lottery curse

I've read alot about the "lotto curse". It's a series of horrible events that happen as a direct result of the people coming into so much money so fast and wind up penniless in the aftermath. I can certainly understand what happened, but not so much as calling it a curse. A curse would indicate some magical, supernatural force caused all the "bad stuff" to happen and these things that happen are readily explained.

1. You win $100 million, you don't get the whole thing. Taxes are taken out. Inorder to get anywhere near the grand sum, you have to take installments that usually last 25-30 years. If you decide to take a lump sum, the actual payout is roughly half and a good lump of that will go to taxes, you might end up with 30 million.

2. People spend like there is no limit because millions of anything is beyond the normal person's comprehension. How far is a million miles? How much do you need to drive to amass a sum of 1,000,000 miles traveled? Take 10 cars and drive them for 100.000 miles. With no real concept of how to deal with that kind of money things can get unrealistic quickly. Buy all of you friends and family a really nice house and car, you can spend all most all of it right then.

3. People will start to feel you owe them something, you will get begged, pleaded with, threatened, sued and generally harassed because they want your money. You start looking like a walking piggy bank that everyone wants to crack wide open.

4. Party time!!!! With that kind of cash, you could live a live 99% of the population would crave, but that doesn't mean you can do everything you want whenever you want all day everyday. You have to pace yourself if you want it to last. You can afford a Bently but not a fleet of Bentleys. You can afford a really nice house, but not a mansion everywhere you ever wanted to live.

If you don't decide to keep up everyone who ever did you a favor, you can eat steak and lobster every night for the rest of your life, go on HUGE vacations with a small group of loved ones every year and have a full and satisfying life.

On the other hand, if you go around spending like a fool, throwing money away at every opportunity, you will be broke before you know it. With 100 million after taxes, you could spend over 9 thousand dollars a day for the next 30 years before you went broke. Hell, even with the afore mentioned 30 million, you'd have 2,700 per day to spend for 30 years. I don't know about you, but I think I could skimp a little here and there so I could splurge on a nice event all at once.

For me, the only lottery curse I get is when I see that I still didn't win. I say "dammit" and head to work.