Lottery gods, listen up:
I would not retire.
I have heard that it can take several months before you actually receive any money.
I would wait until the check cleared. And the taxes were paid in full.
Then I would give notice. And stick around long enough to train my replacement.
Then I would place an ad in the Personals: “Financially secure M seeks frugal F.”
Even better, never having to set an alarm again. And I imagine if life were secure and happy, I’d be more inclined to wake up out of the mind-numbing sleep anyway.
I would stop half of my work (web design/development) and keep doing the other half of my work (creating children’s books). I would also offer my current business partner a fat salary so that he could quit job 1 and help me do job 2.
Powerball currently has a cash option of just under 90 million. I reminded my sales exec that if I win tomorrow she can expect a voicemail monday morning announcing my resignation.
I’d quit. Not right this minute, but I’d quit. My job is great, but I’m the kind of person who could easily live without a job provided I had the financial wherewithal to do so. I would find plenty to keep me busy. I’d travel around the world taking beautiful, beautiful photographs. I’d do volunteer work. I’d probably open a no-kill animal shelter and also probably a homeless (person) shelter, or at least donate largely to one. I’d find ways to fill my time. 
I’d quit, after giving some notice. I’d go to culinary school, after some extensive travel. I know my husband would quit, too. I’d have a housekeeper to help look after my Dad and dogs. I love to cook and grocery shop, so I would still do that.
Oh, and we would build our dream house. We still don’t know where that would be - probably Austin. WE talk about our dream house all the time. My husband would build it, of course, and supervise the intensive labor parts. He loves to remodel and landscape.
We would just do what we love, and pay for the maintenance type stuff.
<sigh>
Back to work.
(And I’d buy a giant server for the SDMB and the staff to run it!)
Not Powerball, I meant Megamillions.
My friend had a great idea I would implement. I wouldn;t quit my job, I’d just stop working.
Go into work every day when i felt like it, free coffee, free internet, private office. I’d show up for meetings but not take any action items. It would sort of be an experiment to see how long it took them to fire me.
Heh, BurnMeUp, I have two tabs open and thought I was in this thread; it sounds just like something George Castanza did…
I would eventually quit my job after all the money cleared and I had all my accounts set up and paid taxes and all that. But I would get a job somewhere else possibly go to work for my step-dad for free just to have spomething to do until I figure out what to do with my money.
I would probably do the usual stuff buy homes, travel, go back to school to take fun classes, invest and some type of charity.
I’d buy three houses one near my mom, one near my dad, who is halfway across the country and still lives in the small town I grew up in, and one in England. I would probably travel for about a year straight just to go everywhere and see everything.
After that though I would have to do something and one thing I’ve recently thought of to do would be to go back to the small town I grew up in and get involved in the running of the town. Get on the city council or something and then try to improve the town. My Grand Aunt recently did this in the small, about 10,000 people, town she lives in and she loves it because she is involved with the community and helping it out and she talks about it a lot. I think it would be something I would enjoy because I know I’d be helping people and it would fulfill my desire to be King of the World.
ETA: I would love to do what BurnMeUp suggested but it just wouldn’t work in my job. My boss works at corporate about 5 miles away and the only way she knows when I do not show up for work is when I tell her so she would have no way of knowing I was at work and just surfing the net all day instead of actually working which I do somedays anyways.
I’m much happier when I have structure in my life and responsibilities that matter. I’ve been out of work lots of times and rather than enjoying it, I just go to seed.
Plus I really like my job, especially the fellow nerds I work with. I’m doing work I would want to do anyway, and probably couldn’t do it outside of my workplace.
But I’d definitely try to work out a deal where I work part time and come in when I want to, and then have a whole lot of fun with my money.
There are about 190 countries. How many could you see.
I’m with Projammer on opening a coffee & tea shop. It would be a combination of selling books (new and used) and hosting game nights. NOT computer games - more traditional board & pen&paper games and target younger kids so they can exercise their imaginations and thought processes.
I’d probably have a couple of book clubs going too - starting with some real classics that kids dont seem to read anymore.
Oh, and I’d invite some of the older folk to come in and teach the youngsters how to play backgammon, rummy, and the like.
Maybe I’d even have a little section for the artists to do their thing, display, & sell if they want.
I’d stay in the same company/industry if my job could be changed to only doing the part of my job I enjoy. As long as that gave me enough income to contribute to my IRA, I’d be fine with that.
I’d only do training and education.
I know lots of people like that who didn’t even win the lottery. Your main responsibility would be to show up for award ceremonies to accept acclaim, prizes, and cash awards. As long as you don’t actively send out bestiality and paedophilia porn in mass e-mails you should be all set.
I am barely kidding. I had a corporate job in a supermarket chain that got sold to another. Most people were let go but they kept me for some reason. I had a giant retention bonus and worked in our former corporate office for the entire summer with about 10 people left out of 400. I almost never showed up for work and had a great time. I just checked my voice-mail once a day at most. I didn’t even have a boss because they all got fired.
After I was forced to show up to the new corporate headquarters in September, I didn’t have any work at all but I had a private office. I started pushing things to see what would happen. I eventually made it to 10:30 am to 4 pm with a two our lunch sometimes to the strip club down the street. That was a sweet deal even though I collapsed from boredom 6 months later and took another job.
I work in a bank and one of my responsibilities is phone and web support for our website.
That said, I’d put all my newly won money into my account, and jump on the website and initiate a ton of transactions, move money back and forth, check balances, and have a heyday. Then I’d decide that I wasn’t happy with some small, minute part of the website and I’d call myself and complain, and threaten to take my money out of the bank first thing in the morning if the problem wasn’t fixed immediately. And the glorious part of this is that I could tell myself to f— off and hang up on myself without worry about getting fired.
Yeah, I’d probably quit. But it would be an interesting phenomenon to witness, being a working class peon and becoming quite possibly the largest account holder overnight.
Otherwise, most of my friends would get their mortgages paid down, paid vacations to somewhere, college trusts set up for their kids.
My immediate family? The sky’s the limit. I’d buy my mom and stepdad a place on the Kenai river, and my brother’s the place right next door to them. None of them would have to work again if they didn’t want to.
For me and my husband? No more worrying about the cost of IVF treatments… Plenty of travel… and a house on the Oregon coast.
I would stay in my job for a while and quit a year or so later. If I quit right afterwards, then folks would know that I was the lucky lottery winner and never give me peace.
Help them remove the staples.
Heck give me a million or two and my biz would take off like a rocket. load up on inventory, sell it at cost, drop a couple grand a month on radio spots, hire the best techs around for awesome wages, grab a high profile location, then proceed to watch the competition crumble. I could afford to lose 200K per year for a couple years. With enough market share the rest of the biz in my area
Given 10-20 million…i just might try taking a run at Geek squad and or pushing into enterprise work. Just to see if I could get best buy to discontinue its services in my area.
Given like 50 mil
Hunt down Geek Squad techs in the feild and pay them $5,000 to just lock their keys in the bug and walk away. Sell a shitload of cheap basic PC’s for the cost of parts just to flood the local market.