I intend to see about this coconut oil everyone is going "nuts" over... for lack of a better pun. I've read tons of great things about it, but I'm not sure if it's something that has just popped up as a trend because there is now an excess of coconuts or because it does actually do all the magical things everyone claims.
Some of these claims and uses include a thing called "Oil Pulling" where you swish it around in your mouth before brushing your teeth to kill bacteria or rather I guess "pull" it away from your teeth and you spit it out.
You can cook with it, use it as sun tanning oil, glop it all over your hair, use it as a moisturizer, even a deodorant! You can even slather it on a broken bone for quick healing!.... Well maybe not that part, but yeah. I often check out natural boards and pages where people have discussions of such things, and there's always someone saying, put coconut oil on it!
I will have to get back to you on this experiment once purchased. Please feel free to leave your experiences with coconut oil to give me any other ideas of what this fascinating substance can do. :)
So, I have recently been super obsessed with the lottery. I mean, I don't play it at all actually. With the exception of the occasional Publisher's Clearing House entry lol But just the psychology behind what people do when they win is what really peaks my curiosity.
I even took a poll on my facebook and asked my friends if they won $10 Million dollars would they go for the 20 year payment option or take the lump sum which is significantly less? The majority would take the lump sum to my surprise.
I have heard statistics (via some youtube video below, lol not sure how credible it is) that 95% of lottery winners are actually worse off financially 3 years after winning. And from my poll about 95% would take the lump sum, is there a connection here? I mean if you take the payout option, you are guaranteed to keep getting money for twenty years, yes there is inflation to think of, but you can't get it all at once and go nuts with it and make yourself bankrupt by living some extreme lifestyle you wont be able to maintain when the money is gone.
So I am not great at math but this is how I figured out what I would do. Well that and also this...ya...
Also, one of my friends commented on my fb question that she actually had family members that won the lottery, they bought a bunch of cars for everyone in their family, a house and a bunch of other weird crazy lavish stuff that had no value. They now live n a trailer in a trailer park in Tucson, not a cool airstream trailer either, and all of the money is gone. HOW does that happen?? This is my question and my biggest fascination with this.
So granted age would play a factor into this, because if you are older and don't know if you have twenty years to wait around for this to happen you'd just want the lump sum and have a ball with your retirement, I would! But say you are only in your 30s and although we never KNOW how long we have, odds are you prob have at least 4 or 5 maybe even 6 decades left if you are really lucky. So, that's where this thought process comes in....
Lump Sum vs Payout Option
The lump sum on $10 Million would be only about $3 Million give or take after taxes.
Either way, in this scenario you have forfeited 70% of your winnings out of wanting the instant gratification of having a bunch of money all at once. Or you are REALLY good at investing and know what you are doing. Which most of us, don't have a clue.
Payout Option over 20 years.
You receive about $240k a year (8 thousand of that would go for taxes if you didn't make any other income)
and at the end of the 20 years you get the other half as a lump sum (5 Million minus taxes) So over the twenty years you would only pay $160,000 in taxes as opposed to what you would pay if you were in the millionaire bracket all at once in the same year initially. I mean this is assuming tax rates stay the same and all.
Say the inflation rate is 3% for the next twenty years, (we can't predict it, but this is about average right now). So in 20 years one dollar will be worth about 60% less. But realize this isn't every year it is at the end of twenty years. So in 5 years your money is only worth 15% less and so on.
I personally would be totally happy with receiving 5 grand a week for the next twenty years as extra income. I don't think you should rely on your winnings to support you, it should be a bonus. Start a business, invest WELL. Make it work for you. Help charities you believe in or even start your own foundation. Buy Gold or other things that continue to rise in value and make sure you are getting MORE than 3% on your return or else inflation will bite your ass and your savings will have actually cost you money. (This goes for ANY investment, not just lottery winning people).
And the best part to me about the payout option is if you screw up one year, you haven't blown it all!
Surreal Sister 2012
OK, I don't know if that made any sense, I now see a bunch of crazy numbers and percentage signs and my eyes are being harassed. So I will stop with that haha. I am an artist not a math genius, and perhaps you will find numerical flaws here and there and that's ok, this is a vague hypothetical break down of some hypothetical money.
The point is, do your homework if you are going to play the lottery, you might win! And you need a plan. Oh, and if you want to help out family members which many of us often do, and share your winnings; well little did you know you'd be giving your family HUUUGE gift tax consequences. If you plan on sharing your winnings, BEFORE you play the lottery you need to set up a contract saying you plan on sharing the winnings, setup a trust if at all possible and have the trust own the winnings and you be the trustee of it.
OK Publisher's Clearing House, I have done my homework.... come knock on my door now haha :)
Do you have any stories of anyone you know that won? What would you do if you won the lottery?
Ok, out of curiosity from my reminiscing about blogging days on one of the first journal sites to ever exist, I did what many of us do.... I googled...
A note from the original owner: (I double checked and the domain name is now some site in German about Backgammon or something?)
scribble.nu
"One of the first journal / blog services on the Internet. Became
insanely popular at the time, serving almost 100,000 users before it
imploded from its success. I spent literally hundreds of hours tweaking
our strained servers (two of them: one web server, one database server)
to support an ever increasing load. I still receive hate mail
occasionally wondering why I had to take this service off line. When you
have to decide between paying your server bills or your rent, something
has to give. Somewhere I still have all of the scribble.nu code and
databases; I should get it back online for nostalgia." Taken from http://dustin.io/things-i-did/
My "writing hate email" face. Photo: Surreal Sister 2012
I totally would have sent this guy hate mail over my lost entries years ago, but remembering at the time I was a senior in high school and most of it was about boys and school, I am sure I would only be embarrassed by revisiting them. Maybe scribble.nu did me a favor... I look forward to getting more accommodated with blogspot and having faith that they most likely won't be going anywhere anytime soon.
That title? Oh yeah, well I suck at being a girl, I mean as far as knowing how to do things like hair or what is currently in style or what shoes go with what. Yeah, I am not the person you would come to with these questions...
In fact, I would be the person that should be your "don't do it this way" example.
But truly this blog isn't about that at all.
I used to journal all the time, I even used to have a scribble.nu account back in the 90s, when the internet first started working it's way into homes on a larger scale. When the phone ringing would kick me offline and I would lose hours of code....anyhow the day that site went offline forever was traumatic, having lost almost a year of entries. So, I never felt the need to do that again or trust some online site with my precious trivial thoughts! How dare they!
