It's billion. With a "B"

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So Mega Millions is now up to over 1 Billion Dollars.

Billion. I don't usually waste my money on any lottery.

But I bought a ticket.
What made you think you didn't waste your money today? Crystal Ball? BITOG Premonition?...Or you just felt like wasting money?
 
I'd note that the tax payments on that list are approximate. Even with that much income at one time, it's still a graduated income tax. There used to be a bubble that more or less forced everything into a "flat tax" for anyone above a certain income, but it was weird when there was a spike then drop in the marginal tax rate. That have no idea in that article what someone's deductions and tax credits will be. Or other ordinary income. I tried an income tax calculator that factors filing status. It was about $7000 lower for married filing jointly.

My state has an income tax, but state residents aren't subject to state taxes for lottery tickets from within the state. If I bought a ticket on a visit to another state I'd have to pay state taxes though. I think I could live with that for this much of a payout.
 
the guy got 25 tickets for $50 just today at a gasoline station in front of me

me $0
 
It's been this high before? Maybe that was Powerball? But I recall one of them hitting around 940 mil in past years.
 
Sure about the math? If you buy 302,575,350 tickets for $302,575,350 You're guarantied to win $1,000,000,000?

No. MegaMillions is $2. And then there's a lower lump sum distribution and taxes.

There was a time that the California Lottery's SuperLotto jackpot went up to about $72 million (for the annuity). I'm not sure why, but the jackpot went up exactly $1 million after each drawing without a jackpot winner. I think the parimutuel rules were to distribute any else to the smaller prizes. The odds were about 1 in 42 million with a $1 cost. As soon as someone won the next week it was back to about $6 million.

I've heard of some lottery buying syndicates that were able to buy every single combination, but that might have been at a time when it didn't require a physical ticket and they could somehow register to buy tickets. That's basically trying to cash out on the carryover. However, it runs into problems if there's multiple winners and the jackpot is split.
 
Sure about the math? If you buy 302,575,350 tickets for $302,575,350 You're guarantied to win $1,000,000,000?
It's $2 / ticket. so 302,575,350 X 2 means you will might very well lose money on that transaction after taxation.
God forbid someone matches yours & now it's halved. : (
First World Problem.
 
Tickets cost $2.00 so it would cost $605 million to buy every possible number combination.

Another thought is if you were to buy two tickets with the same numbers you'd get 2/3 of the prize instead of 1/2 in case of a split with one other player, unless that person also did the same thing.
 
Those sound like good odds. I'd be in for 302,575,350 tickets!
The only problem is that it's impossible to buy 302,575,350 tickets at a time. They don't allow machine purchases, you'd have to run all the individual slips through a machine. So you'd probably have to hire a bunch of people and print out the slips in advance to go to a bunch of machines and basically just hog it for days on end. You'd get the lesser prizes too, probably a bunch of those lesser prizes like 24 of the million dollar prize 3.4 million in 10k prizes etc.

That happened once a while ago, but the odds were much lower so it was actually possible for people to buy all the number combinations, once it went over a certain amount, they went out and bought thousands of tickets. Once the lottery figured it out, they shut down the game.


Another thought is if you were to buy two tickets with the same numbers you'd get 2/3 of the prize instead of 1/2 in case of a split with one other player, unless that person also did the same thing.
Yeah, but if you bought two of every ticket, that would cost you 1.2 billion and you'd still only have a 739 million cash jackpot. Although to be fair, about 60% of the purchase price goes into the pot so it would be up another 726 million, but the cash part of that would be about 537 million so just 1.276 billion. Not a very wise gamble on 1.2 billion to make 1.276 if no one else hits. Good thing you don't have 1.2 billion to try this?
 
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