Do you fantasize about winning the lottery?

I do! But not willfully.

I assuage my shame with the fact that I don't actually play the lotto.

lol, just fantasized about this today. but i never play the lottery, so it's a pointless fantasy.

Likewise. I fantasise about spending the winnings on building modernist Eco houses.

I think about having to change the phone number I've had for ten years, getting a security system installed, whether to go with my current accountant or find someone over at Stephens Inc., do I buy a gun? Etc...

i so this. have everything planned for a 20m win tbh

I have done this at times. I don't play the lotto tho.

The funnest part is imagining setting up the trusts and the charity donations. Seriously.

I don't see it...

nah it's the travel

I play the lotto. Just two dollars per week. Not enough to get in the way of my household finances or actual financial planning and way less than I used to spend on booze in a week. If I win, I promise to create an endowment ilx's server costs, plus to fly all the British ilxors over to America for real Mexican food.

sometimes it comes into my head, but i never play the lotto. i probably should. i know people say money doesn't but happiness or whatev but 3/4m in the bank would make life massively easier. no more worrying or feeling guilty about spending ever again...prob would add years onto your life.

buy happiness*

xxp:

...on my private jet with a go-kart track inside.xp:

if god had wanted charities to have my lotto money he'd have let them win it imo

I do this a bit, I must admit. I buy a ticket each week, I refer to the money spent as my "idiot tax" or maybe "desperation tax". As per Ronan, if I were to win I think the removal of worry about finances would add a few years to my life. If I won big, I think I would pay to have the giant film collection in Buenos Aires catalogued. Also buy a fancy car.

Money mayn't buy happiness but it buys a better class of misery.

The funnest part is imagining setting up the trusts and the charity donations. Seriously.
otm. I have a lengthening mental list of all the organizations I would endow with my winnings. I would also pay off my friend V.'s law school debt, because I promised him I would, and I'm a women of my word.

as David Lee Roth said, "Money can't buy you happiness, but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it."

I'm gonna use my £10m to fund me through my PhD. I swear that's something I'll still want to do when I have no need to work for the rest of my life.

Sometimes I fantasize about having the money to build a recording studio, but I think it would feel very unearned and I would be less motivated to use it if I hadn't built it myself.

Generally I don't fantasize about winning the lottery.

Sorry, when I say "built it myself" I mean if I didn't have some sense that my toil produced the money for it.

i've never played, but as a teenager i would fantasise about winning it and keeping it a secret from all my friends and family. like i could tell my mum i was going to stay a friend's house for the weekend, then go clubbing in paris with a fake ID. or have my own flat, car and relationship with beautiful gold digging girlfriend that nobody would know about.

I sometimes fantasize about having a life-changing sum of money, but the source of it is vague. The lottery doesn't really play into it. It isn't part of my imaginative furniture.

i'd use a win to fund a couple of year of literature, film, economics, physics, whatever study at the best universities in the best cities. just spend the rest of my life being a student of the stuff that interests me while living in verrry comfortable surroundings

I've already got it all planned out. Getting close friends to write up skeletal business plans for creative projects to fund and take part in. Paying my mom to be my account (she's passed her CPA but does higher level stuff) so I don't blow it all on drugs and trinkets, but still having a halfway decent yearly fund she can't look at the expenses of. Paying my dad to help me design/build/upkeep my semi-modest home. Paying my sister to cook me all kinds of delicious health food (she's amazing at it but has thus far failed in creating a financially realistic business model). Which charities get which percentage of my yearly winnings. Arranging a system of yearly goals whereby I set targets for personal accomplishments and if I don't achieve them then I just live a comfy middle class life (sans shitty middle class job) but if I do then I get some nice treat, like a trip into space or whatever. I used to play the lotto about twice a year and since I moved abroad I haven't at all, but sometimes when I'm straight broke it's a nice escapist planning process.

being unemployed gives you plenty of time to think about this.

i know what cameras and lenses i'd get, where i'd live and what i'd do with my time.

this week, i get to live out the fantasy of what to do with a £10 win.

i do this from time to time, but don't play. although it is a tradition in my immediate family to give lottery tickets as birthday presents

and yeah, WmC is right: i don't dream of yachts, generally, but i do think about trusts and charities. lotto money could open up a shit ton of clinics, imo.

also, fyi, i think it's rott3n.com that has the fool proof guide to avoid the lottery-winner's misery. basically, if you win, you're supposed to put the ticket in a safety-deposit box after making a xerox (preferably at home), take the copy to a lawyer and retain his/her services, have them start a trust with some generic name, and then have the lawyer cash in the ticket as an agent of that trust. the only person with their pic in the paper is the lawyer, who no one will care about, and you get the money (as the sole trustee or w/e).

then as long as you're not an idiot buying yachts and shit, no one will notice. it'll out eventually, but hopefully far enough down the line that you won't attract strangers asking for money. just destitute relatives/friends.

but yeah, mostly i think about the peace of mind---debt erased, bills never a problem, no such thing as sudden financial terror, parents' medical problems sorted, etc.

other than that i think about hella vacations

You have the option of no press in the UK if you win, many lottery millionaires take this route, I believe (people win nearly every week, maybe about twice a year you see them twatting about on the front of the papers with giant bottles of champagne and big cardboard cheques).

