If you won Lottery.. (1 Viewer)

[Garrett Lundy]

I'll advise against hiring personal security forces. They Know you have money and its pretty easy for them to "fall and hurt themselves" while on the job and sue you for your new stash of millions.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

2. Don't sign the ticket.

Big mistake. In most states your identity is public record anyway. And if you somehow manage to lose an unsigned ticket, someone else can sign it and claim the prize.

Joe

 

[Richard Travale]

Why not simply file a change of name form to something like 'John Smith'?
Then when that goes through, get all the required I.D., sign the ticket John Smith, claim the prize, request no photo and Bob's yer Uncle.

Then when everything has dies down, change it back.

Sure it's a lot of paperwork and beurocracy but a name like John Smith will be the key to anonymity.

 

[Brook K]

Seems like too much effort. I'd just move somewhere like Malibu where there's a ton of rich people already. Swimming pools & movie stars...

Then my "entourage" of layabout friends can handle the riff-raff while I interview buxom Swedish nannies to watch the kids so I can jet off to film festivals.

 

[Mark Giles]

I like the suggestion they gave when want to donate to a church or charity calls for a donation. Say you'll match them dollar for dollar. That will decrease the amount of calls from a particular church or even family. Tell your distant cousin (upon proof of them really being family), you'll help them get off their feet by matching the money they save up their selves.

 

[Nick]

I just went to Connecticut Website and find out about it. (Since I can't find out at work. They blocked it)
Here's what I found

Can winners remain anonymous?
Because we're a public agency, winning information is a part of the public record. Winners can not remain anonymous. By law, the name, city or town of residence, date of win, amount won and the name/location of the retailer that sold the winning ticket are public information. A winner's home address and phone number are protected; the Lottery will not release this information to anyone without your written permission.

I guess I have to move if I won...

 

[Mark Giles]

so I wonder if #6 on Ricardo's post is even possible.

 

[Nathan*W]

Virginia doesn't allow #6

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Wouldn't make a bit of difference. The laws governing the state whose lottery you won would dictate what public disclosure laws applied to the lottery agency in that state. Where you live has nothing to do with that. Florida makes the names of winners available regardless of where they live when they bought the ticket and where they live when they claim the prize, because the law requires the agency to do so. They neither need nor ask for permission from the winner, and the winner's residence doesn't really enter into matters.

Regards,

Joe

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Boy, is that ever true. I remember a TV show about a 10 year follow-up study on lottery winners that found an astonishing high percentage of them went bankrupt - often within a couple of years. The majority of lottery players tend to be poorer people, and therefore a large number of winners are people with little or no experience in handling money, planning and saving, investing for retirement or using credit wisely. (And then there was the one frugal gent from New Jersey who had paid cash for everything his whole life and lived strictly within his means. When he won a couple of million in the New Jersey lottery he decided to splurge and buy himself a new car to drive down to lottery headquarters - and found he couldn't. Although he made enough on his regular job to cover the payments, even without the lottery winnings, he had no credit rating because he had never had a mortgage or a credit card or even a store charge card. He had a friend drive him to Trenton and later bought the car at another dealership - for cash. )

Regards,

Joe

 

[Hunter P]

I would probably go with the blind trust route. Seems like a good way to keep out of the spotlight.

I was also wondering about giving some money to friends and family. If I gave a million to someone then wouldn't they have to claim that million as income and pay taxes on it? Since I already paid taxes on my jackpot then that million is getting double taxed. I wonder how this can be avoided.

 

[Mark Giles]

well, of course. I was the one that made the original post. But my question was more focused on, is their a way around the states the require you to go public.

 

[Mark Giles]

This is how you spend your money!!





William 'Bud' Post III; Unhappy Lottery Winner

By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 20, 2006; Page B08

William "Bud" Post III, 66, whose $16.2 million in lottery winnings brought him debt, despair and heartache, causing the kind of trouble often recounted in country-western songs, died of respiratory failure Jan. 15 at a Pittsburgh area hospital.

"Everybody dreams of winning money, but nobody realizes the nightmares that come out of the woodwork, or the problems," he said in 1993, five years after winning the Pennsylvania lottery.



William Post said his Pennsylvania lottery win brought "nightmares." (Pittsburgh Post-gazette)

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His problems included a brother who tried to hire a contract murderer to kill him and his sixth wife; a landlady who forced him to give her one-third of the jackpot; and a conviction on an assault charge, after Mr. Post fired a shotgun at a man trying to collect a debt at his deteriorating dream house in northwestern Pennsylvania. He went bankrupt, came out of it with $1 million free and clear and spent most of that windfall, too.

Mr. Post, born in Erie, Pa., had a hard-luck life. His mother died when he was 8 years old, and his father later sent him to an orphanage. Most of his life he was little more than a drifter, working as a spray painter on pipelines and as a laborer, cook and truck driver in circuses and carnivals. He never owned a home or a new car and once served a 28-day jail sentence for passing bad checks.

He told newspaper reporters that on the day he bought his winning lottery ticket in 1988, he was on disability and his bank account totaled $2.46. He pawned a ring for $40 and handed Ann Karpik, his landlady and occasional girlfriend, the cash for 40 tickets in the state lottery. Among the tickets was the winning one.

In the two weeks after Mr. Post collected the first of his 26 annual payments of $497,953.47, he spent more than $300,000. He acquired a liquor license, a lease on a Florida restaurant for his brother and sister, and a used-car lot and its fleet for another brother. He also bought a twin-engine plane, although he did not have a pilot's license. Within three months, he was $500,000 in debt.

