The Powerball lottery rolled over last night. The new estimated jackpot is currently at 1.3 billion dollars. Yes, billion with a B. When you write it out it looks like this: $1,300,000,000.00
Of course you wouldn’t get quite that much. Let’s say you take the lump sum payout and get half; that’s a check for $650,000,000.00 before the tax man takes his pound of flesh. For funsies we’ll say that it’s cut in half again, so now you pop down to the bank and deposit $325,000,000.00 and because you have the financial acumen of Bernie Sanders it’s in an account that generates no interest. What will you do with all that scratch?
I’m sure that you think it would be easy to spend those riches, but let’s examine what you would have to do. If you like round numbers and decided to spend $10,000.00 a day you would run out of money in 32,500 days or just over 89 years! Now, since I just turned 60 and the odds against me living to be 150 are pretty slim, spending ten grand a day isn’t going to cut it. If I live to be 100 I’d have to spend $22,260.27 a day for the rest of my life in order to leave nothing behind. That means I’ll have to save up for almost two weeks to buy a quarter million dollar home.
If you don’t want the pressure of having to spend all that money and you’re totally civic minded? No problem. You can pay down the interest on the national debt. For one day. Less than a day actually. Your $325,000,000.00 would pay for less than 23 hours of the 2015 interest on that debt. Now that’s staggering.
Come on. You’ve all imagined winning. What would you do with the money?
bRight & Early 