money worries with money invested for when they wished to retire. One couple had set up a food service for the homeless. One guy was spending his windfall by taking all his friends and their families on a holiday every year at his expense. All sorts of different stories. They are, I think, the “average” lottery winner.
Most people I know have the odd flutter on the powerball/lotto and if you asked them what they would do if they won most have mundane plans that often don’t even include quitting work.
I’ve heard people claim that lottery winners tend to blow all their winnings. I’ve heard other people claim that people who win their money by luck are less likely to lose it than those who earn or inherit it. But the entire question seems to attract moralists who want to Make A Point of one sort or another, so I really don’t trust anyone on this.
Okay, just for you, go ahead and end world hunger, and if any is left over you can take on those sanitation problems.
Maybe join up with Bono?
If you fuckers don’t quit whooshing this poor old man, I’m gonna tell. 
You’re the onliest one who cops to it, I’ll bet. 
I think another problem the big lottery winners face is that since they’ve never had that kind of cash before they don’t realize that you not only have to spend money to acquire things, but you have to spend even more money to maintain them.
They can buy a huge mansion with their millions with a lump sum but forget that they will have huge mansion yearly property taxes, huge bills for landscape maintenance so it looks as pretty as the day they bought it, inflated electric bills, money to furnish 20 rooms, inflated home insurance premiums, etc. etc.
It not only takes millions to buy into the millionaire lifestyle, it takes millions to maintain it.