Entry tags:
Meme, Day 14
Question #14. If you won the lottery...
Oh man. @______@
Okay, so, the thing is, my dad plays the lottery pretty regularly. Not in some sad gambling addiction way, or even That Guy At the Convenience Store Buying Scratch-Offs, Doing Them at the Counter, and Then Buying More Scratch-Offs with the Money He Wins. (I worked at a convenience store for two months, which was enough to get me acquainted with that guy, and I am assured that every convenience store has at least one in residence.) Anyway. My dad just, you know, buys a ticket every week.
I spent a lot of time in cars with my dad in high school--he worked, and I went to school, about forty miles from where we lived, in roughly the same direction, so he took me to school and brought me home every day for a couple of years, and we had about an hour and a half a day together. At some point, and possibly more than once, he definitely imparted such fatherly wisdom as a) how to calculate how much money you would actually get after taxes if you took the cash option (roughly half the jackpot, and then two thirds of that half after taxes) and b) what to do in the event of winning the lottery: hire a lawyer, remain as anonymous as possible, pay debts, invest for a steady long-term income, give away money to your loved ones and to charity. Do not under any circumstances buy exotic pets or anything gold-plated that shouldn't be gold plated. And so on.
Being roughly the same kind of perpetually broke as my dad was throughout my childhood, I have very often enjoyed the win-the-lottery fantasy, and thanks to his early instructions, it has often taken on a highly specific and carefully reality-based form. I know which wealth-management firm in my city I would consult (with Iulia at my side, of course, since she is my favorite lawyer and would be receiving a healthy share of the proceeds anyway). Every time I look at a jackpot number I automatically calculate the amounts I would give to each of my brothers and my parents, to Iulia (being fabulously wealthy would be no fun if she were not also fabulously wealthy), and the amount I would have left for myself after taxes. Then I calculate how much I would invest and what my likely annual income would be, and how much I would give away (to Riverkids, to Medicins Sans Frontieres, to Remote Area Medical/Remote Medical International, to whoever's keeping kids and the mentally ill fed and housed in my city and in Detroit, and do a wild kid-in-a-candy-store spree through Modest Needs and Donors Choose, and maybe if there's enough to go around, to my library for digital preservation projects, and to endow some scholarships at my alma mater, since I was the recipient of an endowed scholarship myself), and how much would be leftover to spend immediately on repaying my debts, buying a house or two, and generally living the "I won the lottery!" life for a while before settling down to get on with regular life.
I would quit my job with a fair bit of alacrity--among other things, it would be an awkward job to keep if I were known to have won the lottery, since it involves a lot of front-line customer service. I might be able to finagle only doing phone service for a while, though, in the circumstances. Eventually I would want to come back and volunteer, doing behind the scenes work on some of our archival collections (oh god I got shown around one of the collection the other day and there are these drawings just sitting there folded up on shelves and you can see them cracking along the folds and ;_______;), but like my favorite recent retiree among my colleagues, I would give it at least a few months before I came back.
I would travel--visit all my friends up and down the East Coast and in Canada and out west, and knock around Europe, see the town my family's from in Italy, revisit the glories of Summer 2001 in England with Iulia. Take some Viking Riverboat Cruises, ride trains, all that. Eventually other places, but if you told me tomorrow that I could go anywhere I wanted, all expenses paid, no worries about taking the time from work, those are the places I would go--see people I love, and places I already love, with people I love. A whole traveling lovefest.
I would, oh, pay off all my debts, and buy all the drinks for everyone at VividCon, and give extravagant presents, and buy those ridiculous high-ticket things in Kickstarters, and spend a weekend somewhere fancy with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sanj and let her tell me what fabulous clothes to buy to fill out a whole wardrobe of flattering things that fit, and find a personal trainer to make me actually run as often as I ought to, and do whatever other fitness-y things I should do to complement that. And eventually I would be living in some nice comfy house and all my time would be my own, and I would read, and learn things, and write, and write, and write.
