This.
Tithe, Pay off debt, become a movie producer.
Typical stuff. Buy a house. Buy a car. Buy a boat. Travel.
I was thinking about something like that last night while walking the dog.
$600M after taxes, if you take it as a lump sum, ends up (IIRC) as about $234 million.
[ul][li]10% to various charities. $1 million to my church - $350,000 as a direct donation, another $650,00 to an endowment that they can draw on as needed. Maybe the same or similar to my wife’s church. $21 million to a charitable trust to support various charities on an ongoing basis. The American Enterprise Institute, the Republican party and various candidates, educational scholarships in science and engineering, maybe research (althoug probably not medical ones.) Except maybe the Chordoma Institute in honor of a certain mod’s brother.[/li][li]$1 million to pay off the mortgage, new cars for the family, fix up the house so it is exactly what my wife wants. Pay off my kids’ student loans (plus their taxes if that counts as income for them). Everybody in the family gets $25,000 to blow on whatever they want.[/li][li]That leaves something like $210 million. Talk to our financial guy, and invest it. See what we can expect to earn on that, less taxes and fees. Work out a budget so we can live on about half of that ROI, and re-invest the rest. At a wild, over-conservative guess, that would be 4%, which would be over eight million a year. Put a million into a cash-equivalent account, and live on that until next year. Replenish it as necessary from year to year. Then[/li][li]Travel, especially cruises and visit the Holy Land, Japan, Disney, etc. $200 million is “fuck you” money. I like my job, but a life of privileged ease appeals to me.[/li][li]Tell no one. Change my telephone numbers, put up a sign saying “No Solicitors” at the front door, and develop the habit of cutting off anyone who tries to get his hand into my pocket with “No thanks” without explanation.[/ul]So I got a plan. All I need now is for someone to give me the winning ticket. I am too cheap to buy one. [/li]
Regards,
Shodan
I think I’m suffering from a lack of imagination. My first thought is that kind of money would fund an awful lot of biological research… probably even enough for me to buy a house and equip a pretty nice lab in the basement.
But I’d still want to finish my PhD, so I’d have another two years of grad school. At the very least I could do that with a lot more comfort and resources. I could donate some money to my own lab/department to buy new shiny versions of the busted equipment I’m making due with now. That’d also be plenty to hire a research assistant to help me finish all the experiments I really want to do…
I would buy and furnish a nice house, some new cars, but nothing too extravagant. Depending on what my wife wants, she could quit her job, maybe try to go for vet school again. We could start the family that we’re putting off because grad school and money. We’d definitely take some nice long vacations on a regular basis.
My sister and brother-in-law are struggling financially. I’d give them enough money to pay off their debts, any additional education they want, and at least afford to live somewhere that’s less of a shithole than their current apartment.
My parents are pretty comfortable. They’re gradually renovating their house, but my dad is doing a lot of DIY. He definitely enjoys most of it but there’s some he only does because he’s a stubborn bastard raised by an even more stubborn bastard. Therefore I’d buy them the new fucking roof that he’s gradually replacing in little patches. And other home renovations that are a little beyond their budget.
My surviving grandparents are thinking about moving into some sort of assisted living, though right now the cost is a little prohibitive. I’d give them enough money that they wouldn’t have to worry about it. enough so they could each have their own living space, because I think there would be murder if they had to share a small apartment…
After all that, there’s enough money to live off investments, and fund better-than-hobby research, right?
I’d burn through it, then wonder where it all went. After taxes 600 million aint all that much.
Now this is the true value of lottery tickets - entertainment value!
I’d quit, as soon as the validated funds hit my account. 2-week notice? NFW
Pay off the house, and even pay off the 0% car loan, why not? Just get it out of the way, there’s only 18 months left.
My kids and family would get some, of course.
Travel. Maybe go back to school but I doubt I’d have the patience for it.
Give almost all of it away. This would be a lot of fun, and also the most work, managing that process. No blind handouts. I would work with the charities.
First step: hire a tax lawyer,/financial adviser I have a feeling I will need one.
Next: Our current debt is insignificant (basically, we’d have paid it off shortly anyway, even at poverty-level income). However, I have family with debt. I would pay off any and all debt my surviving sisters have, and pay for my sister in Buffalo to get her house fixed up so she can sell it.
I would set up a trust fund for my mentally disabled nephew so he will be taken care of for the rest of his life. He’ll still have a butt-load of problems from his traumatic brain injury, but at least he’ll be comfortably housed and fed and get whatever care would be helpful to him.
I’d pay off the debts of my best friend and her husband, and help them build that retirement home they want on some property they own in the Michigan UP.
There are a few other people I’d specifically want to help out, like that lawyer who helped me get my wages from a bad employer who did it at a significantly lower fee than he normally charged, and other people who have helped me when I really needed it (including some Dopers).
