500 mm Mega Millions

Well, wish me luck!

I just played ten tickets through a very good friend on the Mega Millions jackpot. The lump sum after taxes will be $359,000,000 dollars.

If I survived the heart attack, I promise to give it my level best to spend every single nickle before I leave this earth.

Actually, I would most likely purchase one of the many islands available in and around the Dry Tortugas or something, build a nice little compound with total solar power, de-sal plant and a half a dozen discrete employees. I think 150 acres would do nicely.

I wonder how big a stack of monster boxes that would be? As a matter of fact, I might go all college style and build a couch and chairs out of them, get some covers and hand made cushions made, then hide my PM's in plain sight!

ancona said:

Well, wish me luck!

I just played ten tickets through a very good friend on the Mega Millions jackpot. The lump sum after taxes will be $359,000,000 dollars.

If I survived the heart attack, I promise to give it my level best to spend every single nickle before I leave this earth.

Actually, I would most likely purchase one of the many islands available in and around the Dry Tortugas or something, build a nice little compound with total solar power, de-sal plant and a half a dozen discrete employees. I think 150 acres would do nicely.

I wonder how big a stack of monster boxes that would be? As a matter of fact, I might go all college style and build a couch and chairs out of them, get some covers and hand made cushions made, then hide my PM's in plain sight!

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You could buy over 20,000 monster boxes of American Silver Eagles! Forget the furniture, build the whole house out of them! :rotflmbo:

If I wish you luck, and you win, does that mean you owe me? :rotflmbo:

I play every week with a group from work. I'll send every member here with an introduction post a monster box of ASE if I ever win.

Good luck ancona!

Might want to start with one of the below:

1) Buy better neighbors!

2) Bulletproof your house!

3) Move to Monaco and make some new friends!

KMS said:

I play every week with a group from work. I'll send every member here with an introduction post a monster box of ASE if I ever win.

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hi, i'm lambone, and i love monster boxes.:wave:

DoChenRollingBearing said:

Good luck ancona!

Might want to start with one of the below:

1) Buy better neighbors!

2) Bulletproof your house!

3) Move to Monaco and make some new friends!

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Actually, The first thing you do is anonomize yourself........disappear for a while. Then, you figure out where you want to live, because wherever you were living, will no longer be acceptable for a myriad of reasons, not the leas of which are lotto stalkers. Once you decide where to go, you convert a shit pile of fiat in to PM's. A good place to keep them would be in a closed down bank branch, that you will buy and turn in to an office of some sort. Not something to attract potential burglars, something liek maybe "The Ancona Syphylis Studies Institute". You know, something to keep the looky-loos away. Then, you build a small compound. For my purposes, a 18 hundred square foot place is plenty big. Then, a couple of 1,000 s.f. guest houses and some workers apartments. A five thousand foot out building for equipment and workshop would also be nice. Three acres of solar panels should be enough to powert my little dreamworld I think [chime in DC], along with producing enough hydrogen to power my vehicles. I could even run medium pressure jacketed lines everywhere to fuel up whenever I need to [think along the lines of a thousand acre spread].

Yeah, that kind of bang bang really gets my imagination going! I think iot is worth a few bucks just to be able to dream about it a little bit.

I can however assure you, buying stupid shit like big boats, mansions, matching hummers, etc. etc. is NOT my style.

ancona, you actually raise a great point. I have read a couple of times that the FIRST thing you do as a winner is call your lawyer.

But, even the Florida Hillbillies will find out pretty quick about their lucky neighbor.

Take the check, and GTF outa Dodge (GTFOOD, hey, I'll have to go to survivalblog.com to see if I can trademark that acronym).

With that kind of money, I think you should at least go take a LOOK at Monaco (Monte Carlo).

EDIT:

"The Ancona Syphylis Studies Institute"

I like that one! A good sense of humor is a sign of a great mind.

I would do my part to break the comex.

Make sure everyone gets tickets!

You can have a lawyer claim your winning ticket anonymously on your behalf. 100% correct and this is the way to go in order to protect yourself.

KMS said:

You can have a lawyer claim your winning ticket anonymously on your behalf. 100% correct and this is the way to go in order to protect yourself.

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From who? The media? Family members? Old friends who want to get into your wallet? I'd have that money out of the country and be living in a tax haven so fast it would make your head spin.

