this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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The $1.28 billion is if you take monthly payments over a term of twenty or thirty years.
Very few people do that.
Instead, they take an up front lump sum payment.
That up front payment is the amount the lottery commission would put into interest bearing bonds to pay out over time, getting to the $1.28 billion.
The lump sum payment is usually about half the amount you would receive if you took payments over time. If this doesn't make sense, it's a tangential discussion on the time value of money and its net present value.
I got six hundred million by cutting $1.2 billion in half since this is casual Internet discourse, and I consider very rough cocktail napkin math for illustrative purposes to be perfectly acceptable.
But you didn't need to do back-of-napkin math, at all. He got $433.7 million.
The 433.7 million is after paying taxes on the lump sum.
Nominal Jackpot: 1.2B
Lump sum: ~600 M
Taxes on lump sum: ~167M
Post-tax winnings: 433.7M
My point was that the IRS didn't take the eight hundred million stated, but probably closer to two hundred million.
But we all love to get angry about anything and everything, especially when we think we've scored Internet gotcha points, so enjoy.
Damn I think I would take the monthly payments. I wouldn't complain about ~$3m a month for 30 years. Whatever problems you have that money would resolve would probably be resolved in the first month.