The Winning Ticket
Tonight there will be another Powerball drawing…this time for the seventh largest amount in history, a billion dollars.
Well, it’s only a billion dollars if you let them pay it out over a 30 year period…then it totals a billion. Sort of.
If you took the 30 annual payments, that would be $33 million per year…but thanks to a top federal tax rate of 37 percent, you’d only walk away with $21 million each year…and who could live off of that? Oh, and state taxes have to come out of that, as well.
Most people these days just take the lump sum payment…so if the jackpot is a billion dollars, your immediate cash out would be $516.8 million.
From that, there are federal taxes, depending on your tax bracket…leaving you with between $325 and $393 million. Oh, and state taxes…so bottom line is that if you are the sole winner of tonight’s billion-dollar jackpot, you’d walk away with about a third, some $300 million.
That, of course, presumes you don’t have to share that with any other lucky winners.
So if you’re still interested in such paltry sums of money…the winning numbers will be drawn just before 10 o’clock Iowa time tonight.
And if you don’t hear me at this time tomorrow…well, guess I had a lucky ticket.
