• melpomenesclevage@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    19·
    1 day ago

    if you’re poor when you get the money, you still get taxed for being poor, and the sin of class mobility. only money made AFTER you get rich is safe.

  • threeganzi@sh.itjust.works
    101·
    1 day ago

    Doesn’t matter, your life will be ruined either way by everyone around you that wants a piece of the pie.

    Life pro tip: don’t win the jack pot. And if you do, keep it as much a secret as possible.

    • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
      9·
      1 day ago

      There’s a guide out there about what to do if you win.

      Basically, tell nobody before you talk to a senior partner in a big law firm, get trusts set up for yourself and the people in your life so everybody is looked after and you can’t fall below a decent living wage even if you fuck the rest up. This also stops people hounding you for a slice and destroying your relationships.

      Then there was stuff about setting up investments, and setting aside some spending cash.

      Personally I’d want to put most of the “investments” into various mutual aid projects to build lasting social stability rather than using it to further the stock market, but other than that it’s pretty good advice.

      • melpomenesclevage@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        3·
        1 day ago

        and it’s altadena, which was recently the hub of some pretty big mutual aid efforts, so there’s a chance some of that might actually happen!

        • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
          2·
          23 hours ago

          I’m not sure what the venn diagram of people into mutual aid and people who buy scratch tickets looks like, but I’d suspect it’s a small overlap.

          But hey who knows, if this stuff is getting more popular traction then I might be wrong about that.

  • GaMEChld@lemmy.world
    3·
    1 day ago

    The reason it gets cut down so much is the advertised jackpot is the 25 year pay over time annuity amount. You get only about half if you take lump sum. And THEN that’s taxed at a high bracket.

    • nyctre@lemmy.world
      3·
      1 day ago

      Half? So they could get 850 over 25 years? That’s 34 million/year… Or 2.8mil/month… In what world is that not enough? Unless you’re afraid they’re gonna stop paying you after like a year or two, which is fair, especially in this day and age… yeah, okay, I’ve changed my mind, I’d take the lump sum too… not risking it.

      • darkpanda@lemmy.ca
        5·
        23 hours ago

        The rationale behind taking the lump sum is that if you take a lump sum now and invest it, you can live off the proceeds from the investment and the overall value will outstrip inflation and the losses from the taxes and you can take advantage of compound interest to really ramp things up. You can actuality make more money in the long term by taking less now.

        • nyctre@lemmy.world
          3·
          22 hours ago

          Yeah, if you’re financially responsible you can totally do that. Most people, however, from what I’ve heard, aren’t and don’t really make good use of their winnings. When you win that much, however, pretty hard to go back to being poor no matter which way you go.

      • Mirodir@discuss.tchncs.de
        1·
        1 day ago

        Other than “they’re gonna stop paying you” there’s also the risk of inflation making it so you receive way less overall, since I doubt the amount gets adjusted to match inflation.

        But yes, if the jackpot is so high that you’d get 2+mil per month, assuming you’re so worried about the dollar being worthless soon, you can still take the 2mil/mo and diversify. After a year you should already have plenty money to live comfortably for the rest of your life.

    • adarza@lemmy.caEnglish
      14·
      2 days ago

      it was a $2.04b jackpot. would have paid out that much as an annuity over like 25 years or something. taxes would have been withheld from those payments.

      the ‘lump sum’ option was $997.6m, which is what the winner opted for. after taxes the amount received was actually $628.5m.

      https://www.yahoo.com/news/2-04-billion-powerball-winner-200153929.html

      whoever pulled the $424m out of their backside took another dose of taxes out of the payment that already had taxes deducted.

    • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 day ago

      The listed amount is actually an annuity that pays out over like 25 years. The base lump-sum amount is usually only around half of the listed amount. So a $2b win would only pay out about $1b in cash. And then that cash amount is heavily taxed.

      You should almost always choose the cash option even if the annuity is a “larger” total, because the annuity’s rates very rarely beat inflation rates over the 25 year time period… So you’re better off just taking the cash as a lump sum and investing it in index funds and bonds, which will virtually always beat inflation rates over time.

      But all of this is to say, it’s not quite an 80% tax rate. It’s more like 55%, once you consider the fact that the cash option is already only about half of the listed winnings.

    • Davel23@fedia.io
      2·
      2 days ago

      Lottery winners usually have a choice of getting their winnings paid out over the course of twenty or thirty years, or as one lump sum. If they take the lump sum the winner only gets about half of what they would with the annual payments. So assuming this guy took the lump sum and got $1B the tax would be closer to 60%. Still a lot, but $450M is nothing to sneeze at.

  • shorap@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    Old money hates new money. That’s why lottery winners are taxed so much.

  • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 days ago

    Could you withold from being taxed from your lottery win until you get a lawyer to put all that money into a tax haven, and then pay the tax in pennies? I mean, if billionaires could get away with stashing their money into offshore and tax havens and pay pennies in taxes, why couldn’t this instant billionaire do the same?