What I would do if I won the lottery.
Whenever the lottery gets obscenely huge (like now at 89 million) I buy a ticket. I'm an accountant, I know the odds are that I could buy a lottery ticket every week for the rest of my life and never win. Still, I like to daydream and lottery ones are the best. Don and I have agreed that if we ever won the big one we would split the lottery 6 ways - an even share for each of our four children and a share each for Don and I. Why wouldn't we split it 5 ways (an even share for each of our 4 children and 1 for Don and I)? Well because. Because we are older and have lived much harder lives than our priviledged spawn, and dammit, we want to be twice as rich as them. We have also agreed that everyone would take the 30 year annuity. That way you get all the money instead of half, which is what you get with the cash opton, the tax burden is much less so you don't lose half again to the guvment, and, if you act like an idiot and blow all the money the first year you still have 29 years of money coming in and, hopefully, you will learn a lesson and not do that again in the following years. Right now, if we won, our children would get $264,480 the first year and Don and I would get $528,960. That figure would go up 4% a year until the end when the kids would get $824,820 and we would get $1,649,640. I bet we could live on that quite nicely.