Oh man. @______@
Okay, so, the thing is, my dad plays the lottery pretty regularly. Not in some sad gambling addiction way, or even That Guy At the Convenience Store Buying Scratch-Offs, Doing Them at the Counter, and Then Buying More Scratch-Offs with the Money He Wins. (I worked at a convenience store for two months, which was enough to get me acquainted with that guy, and I am assured that every convenience store has at least one in residence.) Anyway. My dad just, you know, buys a ticket every week.
I spent a lot of time in cars with my dad in high school--he worked, and I went to school, about forty miles from where we lived, in roughly the same direction, so he took me to school and brought me home every day for a couple of years, and we had about an hour and a half a day together. At some point, and possibly more than once, he definitely imparted such fatherly wisdom as a) how to calculate how much money you would actually get after taxes if you took the cash option (roughly half the jackpot, and then two thirds of that half after taxes) and b) what to do in the event of winning the lottery: hire a lawyer, remain as anonymous as possible, pay debts, invest for a steady long-term income, give away money to your loved ones and to charity. Do not under any circumstances buy exotic pets or anything gold-plated that shouldn't be gold plated. And so on.
Being roughly the same kind of perpetually broke as my dad was throughout my childhood, I have very often enjoyed the win-the-lottery fantasy, and thanks to his early instructions, it has often taken on a highly specific and carefully reality-based form. I know which wealth-management firm in my city I would consult (with Iulia at my side, of course, since she is my favorite lawyer and would be receiving a healthy share of the proceeds anyway). Every time I look at a jackpot number I automatically calculate the amounts I would give to each of my brothers and my parents, to Iulia (being fabulously wealthy would be no fun if she were not also fabulously wealthy), and the amount I would have left for myself after taxes. Then I calculate how much I would invest and what my likely annual income would be, and how much I would give away (to Riverkids, to Medicins Sans Frontieres, to Remote Area Medical/Remote Medical International, to whoever's keeping kids and the mentally ill fed and housed in my city and in Detroit, and do a wild kid-in-a-candy-store spree through Modest Needs and Donors Choose, and maybe if there's enough to go around, to my library for digital preservation projects, and to endow some scholarships at my alma mater, since I was the recipient of an endowed scholarship myself), and how much would be leftover to spend immediately on repaying my debts, buying a house or two, and generally living the "I won the lottery!" life for a while before settling down to get on with regular life.
I would quit my job with a fair bit of alacrity--among other things, it would be an awkward job to keep if I were known to have won the lottery, since it involves a lot of front-line customer service. I might be able to finagle only doing phone service for a while, though, in the circumstances. Eventually I would want to come back and volunteer, doing behind the scenes work on some of our archival collections (oh god I got shown around one of the collection the other day and there are these drawings just sitting there folded up on shelves and you can see them cracking along the folds and ;_______;), but like my favorite recent retiree among my colleagues, I would give it at least a few months before I came back.
I would travel--visit all my friends up and down the East Coast and in Canada and out west, and knock around Europe, see the town my family's from in Italy, revisit the glories of Summer 2001 in England with Iulia. Take some Viking Riverboat Cruises, ride trains, all that. Eventually other places, but if you told me tomorrow that I could go anywhere I wanted, all expenses paid, no worries about taking the time from work, those are the places I would go--see people I love, and places I already love, with people I love. A whole traveling lovefest.
I would, oh, pay off all my debts, and buy all the drinks for everyone at VividCon, and give extravagant presents, and buy those ridiculous high-ticket things in Kickstarters, and spend a weekend somewhere fancy with
sanj and let her tell me what fabulous clothes to buy to fill out a whole wardrobe of flattering things that fit, and find a personal trainer to make me actually run as often as I ought to, and do whatever other fitness-y things I should do to complement that. And eventually I would be living in some nice comfy house and all my time would be my own, and I would read, and learn things, and write, and write, and write.
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Also? ALL THE KNITTING.
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