A year later, estranged from his siblings, Mr. Post bought a mansion in Oil City, Pa., for $395,000 and set about upgrading it. But all was not well; a county court ordered him to stay away from his sixth wife after he fired a rifle shot into her Pontiac Firebird, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.

When his former landlady Karpik sued him for a portion of the lottery winnings, Mr. Post was mortgaged to the hilt. She claimed that they had agreed to split any winnings, which Mr. Post vigorously denied. After three years, a judge ruled that he owed her one-third of all the proceeds, but Mr. Post was unable to pay. When he refused to turn over his 1992 annual payment to satisfy the judgment, the judge ordered all of his lottery payments frozen until the dispute was resolved.

The paper multimillionaire, strapped for cash, sold off most of his acquisitions. Visitors to his crumbling mansion in Oil City noted plywood-covered windows, missing shower stalls, a swimming pool filled with debris, an old car on blocks in the weedy yard and a malfunctioning security system that chirped six times every 60 seconds.

A disheveled Mr. Post ambled around his 16-room home without his false teeth, because he said they made his head hurt.

"I was much happier when I was broke," he moaned.

In 1996, he decided on a final ploy to get out of debt. He sold the mansion for $65,000 and auctioned off the remaining 17 lottery payments he was due, hoping to clear his bills and hold on to a nest egg.

"Once I'm no longer a lottery winner, people will leave me alone. That's all I want. Just peace of mind," he told the Guardian newspaper of London.

Unfortunately, by the next year, he had spent almost all of the remaining $2.65 million on his debts, two homes, another truck, three cars, two Harley-Davidson motorcycles, two 62-inch Sony televisions, a luxury camper, computers and a $260,000 sailboat docked in Biloxi, Miss., with which he planned to start a charter fishing business.

He was arrested on that boat in 1998 after he refused to surrender to serve a 6- to 24-month prison sentence on a six-year-old assault conviction. Mr. Post, found guilty of firing a shotgun at a man who had come to his Oil City mansion to collect a car-repair debt, had appealed the conviction up to the state supreme court to no avail. After he served the sentence, he was reportedly living on a $450-per-month disability check.

Six marriages ended in divorce. He also had a companion with whom he had a child.

Survivors include his seventh wife, Debra S. Wice; and nine children with his second wife.

 

[Nathan*W]

 

[Holadem]

The seeds of Mr Post's demise were planted in him long before he won the lottery. No amount of $$$ would have lead to a happier existence. The lottery win is little more than incidental in that story. His life would have followed a similar path without it.

--
H

 

[Lynda-Marie]

Gad, I have MORE conversations with people regarding this very topic!

After picking how I will receive my winnings (lump sums or payments - it depends on the size of the win) I will:

1. Change my phone number. I don't want to know ANYONE until I can get a handle on everything.

2. Talk to a trustworthy friend of mine who is an accountant, and tell her she's going to be working for me with a VERY generous salary and benefits package.

3. Have a Realtor I know put out some feelers for a good sized piece of land, and have a nice, big house built.

4. Put a hundred thousand or so into a checking account so I can just go nuts shopping, and get it out of my system.

5. Travel incognito.

6. Make various financial arrangements, once I get my mad shopping spree out of my system:
a. To start a trust fund like situation for my new house, so the bills [taxes, maintenance, utilities, etc.] will never be a worry.
b. Start trust funds for the children of my relatives and friends so the kids will be able to go to college. Also fund family members/friends so they can return to college, and finish degrees.
c. Invest the majority of the rest of my winnings.
d. Make out my last will and testament, but keep it sealed from family/friends until I am finally dead. That way, they will ALL have to be nice to me, because they'll have no clue as to who will inherit what, if anything.
e. Leave a clause in my will that if I am done in by a friend or family member, that that person will be done in by a hitman.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

This was the post I was thinking of.

Joe

 

[Christ Reynolds]

this is exactly what i was going to say.

CJ

 

[Patrick_S]

Please everyone be realistic. Even if you held a press conference when you picked up the prize, there would absolutely be no need to have to "travel incognito". The vast majority of the public would forget your name within a week. Probably the only ones who would remember you outside of six months would be the people who knew before you won.

Even though your name is public record as a winner, I can't remember a time when the press ever published the name of a winner in California who didn't want the publicity. Of course with the ever bigger jackpots that may change if someone won over a hundred million dollars.

I would of course move from my current home as would most other winners simply because I would like a dream house with everything I wanted. (A real fancy home theater and all the other tech gadgets I could think of!) That alone would take care of the vast majority of your problems as once you moved you would be just another new person in the neighborhood. Just be smart and don't blab about how you got your money and most people won't ask.

 

[Garrett Lundy]

I'll buy a brand new Hyundai Accent for everyone who replied to this thread. That will be the extent of my generous nature. Nobody paid my way through college, my extended families children can get student loans like everybody else. If my cousin (whom I likely never met) needs a house payment, he shoulda bought a cheaper house.

My dream home would likely by a single-wide modular with an attached "wing" for housing the 6 seat HT, $100,000 stereo room, and a garage for my fleet of motorcycles and collection of vintage econo-hatchbacks (I'm gonna be an eccentic millionaire) including a '86 Plymouth Horizon, a '68 Volkswagen, an AMC Gremlin, and a Ford Aspire.