Paradox - getting ready to bug out for bad times - but also perhaps needing to do so in very good times!

I'd bug out, to say NZ. Just show up as a "businessman" - almost all the good countries will let you in if you've got cash on a level to start a business. So, start one, it doesn't have to be profitable, even - but it makes a great cover for your other spending. And it gets expensive for people to hound you from here - and very expensive to do so in person, so they give up quick when you just throw their begging mail into the trash.

I'd bet no one in NZ or OZ actually checks who is winning American lotteries so if you don't tell them where the money came from, or how much, you're good.

DCFusor said:

I'd bet no one in NZ or OZ actually checks who is winning American lotteries so if you don't tell them where the money came from, or how much, you're good.

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Changing your phone number is probably the easiest thing to do. Go down to walmart and buy a burner phone.. in 15 minutes you have a new number. Then cancel your old one. That way you can restrict contact to the people you want to actually interact with.

The biggest problem is actually how to deal with family who continually act irresponsibly with their money. That is where things get complicated. If I won, I'd probably have to allocate about 20% of the holdings into a trust that could be used to pay for college for my 15 nieces and nephews and for actual emergencies. Like someone's house burning down or my parents need a surgery. Not for boob jobs or anything like that. I'd be clear that it wouldn't be used to pay off mortgages either because of tax implications. I'm not going to give someone 100k and then have to give them another 30 to cover their taxes. The more prudent way would be to simply buy the house and make them pay rent. And that's where the slope gets slippery...

dereksatkinson said:

From who? The media? Family members? Old friends who want to get into your wallet? I'd have that money out of the country and be living in a tax haven so fast it would make your head spin.

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Well, the less complete strangers or old 'acquaintances' that know you just hit the money, the better. And yes, I'd prefer a lawyer claiming my win instead of being paraded in front of national TV.

KMS, derek, DCFusor:

Lots of good suggestions there!

ancona, don't worry, I won't ask you for any money!

KMS said:

Well, the less complete strangers or old 'acquaintances' that know you just hit the money, the better. And yes, I'd prefer a lawyer claiming my win instead of being paraded in front of national TV.

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I'd wear a gorilla mask.

ancona said:

(...)"The Ancona Syphylis Studies Institute"

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...ancona, but you DO know you can cure your syphylis now WITHOUT winning the jackpot & funding the institute these days, right? :rotflmbo:

cheers

If you win, you can always hide here awhile, brother ancona...(or if not, actually).

More fun speculating on spending a huge windfall than the actual event i reckon .....

Its important to have unrealised dreams and something to strive for.

What we probably want is not to win a fortune but to hit a 'comfort zone' that removes the stress of uncertainty, without our real friends feeling they have to back away from us, in case they seem like spongers.

Most think otherwise, cos they think their happiness is assured by a mountain of paper.

And would be delighted to prove me wrong (-:

Good luck with the tickets Ancona.

and Do Chens comment about buying some new neighbours ......... kin brilliant !

winning #s ----- 2, 4, 23, 38, 46 and mega ball 23.

heh, from -

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/why-mega-millions-jackpot-nothing-another-tax-americas-poor

... many people tend to significantly overestimate the odds of winning because we tend to assess the likelihood of an event occurring based on how frequently we hear about it happening. The technical name for this is the Availability Heuristic, which means the more we hear about big winners in the press, the less uncommon a big payday begins to seem." Call it that, or call it what one wishes, the end result is that the lottery is nothing but society's perfectly efficient way of, to use a term from the vernacular, keeping the poor man down while dangling hopes and dreams of escaping into the world of the loathsome and oh so very detested "1% ers". Alas, the probability of the latter happening to "you" is virtually non-existant.

Rblong,
I will buy a ticket from time to time simply because it gives me permission to dream about what I could do with all that money, and actually have a chance, if an infinitessimally small one, of actually winning.

It's good for the soul sometimes.

rblong,

Lottery is also a great way for states to generate much needed revenue and have done so for many years throughout history. So even though chances are small of winning the jackpot, if you don't play you can't win.

