1 in 302,575,350: Your odds of winning jawdropping jackpot
Staff members working the front counters at the Colorado Lottery’s Denver offices didn’t have a chance to leave their posts for lunch Thursday as a recordhigh jackpot drove a frantic pace of ticket sales.
“Things are reaching a fever pitch,” Colorado Lottery spokeswoman Jenni fer Churchill said.
The estimated jackpot for the multistate Mega Millions game increased from $900 million to $970 million on Thursday, and Churchill said she wouldn’t be surprised if it reached $1 billion before the next drawing at 9 p.m. Friday. That amount won’t fit on the lottery’s signs designed to display mere
hundreds of millions in prize money, she said.
The odds of winning the pot — a cash value of more than $548 million after taxes — are one in 302,575,350, according to the Colorado Lottery. But that hasn’t kept more and more people from buying tickets.
Between 3:22 p.m. and 4:22 p.m. Wednesday, the Colorado Lottery sold $3,092 worth of tickets a minute. As of 10:15 a.m. Thursday, the state lottery had sold more than 305,000 tickets for Friday’s Mega Millions draw. The tickets cost $2 apiece.
“When you get these record numbers, we definitely see people who aren’t regular players come out and play these,” Churchill said. “It’s happening fast and furious.”
Experts and advisers in the legal and financial world all gave the same advice to a hypothetical winner of the monster jackpot: Don’t tell anybody. And don’t make any hasty decisions.
Any winner in Colorado has 180 days to claim their prize at any of the four claims centers across the state, Churchill said. During that time, a winner should stay silent about their news, avoid any media attention and prepare for their life to take a wild swing, experts said.
Even staff members at Colorado Lottery were struggling to comprehend the size of the jackpot, Churchill said.
She started Googling what a winner with that much money could buy — like multiple trips around the moon.
“It’s almost intangible,” she said.
What to do if you win
Zachary Bouck had one piece of advice for anybody who might hit the jackpot.
“First, do nothing,” said Bouck, chief investment officer at Denver Wealth Management.
Bouck recommended waiting 90 days before making any big decisions. The lucky winner should check with financial advisers, and if they choose to, inform close friends and family and create a plan for giving money to loved ones. Don’t make any big purchases or any promises, he said.
“Ninety days in, that Lamborghini will still be there,” he said.
Mega Millions winners can be cashed out in a onetime, lumpsum payment, or under an annuity option that is paid out as one immediate payment followed by 29 annual payments, each 5 percent larger than the last.
A winner would have to consider whether they want to keep working even though they don’t need an income, said Tom Stefaniak, president at Pinnacle Wealth Management in Denver, who has worked with winners of jackpots of a few million dollars. The winner would have to decide what to do with the remainder of the money that couldn’t be spent personally, such as creating a foundation or donating to other charitable organizations.
“That’s more money than pretty much any American can spend in a lifetime,” he said of the current jackpot. “So what kind of impact do you want to make?”
As a bankruptcy lawyer, Tony Cross has seen a number of people win big settlements or worker’s compensation payments just to see all the money gone in a few years. The clients give away money, spend it all or don’t know how to properly invest it.
“In two years, that’s it, they don’t have a dime,” said the attorney based in Colorado Springs and Pueblo. “They end up dead broke.”
That’s why Cross offers legal consultations for lottery winners — he said he wants to make sure they don’t make those mistakes. He said anybody who wins the lottery should take pictures of the winning ticket, but not tell anyone about the win. He’s seen clients become inundated with requests for cash from friends, family and acquaintances from people they haven’t seen in years.
Working with legal and financial experts is necessary to made rational decisions and invest for the future, Cross said.
“I would keep it as close to the chest as possible,” he said. “You need a firewall between you and all of those other people.”
While gathering the advice of financial and legal professionals, a lottery winner may want to meet with a life coach or therapist who is familiar with financial puzzles, said Myra Salzer, who specializes in helping people who come into sudden wealth at The Wealth Conservancy in Boulder.
That therapist can help the winner and their family navigate their new reality and learn to let the money be a tool, not a burden. Some people feel guilty after suddenly coming into money, she added.
People who suddenly become wealthy often go through five distinct phases, Salzer said. First, they are innocent and naive about their new status. Then they’re in denial and don’t want to face their newfound responsibilities. The person then moves into “ignorant acceptance” before entering the growing stage and begins to learn about their sudden money. Finally, they move into the “integrated authority” stage, she said.
“That’s when they define what their money is to them instead of letting their money define who they are,” she said.
Part of an office pool?
Coworkers chasing the success of an office pool at Kaiser Permanente in Aurora that won a $1 million prize from the Mega Millions game earlier this month should follow a few basic rules when setting up their own pool, experts said.
Make sure to write down the names of the people who participated, the shares they bought of the pot and who will collect the money if the group’s ticket wins, said Bouck of Denver Wealth Management.
“Write it down, because it’s going to get contested,” he said.
Stefaniak also noted that if the pool represents a large majority of the business’ staff, somebody should inform the bosses.
“They might just have lost all of their employees” if the pool wins the jackpot, he said.
Here’s more bad news: Pooling money in an office to buy 10 or 20 tickets instead of one doesn’t particularly increase your odds of winning the jackpot, said Aaron Nielsen, an assistant professor of statistics at Colorado State University. The reward also lessens if multiple tickets win the prize and the pot is split several ways, thus worsening the bet.
“This isn’t really a winning business,” he said. “People are usually making a bad bet.”
But even Nielsen, who is fully aware of the long odds, might be swayed by the high jackpot.
“Maybe now I’ll go pick up a ticket,” Nielsen said at the end of his interview. “It’s fun to dream.”