this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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Asklemmy
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First of all, you're right to take the lump sum, definitely take the lump sum.
Then... There are some things I'd definitely want to spend on up front, like housing in particular. In the long run, the money would pay my property taxes, fund my clothing hobby, support parties with my friends, etc. I'd probably get a private chef to cook good, nutritious meals for me regularly. A personal trainer and a private gym in my home. And I'd travel more.
This advice is important:
https://np.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/whats_the_happiest_5word_sentence_you_could_hear/chb4v05/
I feel like the lottery tends to end badly for people because they are stupid about it. Why would you go around bragging to people that you won and flashing your cash? And if you have a shitty relationship with people you know, it really isn't a great idea to stick around them if you've suddenly found yourself flushed with cash. And the people who end up bankrupted from gambling and wild spending episodes afterward are probably among the stupidest. Winning the lottery isn't a curse. It's just that people are dumbasses.
Yeah, invest in yourself first. Pay off all your loans/debts and buy yourself a nice house in cash. You don't need to live in a crazy mega mansion, but just having a modest house in your name that is fully paid off is invaluable. Get yourself squared away and then start worrying about others.
Even better, put the money into a trust and pay yourself a salary and make it so that if any other money is to be distributed from the trust it has to go through your financial advisor first.
And your financial advisor is attached to a company with deep pockets like Chase Manhattan, with fiduciary responsibility to maintain your income.
That would make it really hard for you to hand out more than you know a handful of thousand dollars to anybody that asks for money.
And you could still hand out quite a bit but you know if you limit yourself to a reasonable amount of money every year, say like $600,000 after taxes or $50,000 a month, then it's going to be really hard for you to fuck up your nest egg while still living the kind of life that very few people ever even get to imagine.
If there's some kind of giant purchase you want, (lambos for the fam, bro!) you can either finance it or put in a request to your trust to pay for it, first set your trust to have a two-week cooling off period before it grants any additional disbursement.
And also, aside from drugs, lawsuits, and gambling, the number one way that lottery winners go broke is by giving it all away to friends and family and worthwhile charitable causes.
Setting the two week cool down in place is a good way to prevent yourself from doing that. You should also inform your trust of what percentage you want to max out at giving away to charitable causes over the lifetime of the trust.
Say if you set a reasonable 25% of the total when you hit that 25% Mark however long it takes then the only way for you to give more money to a charitable cause is for the total value of the trust to increase due to interest accrual.
That should help prevent you or your immediate descendants from frittering all of the money away and having nothing to show for it in a what could be an astonishingly short amount of time.