I’ve got it! I’ve got the fever! No, not the swine fever – the lottery fever!

August 27th, 2009

Yes, I am excited! The Mega Millions jackpot is $325 million!

And yes, I’m going to win it! How do I know? I can feel it in my bones, that’s how I know. Actually, I suppose it’s me and zillions of other ticket holders who are all feeling it in our bones. Can you imagine winning $325 million dollars? There is absolutely no point in making a wish-list, just buy everything!

There was no winner again last night

Last night, the Mega Millions jackpot rose again, this time by a whopping $73 million, bringing it to the $325 million mark. It all sounds so easy, how can so many players not get the numbers right? What’s so difficult anyway? All you have to do is choose 6 numbers from two separate pools of numbers – five different numbers from 1 to 56 and one number from 1 to 46. You win the jackpot by matching all six winning numbers in a drawing. To make it easier, you don’t have to do the actual choosing of the numbers. You tell the man at the counter that you want the Easy Pick and the computer will pick 6 random numbers for you. It’s painless. Each 6 number pick costs you $1. Oh yes, you have a 1 in 175,711,536 chance of getting it right. I guess that they never sold 175 million tickets, that’s why nobody won!

How you get the money

There are basically 2 options: The annuity option: This will provide 26 annual payments. For every $1,000,000 in the jackpot, you will receive approximately $38,500 per year before taxes. There is also a Cash option: A one-time, lump-sum payment that is equal to all the cash in the Mega Millions jackpot prize pool. Don’t get excited – there are taxes to pay. Never mind, there will be enough left over to pay all the taxes. In any case I will have a lot of recognized tax expenses. The car, the mobile phone, a watch and a pen and, er…, um…

The last big winner

Jack Whittaker was the last big winner. He won $315 million in the Powerball multi-state lottery in 2002. At the time, it was the largest jackpot ever won by a single winning ticket in the history of American lottery. Jack unfortunately had a few brushes with the law and suffered some personal tragedies following his win. The story of his ticket and win is worth recounting. Whittaker purchased the winning Powerball ticket at a supermarket in Hurricane, West Virginia, where he had stopped for a deli breakfast sandwich and gas for his car.

The mega-jackpot

The jackpot that day was a $314.9 million annuity or $170 million cash. Whittaker chose the cash option and received a check for approximately $114 million after tax was withheld. Great breakfast treat, huh!

What would you do?

Do you have any inkling of what your first action would be after you get the check? Think about it – it’s fun!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 27th, 2009 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Economy, Finance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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