Lottery Fun

[AlecWest]

A few years ago, I was watching my evening news and saw a funny thing transpire at the Vancouver (Washington, not Canada) regional office of the state lottery commission. Anyhoo, something recently reminded me of it and I scoured the web for "advice" on what to do if you win a lottery jackpot. Initially, I did an article on it on my blog site. But, it kept expanding and refining until I said, "What the heck," and gave it it's own standalone web presence. The article is titled, "Lucky You - Advice To Instant Lottery Millionaires," and is located here:

http://LuckyYou.atspace.com

BTW, if you haven't heard of them, http://www.atspace.com is the only entity I know that provides free subdomain hosting with no popup or ad requirement. The site is a bit unkind to media file hosting ... but if you wanted to put up a novelty site for any reason, they'd be the place to check out first. If I'm not mistaken, they're physically located in Germany.

[MeDiCo_BrUjO]

If i ever win the lottery I will know what to do now.



Wish me luck!

So far the best I have hit is 3 out of 6

[AlecWest]

So far the best I have hit is 3 out of 6

I hit 4 once ($20, whoopie). My ex-wife bought a scratch ticket once that paid off $50. She cashed it in and bought $50 of lotto tickets and didn't get squat, hehe.

[adam]

My firm is representing a guy who just won $10 million in the lotto. I won't go into the details but basically his best friend wants a cut.

This guy has lived in a mobile home his entire life. The first thing he did when he won was sell the mobile home and buy, you guessed it, a bigger mobile home.

[AlecWest]

My firm is representing a guy who just won $10 million in the lotto. I won't go into the details but basically his best friend wants a cut.

This guy has lived in a mobile home his entire life. The first thing he did when he won was sell the mobile home and buy, you guessed it, a bigger mobile home.

Hmmm ... sounds like the first thing he did was tell his best friend ... who sounds like he may no longer BE his best friend. Or, he could live in a state that doesn't allow trustees of blind trusts to redeem tickets. It surprises me that more people don't know of the blind trust method of preserving anonimity.

In my article, I mentioned one Ohio attorney (Dominic J. Spinazze) who has acted as trustee for a number of lottery winners ... and the Toledo Blade has a good article on the blind trust phenom where he's mentioned:

http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040806/NEWS08/408060345/-1/NEWS

PS - Sometimes, my standalone "LuckyYou.atspace.com" site goes down (they have issues). If it does, it can also be seen here:

http://home.comcast.net/~server236/alecwest/lucky.html

[AlecWest]

P.S. to Adam - Are you aware of any instance where an attorney, in his capacity as trustee of a lottery-related blind trust, absconded with the ticket (grin) and took the money for him/herself? Just curious.

[adam]

Don't know of any particular cases like that but there are all sorts of creative ways in which trustees have cheated the beneficiaries out of the trust funds and gotten caught.

But I'm sure the trust agreements in these cases have all sorts of failsafes. Since the beneficiary is also the trustor, they can place whatever restrictions they want on the trustee. The Lotto would probably be required to put the funds directly into the trust escrow account, and the attorney wouldn't just be able to cash it all in under his name. In other words there'd be a huge paper trail so he/she'd get caught. Trusts like these would pay out pretty regularly, like every month, so it probably wouldn't take the winner long to notice something wasn't right.

And then of course there's the incentive to manage the trust honestly. Besides moral obligations, the trustee would get 5% guaranteed and possibly up to 10% if the trust funds were invested. That ain't too shabby when the trust is in the millions or even 10's of millions!