One of my favorite expressions about the lottery is, “The lottery is for people that aren’t good at math!”. Well, I know two people that would probably disagree with me. This morning I read that there were two lucky winners of the Powerball jackpot last night. One of the winners is in Arizona and the other is from Missouri. You can bet those people are likely still shaking from winning such a huge amount of money. The big question, that only time will tell, is whether these winners can be successful with their good fortune. Hopefully they don’t spiral down in an epic way like so many other lottery winners have in the past. I always hope that the winners will have good sense like one of their peers, Brad Duke. Unfortunately, statistics says that they also have as good of a chance to end up penniless, although with this much cash, that might be hard to do for quite awhile.
I found myself daydreaming about what I’d do with the money if I won a huge jackpot. (Of course I’d actually have to buy a ticket to win). The first thing I always think about is who’s homes I’d pay off. I usually come up with a list of about 10-15 friends and family that I’d do that for, and then my mind turns to how I could set up lifetime income streams for most of them. The goal is always to generate enough investment income from the principal that I’d be set to live off the investment income for the rest of my life, and also create an income stream to support the rest of my family. With a jackpot as big as the latest Powerball jackpot, that wouldn’t be tough to do. If you ended up with $150 million after all the taxes are taken out, you could conservatively take a 4% withdrawal rate and have income of $6 million a year. Even after you take taxes out of that, it’s plenty of money to live an extravagant life and also help those around you. You could set up each family with a $10,000 a month income and still have about $3 million left for yourself. I didn’t cover charity, but I think it would be easy to find good charities to donate on an annual basis as well.
Anyway, there I go again, dreaming about what could have been. Maybe I’ll have to buy a ticket next time. It’s exciting to think about all the things I could do with the money, but I find it equally as disappointing when I check my numbers and don’t even have one match!