The odds on some games aren't as bad as odds on others. In Florida we have a game called Fantasy Five which pays between 50K and 1mm dollars. We have another called Mega Millions which has you pick four numbers and a control number from a separate draw list. That game pays between 250K and 2.5mm dollars. Are the odds good? No. Are they significantly better than Powerball odds? By an order of magnitude.

It appears three winning tickets were sold. One in Ill., one in Md., and one in KS. Here's the article:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jNqfkQNXLuX4KQ3fVDZSWFxnaBlA?docId=6da8390fa13a41adb098d6f38bf89a76

Either way, t5hat's a lot of fiat. If one were to convert 85% of that in to PM's, the returns will pay for decades to come.

ancona said:

Rblong,
I will buy a ticket from time to time simply because it gives me permission to dream about what I could do with all that money, and actually have a chance, if an infinitessimally small one, of actually winning.
It's good for the soul sometimes.

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exactly ! more fun speculating on what you could do, than actually winning

winning is just a state of mind anyway and you can be permanently in a winning streak, when you choose this state.

So winners all round tonight

I used to think of the lottery (and nearly all insurance, for that matter) as a tax on the statistically stupid. I no longer think that as fervently as I did.

Present company excepted, of course - look at your average ticket buyer (I have to all the time). Yeah, the odds are terrible. But look at this guy's life - his odds aren't just terrible, they're zero, he is never, ever, going to get rich on his own, by his own wit and brawn, he's maybe already drunk himself half to death as is.

For that guy - a chance in 10 million or worse is STILL a better chance than he has if he doesn't play. It's his ONLY chance. It therefore is logical for him to play, weird as it might seem at first.

People who insure everything don't seem to realize that insurance companies do make a profit (they'd better, or they're not going to be able to pay out when they should). If you just kept that money in the bank (or someplace better), in not long at all, you can be self insured, it's a better deal (you can keep any extra gains for other stuff) - and zero issues with some company trying to get out of paying you when needed. So, what are you paying them for? Because you're too immature to hang on to the insurance money and not spend it frivolously before it's needed?
That's a pretty stiff premium to pay for lack of discipline.

Market watch went pretty retarded (even for them) the other day, telling people not to buy more tickets to improve the odds - even kind of saying it doesn't. Of course it does - two tickets have twice the chance of winning as one. Their premise was that after you get one - as ancona mentioned, permission to dream - you'd gotten all the utility you were going to get, because there was basically no chance you'd win.
No, it's not no chance, it's just a very tiny one. And this is what skews thinking, because it's obvious that someone always does win (well almost always).

In a universe that's both large and long timeframe, it's amazing how many low probability things actually do happen. They're low probability, sure - but there are SO MANY possible rare things, it's common for at least some of them to happen.

Yup

I reckon that anyone here, is probably smart enough to make a go of things, so already a winner and that buying a single lotto ticket is a way of contributing to local projects and allowing a little dreaming

Sussed out the insurance business years ago and now only insure my vehicles for third party risks because the law says i have to )-:
No property insurance but i am a little more committed on the 'food insurance' (-:

Exactly.

Instead of buying home insurance on my first piece of crap, I spent the money building another - then another (finally, a nice one). One burns down? Two left! A general fund kept liquid for "emergencies" only - and I'm strict about what constitutes one. Food, well, there's this land (unlikely to vaporize) plus the stash on a pallet, still growing.

Water, at least 3 independent ways, maybe 4, to take care of that one. There's always enough trash on the ground in my woodlots that if heat became an emergency - I wouldn't even need a chainsaw for most of it - but I have two gas and one electric saw. And a few hundred gallons of propane... Various other things - machine tools, stock, a small junkyard of exotic metals...solar power, electronics and test gear, computers - all add up to insurance, but bought at a much cheaper price than the equivalent premiums would have added up to during the same years.

Some risks aren't really risks - they are sure things. Hence the electric car and the ability to charge it off power I make here; you know gasoline is going up from here.

Of course, this took a little luck that I didn't wind up with cancer or something while still young and the bank account small.

But that was a good play on the odds. It's of course why the government is attempting to force buying insurance on us all here - so the people who would be totally ripped off by it still have to pay into it anyway to support the losers.
And of course, it then gives government a credible excuse to tell us how to live, meal by meal, and how much of what type of exercise to get, to save it money. I can see down this whole slippery slope and I really don't like what I see there.