The Mega Millions lottery is up to an estimated $325 million dollars for Friday night’s drawing. I’ve bought my tickets and if I win, I’ll pay $1,000 for each person who leaves a comment to this post or another of my stock picking posts today or tomorrow.
You’ll know if I win because I’ll change my blog from MyTradersJournal.com to I-Am-A-Lottery-Winner.com or something like that and will blog about how I spend my money. If I win $325 million dollars, I estimate I’d get around $100,000,000 after taxes, present value. If I’m off by $5-10 mil I think I could spare it.
Now, after dolling out $1,000 to each of you who comment I have to figure how to spend my new found wealth. Have you ever seen the Richard Prior movie “Brewster’s Millions”. He had to spend $30 million in 30 days to get the rest of his inheritance of a lot more, but couldn’t tell anyone he was trying to spend it all. He had a hard time doing it and that was just $30 million. Can you imagine the damage (and good) you could do with more than three times that?
Of course I’d do all the basic stuff of giving money to my parents, my brother, my in-laws and brothers and sister-in-law. Even after setting them up nicely, I’d still have $80 mil to go. I could take that and put it in 5-year CDs and earn more than $4 mil a year in interest or I could stick it all in a tax free bond like T. Rowe Price’s Summit Municipal Intermediate fund that has a 10-year average return of 4.52%. Either way, that’s plenty to “live the life” on.
But, that’s not as exciting and rewarding as doing some real good with it. I think I’d take $20 million to put away in something safe like the bonds to live off of and use the remaining $60 mil for giving back to others. I’d like a nice house in Greece, Italy, France (maybe one in Paris and another on the Riviera), England, Scotland and I figure I should spread a few around the US for whenever I wanted to go to New York, California, Colorado and Florida. I don’t think I’d move from the house we are living in now. We like the neighborhood and would need to maintain an inkling of some sanity for our son. All friends and family would have anytime access to all of these houses to vacation in. That still leaves me with around $50 mil, after I pay cash for these abodes. Now it’s time to do good for others who I don’t know.
I change my mind often on how I’d do this. I’d like to help victims of catastrophes like the earthquake in Peru, the fires in Greece and Katrina. Cancer research is always high on the list since my mom had breast cancer and I have two good friends with Leukemia. A portion would have to go there and some would have to go towards diabetes research since that’s a big part of my family too. Instead of focusing completely on big diseases like this, I’d like to try focusing on a smaller community or town as an overall health improvement focus. If you watched any of the short TV series “Shaq’s Big Challenge” you could see what a big difference paying attention to health can do for one school. With more money and a full time focus on it, I think a serious impact that lasts generations could work. I’m talking about having an army of full time personal trainers and dieticians available to help a town get on and stay on the right track. These would be free for any resident of the city. I’d even have monetary rewards for those who reached and maintained certain benchmark levels of fitness and health. Just to round it out a little I’d have more teachers and financial planners on staff to help educate the residents beyond what the schools teach them too. College tuition assistance or grants could be tied in too if they pledged to come back to volunteer in this town or another to spread their knowledge. That could help this spread around to other regions and other wealthy people could start similar programs using this as a model. And because I could, I’d have a small fleet of electric cars for residents to use in their commutes to help reduce pollution output.
What would you do in this town to help? Leave a comment and feel free to reference your own blog for some self promotion. To help me know which ones are spam and not, wish me luck in the lottery in your comments and I’ll know it was probably not spam.
If you win the lottery, my next documentary will be on your town. Good luck!
Here’s my current project:
http://www.doghousepictures.biz/trailer_quicktime.html
Good luck on your lottery win. Just thinking positive. You win and I’ll do an interview with you here:
http://jerichomonster.blogspot.com/
Very generous on your behalf. Aww lets win this time. Good luck 🙂
very generous of! I wish you good luck!
this is very nice of you. good luck!
i wish i could win that lottery.
good luck
identikit
Best of luck to you on the lottery. I am glad to see that you can think of others who are less fortunate. This is a social skill missing in our (mis)leadership class today. Although it seems you are tackling the social giving aspect in an admirable way, may I make a few suggestions?
(1) Focus first on children. The number of children living in poverty is astounding and truly saddening.
(2) If you can find like-minded people, start an educational endeavor that provides quality, low-cost education to all, esp. the underserved. Have you seen the cost of a 4 year education lately?
(3) Support job training programs that empower people to pursue private enterprise (you know, “teach a man to fish….”). Dr. Martin Luther King once remarked that we should encourage people to be the best at whatever it is they do. A farmer should try to be the DaVinci of farmers and so on. Everybody doesn’t need to be the head of Microsoft.
(4) Support or establish programs which allow for the international exchange of teachers. We learn from each other and no one has a lock on intelligence, creativity, nor motivation.
(5) As you have outlined, support wellness endeavors that are proactive and supportive of health education and prevention.
Best of luck to you.
Good luck with the lottery. God knows you’ll need it :o)
Thanks for everyones well wishes.
– Jeff, Get the cameras ready.
– Jane, I’ll be waiting for the interview.
– Mike, You are exactly right. The children is where the initial focus needs to be. I like the international exchange idea too.