And, of course, we’d probably upgrade our living circumstances. I don’t want a hundred room mansion, but a comfortable, well-built home on a piece of land with some privacy would be ideal for us.
I would resume flying as a hobby, and would probably own an airplane this time around. My spouse and I have both discussed going back to school to study things of interest to us.
None of which would significantly dent the pot of money. So after that, I’d probably take six months to a year to think about what to do with the rest. I don’t want to just dump money onto causes, I want to use it effectively. There are a lot of little groups for whom just $10,000 would make a huge difference. I would like to do something about affordable housing. I would like to help small entrepreneurs. I would like to fund space exploration. The problem is, even with hundreds of millions of dollars I’d still want the most bang for the buck, and there would still be more good causes than money. So yeah, some research and though for awhile.
So, 600 million works out to maybe 200 million after taxes and the cash payout.
- Financial planner. No desire to leave anything to anybody when we die, so that frees up all the inheritance crap.
- Establish good-sized residences in San Diego, Las Vegas and maybe the Pacific NW.
- Give sizeable donations to the local animal shelters and placement centers.
- Several scholarship funds would be established.
- Donate a new state of the art theater building to my high school.
- Lots of travel.
- Lots of random acts of giving. Tip the waitress a Cadillac type of things.
- Immediately fund the second season of Con Man.
I love to do these kind of imaginative exercises every time the power ball jackpot gets up there, so I have my answer ready.
- Pay off everything I owe.
- Hire a reputable financial manager (and an equally reputable auditor to check up on the financial guy - trusting, I’m not)
- Purchase two homes - one in the mountains and one at the shore; buy a car to keep at each house
- Fully fund generous college funds for existing grandchild, grandchild on the way, and an extra for any subsequent grands to come along
- Do a little nipping and tucking to spruce up my old mug
- Throw a lavish party and invite both close friends and everyone who has ever treated me badly over the years. Give generous gifts to the friends and let the others ponder what they might have received had they bothered to be nice to me. (yes, I am that petty)
- Commission a bespoke perfume and one or two nice pieces of custom designed jewelry
- Buy and open an eclectic bookstore which someone else will manage, but I will grace with my presence at will. It won’t ever have to make money, just be there for the folks like myself who miss being around books and book people.
- Pick a worthy, but struggling, charity and give them a meaningful monetary gift
- Take a year, rent or purchase a sea-worthy sailboat, hire a crew, and leisurely travel around the world, visiting as many ports as I can, drinking in the culture, eating the food, and relaxing in a way that has never been possible for old type A me.
- Take a million and just blow it on whatever tickles my fancy. One helluva shopping spree!
I’d set up trust funds for a bunch of my friends.
Taking Shodan’s 234 as my takehome amount. I’d start off paying of our debt for about $250k and then I’d buy a section just south of Boulder with all the mineral and water rights I can. After that I’d turn it into an orchard with the help of my brother in law focusing mainly on cider apples but also sour cherries and plums. I’d also try and get a commercial crop of sugar maples to grow. Then with my other brother in law I’d start a distillery on the property and spend the first 5 years building everything just how we want it. That should take about 150 million.
I’d take the 80 million and invest it fairly aggressively focusing on mostly stocks but still broad indexes so the entire market would have to crash for me to be impacted but then I’d still have the farm and distillery. I’d probably make about 3% after taxes per year or about 2.5 mil per year. I would use that money as an operating budget for the distillery for the first couple of years and salaries for my brother in laws and me
. This way I get to do my dream job but there is no money laying around for people to ask for. Of course I’d be happy to give a job to any of my friends or family who needed money.
Buy the most isolated place i can find, hook up the most powerful internet connection i can to it and basically live like a hermit for the rest of my life. I want to live like Nathan from Ex Machina.
Invest most of it, pay off all my friends and families houses, and travel the world at my leisure. Spend the rest of my life living well but not extravagantly.
Debt: my own, family members, etc.
Finish my PhD.
Invest wisely.
Never work another day in my life.
Travel with the family.
[ul]
[li]Women who will exchange currency for sexual relations.[/li][li]Illegal substances derived from erythroxylaceae plant family, common in the Colombia area.[/li][/ul]
Quit my job. (There’s my charitable act for the year - create a hole at work to be filled by someone who needs it. :D)
Pay off the house. It’s not a fancy place, but I like it, so I’d do some remodelling and redecorating. Buy the house next door and tear it down, thus more than doubling the size of my yard. Buy a vacation home - maybe one of those Spanish villages or European castles that are on the market.
Pay off all the rest of my debts, of course.
Buy myself a new Subaru and fix the current one up for my daughter. My wife’s Hyundai is only a couple years old, so she can make do with it for another couple years. 
Set up a fund that would give us monthly payments for living expenses.