I'd see my friends and family OK, sort out a decent charitable fund for things I care about, then just be glad I never have to work again in my life. And go on holiday. A lot.

(I play every week. I've won about £100 since the thing started. I like my brief and relatively cheap bi-weekly dream of being rich though)

I got fed up of the brief weekly kick in the balls when I knew I'd still be at work on Monday.

i actually can't recall ever seeing a lottery winner on the news/in the paper, but i also don't pay attn to the sort of news sources that cover that, tbh.

all i know is that, according to CW, lotto winners end up destitute and die early.

Your glass appears to be half-empty there, care for a top-up?

xpost

gbx, it's only cnuts like this that get in the papers over here, tbh

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Carroll_(lottery_winner)

actually yeah I think my #1 thing would be getting my mum out of the horrendous money troubles she's been in my entire life. Then starting an ILX thread asking for suggestions for eccentric but awesomely worthy acts of charity. Then completing a PhD over about thirty years while wandering the world. I play v. occasionally and have never won anything, that makes my chances of eventually winning higher, right?!?!?!? #nounderstandingofprobability

long as i didn't end up like this guy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Carroll_%28lottery_winner%29

i could imagine ending up as a morbidly obese, drug addicted waster tbh. not having a shitload of money is a bit of a blessing in disguise for me, spending £50 a week on beer and weed is better than spending thousands on champagne, coke and fancy restaurants.

haha x-post ailsa beat me to it.

there's one good thing about being unemployed and not winning, i still get to stay in bed on monday.

I waste a frighteningly large portion of my life fantasising about winning the lottery and becoming a millionaire, especially considering I buy a lottery ticket about once or twice a year.

I used to say I'd build a big digital recording studio loaded with instruments, then write a load of pop tracks, and go all stock aitken and waterman and make even more money.

Now, I'd rather buy a large, rambling house in the country, for me and some of my closest friends to live in, with rambling gardens full of veggies and chooks and things. We'd live in the middle of nowhere somewhere very beautiful but we'd have high speed internet, and some way of being driven into town whenever we wanted (the money could buy a town car and driver after all).

Then I'll kick back and grow,cook and write, til my frail dotage.

I'm gonna win the lottery on wednesday btw, will set aside some of it for fulfilling ILXor lottery win dreams.

Mega Millions ~$125mn cash after taxes (assuming you don't find loopholes) tonight.

Planning on building a commune for my closest friends in Oregon with the proceeds, FYI.

some votes for building it outside of Austin, but if I'm rich then Texas summer heat can go fuck itself IMO

if i had that kind of money i would invest it in artificial intelligence research. but only if they promised me it was going to be evil AI in a HAL/skynet stylee.

seriously tho, what appeal do people see in building a commune and shutting yourself off from the world with your closest mates? i would travel the world and meet loads of new people, i try to do that on a holiday budget of £1000 a year anyway. not dissin, btw. just interested.

Not shutting off, the idea would be to live near each other and be taken care of.

If I had that kind of bank I'd travel, undoubtedly. Probably the first move would be to buy a fun car and drive around the US and Canada for a year with my cameras.

if i won it i would... hire an assistant who would make me write, buy everyone i know & love a house each (no squabbling about how much everyone got then and its a p big burden off the back) and maybe pump some money into justine's publishers just so i could self-publish the crap i eventually come out with. oh and occasionally travel. oh and get a sweet seat at the grove.

re: charity thing - i think its kinda boring just to pump money into an organisation i like, although still a very worthy idea and i might. but otoh i would like to put some money aside and get someone to look after it so everyone i knew or was a friend of a friend or an ilxor or whatever could say 'there is this local cause i'd like to get into' or 'there are these turtles in the sudan i'd like to go and save' and i'd help fund their personal project.

would just about cover the garage quote i'm just after getting.

Commune for mates, definitely. We'd all just work on w/e, writing, iphone apps, five a side. Sweet.

I won €750 euro last week less than an hour before finding out the repairs on my car were going to cost me €1700. :-(

In an eerie echo of the numbers that haunted Lost character Hugo "Hurley" Reyes, four of the six numbers drawn in the $355 million Mega Millions lottery Tuesday night matched those of the likable islander, who believed his luck was cursed.

In the show, Hurley – played by Jorge Garcia – won $114 million in a lottery with the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42.

Tuesday's Mega Millions numbers were 4, 8, 15, 25, 47 and 42, with 42 being the Mega Ball number. Anyone who played those four of Hurley's numbers won about $150.

The series of six numbers in the show followed Hurley throughout, popping up in other contexts before Lost creators finally revealed the digits' meaning towards the end of show's run.

The coincidence wasn't lost on Damon Lindelof, one of the hit show's creators, who Tweeted Wednesday that "9,078 people played Hurley's numbers in the MegaMillions tonight, each winning $150."

Americans spend $70 billion/year on lotteries, more than movies/books/sports/music/video games combined

https://twitter.com/tinyrevolution/status/686975516868521984

from a pure EV standpoint each $2 ticket is worth about $5 tonight, making them a very sound financial decision when you get down to it

each $2 ticket is worth about $5

if only it worked like that

I won

Chino Hills!