On a snowy Wednesday in February 2012 my wife stopped at a gas station on the way home from work to fill up and grab a kind bar. While she stood in line the sign showing the $490 Million Powerball jackpot loomed overhead as if calling out to her. We played the lottery about once every two years or so, but on a whim she bought a quickpick ticket, tucked it into her purse, and headed home.
When she arrived home I was already home clearing snow from the driveway so she hopped out, grabbed a shovel, and helped me clear the driveway. We talked about how the snow would help bolster the ski season and with each shovelful of snow she threw, the memory of the ticket slipped further from her mind.
As we’d come to learn, two winning tickets were sold; one in Montana and one in Colorado meaning the jackpot would be split two ways. It wasn’t until a few days later upon hearing that a winning ticket had been sold at a gas station in our town that the ticket clicked back into my wife’s mind. With trepidation she pulled the ticket from her purse, hunched over the kitchen table, and one-by-one matched the ticket numbers with the numbers in the paper.
Despite not playing the lottery regularly, we had a plan for this. Our Colorado highways are so littered with lottery billboards announcing the jackpots that on long car rides you can’t help but dream about what you’d do with the winnings. We had plans for small, medium, and large jackpots. Our plan for anything over $100 Million was what we thought about the most:
Buy a $5M house somewhere in ski country on a great ski mountain
25%: Put in a trust for family and just live off the interest and earnings (estimating a few million in earnings in a normal year)
25%: Give away one-time gifts to friends and family
50%: Donate to a non-profit foundation that we create. We’d play key roles in running the foundation and spend our time giving out money to causes we care about such as the environment, college scholarships, service projects, youth programs, and generally things that make the world a better place.
All the money would be put into trusts and out of our reach, except for the interest and earnings which we’d live off.
We both stared at the ticket in wonder. A world of possibilities, options, and freedom danced through our minds. Healthcare, jobs, bills, work problems, burdens, stresses, seemed to melt away as we verified the numbers on the Powerball website.
“Hold it up to the light,” I said, “maybe we’re misreading it.”
But we weren’t misreading it. The numbers were a complete match. We stared at each other for a moment overwhelmed with a million thoughts and emotions. My wife finally broke the silence as tears of joy burst forth and reached out to embrace.
What ensued was a whirlwind of chaos we hardly remember as we found a lawyer to claim the winnings on our behalf, chose to take a one-time sum, started to put the pieces in place to move forward. I vividly remember dancing around the kitchen that night with a little champagne while paranoid-ally worrying that we’d spill something on the ticket. In the subsequent weeks there were no public scenes at work, no dramatic quitting episodes, we simply slipped away quietly. We spent the first weeks setting goals and exchanging ideas for the rest of our lives.
We basically followed the plan above to a “T”. Free from the daily stresses of career, I learned to play the drums, became a winter ski patroller, still took occasional IT consulting jobs, and took up writing fiction in my free time. My wife chose to stick with engineering but did so on a non-profit basis focusing on bringing clean drinking water to 3rd world areas that had little access. Free days were spent outside hiking, biking, and skiing. With the time that was left, we managed the foundation we’d set up. In short, in a line of bad stories about what happens to lotto winners, we became an exception. Putting the money out of our reach freed us from the burden of having it in the first place and allowed us to live our best lives.
Okay, by now you’ve deduced that it’s April Fool’s Day and I’m just spitballing here. No, we never won the lotto — we really never even play the lotto. I actually view it as state sponsored “hope tax” that often falls on people who can’t afford to be taxed but still want to buy a slice of hope. I do participate in somthing lottery like that guarantees you a return though. Find out about in my post here.
If you’ve never done the exercise of mapping out what you’d do if you won the lottery, it’s a good one to try. I found a Medium Post talking a little about it here. The whole point is to help figure out what you really want and at the end of it say, “well what’s stopping me from doing these things now without the lottery”. In a lot of cases it’s just fear, or for some of the items you’ll find you can do them now and there’s nothing stopping you.
