When the Powerball jackpot hit $1 billion, I jumped in.
My wife didn’t approve, pointing out that the odds of winning were around 300 million to 1.
“We’re already blessed with a beautiful home,” she argued. “Why pursue such reckless fantasies?”
She sees our house as our personal jackpot considering the soaring appreciation.
The problem, I point out, is that although the value is there, our mortgage payments have also swelled along with the mushrooming property taxes.
“And if we sold,” I said, “we’d not only be faced with a punishing tax, but where could we go"> (new Image()).src = 'https://capi.connatix.com/tr/si?token=8b64ff35-2d21-481e-88ae-8562dded85bd&cid=1ffe15d6-eb53-11e9-b4d2-06948452ae1a'; cnx.cmd.push( function() { cnx( { playerId: "8b64ff35-2d21-481e-88ae-8562dded85bd" } ).render( "11982501ceb44352bd1e95848c612274" ); } );
My daughter would love for us to move to Montana where she lives together with our son-in-law and the grandkids, but the real estate prices there are equally inflated.
Not to mention the climate extremes.
Annual snowfall in Montana can reach 300 inches, and they once recorded a temperature of 70 below.
And we don’t ski, skate, or luge.
So I won’t be moving there, and we can’t afford to sell the house, not only because of the huge tax burden, but my wife insists we’d be depriving our kids of a tax-free inheritance, the same kids who own their own homes and are in infinitely better financial shape than their parents.
So it was back to the lottery dispute.
She consulted the Internet and read aloud a number of probabilities other than those massive Powerball odds.
“Did you know you have a 1 in 57,825 chance of dying from a bee sting?” she queried. “But as long as those odds are,” she continued, “the ones against winning that lottery are 5,000 times greater.”
It was an argument that didn’t constrain me from buying $10 worth of quick picks, along with a can of insect repellent.
“Considering that huge jackpot,” I said to my wife, “my lottery investment makes sense.”
And to prove it, I showed her that if we bought every combination of numbers, at $2 per pick, it would cost just under $600 million yet guarantee a $1 billion jackpot.
“That’s a cool $400 million profit,” I crowed.
“There are just a few flaws in that calculation,” she moaned.
She consulted the Internet and learned, taking into the roughly 30 seconds needed to fill out the bubbles for each ticket, it would take 278 years to complete all the entries.
“Beyond that,” she continued, “we’d need to find $600 million to make such a wager.”
“And you forgot about Uncle Sam,” she lamented. “I did the math, and if we spent $600 million and won that $1 billion, we’d suffer a net loss of $100 million after taxes.”
Despite her reservations, I invested in those Powerball picks. “If we win the billion dollars, I’ll try my best to manage the consequences,” I told her.
Wednesday, however, I got the sad news. The winning ticket was purchased in Los Angeles.
Looks like I’ll have to wait until the next time. In the meantime, I’m trying to absorb the loss and take some comfort in the fact that we still have our lovely home, the one with the huge mortgage payments, burgeoning property taxes, and bees.
Erdos is a freelance humor columnist. him at [email protected].