Trust funds for both of my kids. My parents are dead, alas, and so are all of my siblings. Funds for their children and grandchildren*, though, and also for my cousins. Funds for my wife’s siblings.
Set up four scholarships - one for botany majors (my father was a botanist), one for chemistry (in memory of an old friend who passed away last year), one for medical (a good friend who committed suicide some years back was a Navy hospital corpsman), and one for theatre (in memory of my favourite teacher in high school).
Make a few donations: Navy Relief, the USO, Heifer International, ARC, autism research, a couple of museums, &c.
Travel: The 12 states and the two major overseas territories I haven’t been to yet. Back to Scotland, Slovenia, and some of the other places I enjoyed while I was in the Navy. More of Canada. Ireland, Australia, and a few other countries I haven’t been to. One of those round-the-world cruises.
- The great grandchildren (yes, one of my sisters has a dozen or so already) will just have to wait to inherit from their parents.
For starters, I’d take my prize money as one lump sum instead of spread out over 20 years (because I’d just hate it if I was to die before then and lose that ill-gotten lucre), so I’d have to settle for 300 mill instead of six. Oh well, in my wildest dreams of avarice I can’t imagine three hundred ma-zowie-zillion bucks as not being enough!
So. Um. I’ll give one-fourth of it away to such causes as I choose, as soon as I can arrange it. Me being me, this would include mostly animal related charities, arts organizations, and groups working to promote sexual freedom, drug legalization and opposed to censorship. Plus smokers’ rrights! The very first place I’d lay my largesse on, though, would be St Anthony’s Dining Room in San Francisco: because there’ve been so many times St. Anthony’s has fed me and my lover, and many friends of ours, when we were broke and hungry and without prospects for improvement–I’d even say they’ve practically saved my life a few times. Indeed, I’ll probably have lunch there today. So, yeah, St. Anthony’s would get fifteen million right off the top.
Which would leave me with two hundred and twenty five million -WHEEEE! just typing that notion exhilarates me somewhat-to do whatever I want to with. Oh, my friends, I would be just the sort of rich guy that makes lefties and socially responsible folks foam at the mouth and die from rage-and-hate-triggered apoplexy. I would do the practical, long-term planning stuff, that is, deposit one hundred of those mills in a bank to collect interest. The rest of it would be for showing myself and a select circle of friends a REAL GOOD TIME! Talk about hedonistic abandon–my lifestyle would be somewhere between a rock star, a crime lord and the emperor Heliogabalus. Sometimes I’d go out riding a human-drawn chariot or a sedan chair liftred on the shoulders of four sexy musclemen, just because it would be fun. Yessirree, I’d selfishly self-indulge in legendary fashion-blowing the wad on delicious food, good dope, hot young men, luxurious living, first-class-and-then-some world travel, exotic pets, and being a patron of the sort of art that pisses regular people off. I want my toys and my kicks, goddammit! When I’m done squandering 125,000,000 on libertinage and sybaritism, I’ll still have the interest from the other hundred mill to live on, and when I die, I’m leaving whatever’s left to my pets!
Oh yeah, and I’d try to give at least $500 to bums and panhandlers every day.
You see, I don’t wanna be Bill Gates or Ross Perot or one of those world-power guys, I just wanna be Jed Clampett.
I’d probably spend it all on medical bills for the heart attack I’d have if I won the lottery.
If not, I’d buy a nice house with a pool, get myself a decent car with full insurance coverage, get my teeth fixed, new glasses, get my youngest set up with more therapies/groups and a good school for kids with autism. I’d give a big chunk of it to my oldest daughter because she deserves it more than anyone else in the world.
There are a few charities I’d like to help and a few old loans I’d like to pay back. Nothing major. I’d have to find a trustworthy financial planner to work out all the details. I have never had more than a few thousand dollars at one time so I know better than to think I could handle it all on my own.
I think the first thing I’d do is talk with a lawyer and figure out what kind of trust I’d need to set up in order to claim the prize anonymously. I’d make sure and name it something embarrassing for news readers and/or legislators to read out loud.
Second, I’d talk with a financial planner to figure out how to best invest most of it- I think I’d take about 5 million for spending cash, and the remaining $145 million(cash option, after taxes) would be invested.
With the 5 million in spending cash, I’d probably renovate my current home, get a couple of new vehicles, and quit my job ASAP.
The slightly odd thing I think I’d do would be to rent some space in a light industrial park- I’d set up a somewhat bigger home brewing set up permanently, and I’d set myself up with a nice woodshop, and I’d set my wife up with a nifty jewelrymaking/metalsmithing workshop. I’d also set it up with an area with a sort of home-theater/videogaming/computer/man-cave/bar kind of area that would be air-conditioned.
I think I’d hire a housekeeper to come in every day, or at least a few times a week as well.