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If this is your first time visiting, welcome. If you are returning again, welcome back. While this blog was originally not going to be about me or my life, it seems to be morphing to include more of myself and experiences. I will still strive to add a different perspective to the news and events around the world that impact everyone's life,however, I will focus more attention on issues that relate more tangibly to our personal lives. We all live in a world that is increasingly interconnected yet it seems a lot of people are turning inwards, shying away from human interaction. Lets step away from ourselves and see what we can do to make a difference. There are ads on this page and 65 cents of every dollar earned will be donated towards helping the homeless. If you like what you are reading, please share it with your friends.




Thursday, November 29, 2012

No Powerball Jackpot for Me

I rarely if ever by lottery tickets.  The only times I do is when, like yesterday, the jackpot reaches an absurdly high number.  I know if I played it regularly that I would probably get addicted to playing and waste my money away.  However, on those occasions when the jackpot would literally enable me to stop working for the rest of my life, I take a chance and buy a few tickets.  I never even pick my own numbers because that would require me investing too much into a game of chance that in reality, I know that I have very slim odds of winning.  I guess the part that drives people like me who never play, to play, is the dream of possibly winning an enormous amount of money.  Now, for the majority of us, the jackpot would take care of us for the rest of our lives.  I know that there are a select few, the rich, for who winning would not mean very much.  Such is life, dreaming never hurt anybody unless it gets in the way of reality.  Getting addicted to playing the lotto would be a prime example of dreaming getting in the way of reality.  So enough of why I played and didn't win yesterday, I did get to have some nice day dreams as a result of my purchase, however short lived those dreams may have been.  The final jackpot for the Powerball drawing reached close to $575 million dollars.  That's a large chunk of change to have some fun with.  There is one downside to winning, however, in that you will never actually see the entire $575 million.  If you were to take the lump sum, one time payout, you would receive about half that amount.  Then come the taxes which are assessed on the entire $575 million, not the half that you would take home.  Ultimately, you would probably end up with about a third of the $575 million.  Even if that came to $200 million dollars, I wouldn't complain one bit.  Over the last few days, I started my hypothetical planning on what I would do should I win the Powerball jackpot.  I know everyone has different dreams of what they would do with the money, but following are some of the plans that I hatched on how to use the winnings (which I didn't get and as a result will have to keep on working).

So in planning my future with the Powerball money, the first thing I would do with my estimated $200 million that I would get would be to take $150 million to a financial planner and have them ensure that I didn't have to work for the rest of my life.  That would leave me with $50 million to play around with.  The next thing I would do with the money would be to pay off our house which would be around $200K.  Following that, any remaining debt we had would be paid off.  Going with the high end of our debt, I would guesstimate about $50K should cover it.  With no more debt, we would have about $49,750,000 dollars left.  Damn, now what to do with the money.  Well, I would take care of any debt that our parents had so that they could live comfortably without worry.  I don't know what their total debt between both my parents and my wife's parents is, but I am guessing that $750K should take care of it.  Then, I would take probably a million and donate it to my church to build a gathering space that they have been wanting to build for years.  I would also probably give $500K to my old grammar school and $500K to my old high school just because.  After all that I would still have $47 million left to do something with.  In all honesty, I would then probably have my current house completely fixed up, not to sell, but to rent out.  That would probably run me about $200K on the high side.  I would buy another house closer to my parents and my home town of Milford.  I am going to go high here and say a $1 million should cover it.  I would then spend $1.8 million on buying all the land surrounding my property in Vermont and build a nice large house in the woods.  The remaining after all that would be about $44 million.  Part of me would want to buy investment properties to rent out.  I would probably spend about $3 million on that to ensure that I would have some sort of income coming in (not that I would need it).  With $41 million left, I would go to Italy and buy a Castello Turfuri in Porto Palo Sicily.  That would cost me probably close to $10 million, but it would be worth it.  I would still have $31 million left.  After that, I would buy a nice care for my wife and I, probably spending $500K.  Then I guess I would have to do some traveling spending probably $500K on that.  With $30 million remaining, I guess I would just sit on it and enjoy my life.  With all those plans, I still couldn't spend a quarter of all the money. 

Needless to say, I don't have to worry about the aforementioned plans as I did not win the Powerball.  In fact, I wasn't even close.  Not a single number I had on the two tickets I bought matched up.  I guess someone is trying to tell me that I still have to go to work.  That's life though.  There are very few people who actually win a large amount in the lottery and what it all boils down to is luck.  There is no magic wand you can wave to get the winning numbers.  There is no psychic that could tell you your numbers to play.  In fact, I probably have a better chance of being hit by lightning, getting into a car accident, or flying to the moon than I do at winning the lottery.  At this point, I want to invite others to share what they would do with $200 million dollars.  For most of us, that is a large amount of money that wouldn't be very easy to spend.  Share your plans on here or on Facebook.  Just for fun, lets see what people would do with their money.  As for me, I must go get ready for work because I will not be receiving any money today.  Nope, I must get my son up now, get my but in gear, and get ready to go climb ladders in the cold to try and finish painting this house I am working on.  Till tomorrow, don't get depressed if you played and didn't win, just get back to work and keep dreaming of the next large jackpot that we probably won't win either. 

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