If you won Warren Buffetts $1billion MM Bracket

[Mickw1016]

http://www.cbssports.com/collegebas...ffering-1-billion-for-perfect-tourney-bracket

March Madness (Basketball tournament for those who don't know) perfect bracket is rewarded with $1,000,000,000 cash.

Two options are taking a lump sum of $500mill or 25mill/year for 40 years.


If you won, which would you pick and why? What would you do with the money?


I would pick the 25m/year for 40 years because i know for a fact if i got 500m cash half would go to taxes and i would blow through the money so fast cause i would think it would last forever. If i get a steady flow of 25m then i would only have x amount of money to spend. I would but a couple lambos, house for me and my girlfriend and both of our parents, but all my family members new cars and i would donate 5m a year to cancer research ( Know many people who had cancer and fought it off ) and i would pay for anyone that couldnt afford the cancer treatment!

 

[MohtasaUnique]

Obviously the 25 million per year. There's nothing in the world I want bad enough to spend 500 million dollars on, and I'd rather have security for the rest of my life, and stash away 20-23 million of that a year for my children to have stability for the rest of their lives as well.

EDIT: also, fuck charities. I have a reasonable suspicion that most of the money donated never makes it to the target cause anyway. For example, Zero dollars was sent from Red Cross to Haiti after their national disaster. Miniscule amounts of money were put into housing Haitians in the most deplorable conditions, and the rest was pocketed.

 

[Mickw1016]

20-23mill a year is soo much for your kids haha thats like 2-5m a year for you and they get 4x what you get lol

Edit: I would personally make sure my money was being used the way i want it being used there. I'm sure most companies pocket the money, i bet there is cures out there for every disease but it would cost research companies so much money if the cure got out.

 

[reddogwwa]

Personally I would opt for the lump sum of 500 simply because I have trust issues. If I won I would be totally fine with around 250 million. Right now, I couldn't imagine blowing the 250. I live my life too frugally haha, I enjoy looking at my bank account now (not because I have tons of cash, but because I love saving). If I had 250 million in there I could only imagine how often I'd just look at it haha.

That being said:

500 million upfront
I would buy a nice house with a great deal of property, build myself a shooting range. I'd throw a portion of it in a high interest savings account and never look at it again. I wouldn't tell to many people I won, there's one friend in particular I'd hook up for sure.

I would like to sponsor a couple of young children who live in shit neighborhoods. Give them some incentives not fall into alternative means of making money. Set guidelines, (x) amount of dollars a month as long as they maintain 3.5gpa, pay their way through college, when they graduate have an account set up to get them started....obviously an extremely rough idea, but something along those lines.

Pretty much live a comfortable life, nothing too crazy!

 

[kiln master]

If I knew what basketball brackets were, I'd definitely try my luck at this, as I am quite lucky =s (got druidic from clue in rs!) However to answer the question, I would put it in a savings account and live off the interest. Honestly, with 1 billion minus taxes (let's say 400 million left over) that's enough money to have like 10 generations of children live comfortably without ever having to work.

 

[Almond Joy]

$500M all at once.

Theres no gaurantee that i'll get the remainder of whatever if I opt in 25m/yr. I can keep the 500M in a off-shore bank account or invest it in gold or silver. For 500M, i'll buy a bunch of real estate and rent them to people for free. Just pay me the yearly tax for the property!

 

[Trin]

I'd do 25 million per year. I am in no real rush to spend it. I would firstly, build a house with two guest houses, one of which N4n0's dad can live in and create a massive man-cave for N4N0 in the main house with top of the line electronics and computer equipment. I'd also put a lot for college education for my girls and have a trust fund for them. What I'll do with the rest of the money is unknown. There are a variety of things I'd look into.

 

[Mickw1016]

There are a variety of things I'd look into.

Keep goin then mofo!

 

[Highlands]

I'd definitely take it all at once. You never know what might happen for instance: they lose all your money so you dont get paid.

 

[Mickw1016]

There is a contract, you can sue haha. but 500m tax bracket it a lot more than 25m tax bracket.

 

[Quatakai]

I'd take the 25m a year and move to a big city (Vancouver, Toronto, L.A, N.Y, ect...) Buy a 5m+ loft in the heart of the city, a few cars, and just be set 4 life.

 

[HotColdRush]

All at once of course. I don't even know if I'm going to live for 40 more years.. And who knows what happens if one of the companies go under?

 

[MohtasaUnique]

20-23mill a year is soo much for your kids haha thats like 2-5m a year for you and they get 4x what you get lol

Edit: I would personally make sure my money was being used the way i want it being used there. I'm sure most companies pocket the money, i bet there is cures out there for every disease but it would cost research companies so much money if the cure got out.

I've lived 21 years of my life with less than 50,000 dollars a year from my parent's income. 6 of those years, I've been entirely self sufficient with my own 10-15K dollars per year. 2-5 million per year would STILL be more than I'd be able to spend. With a single year's cash reward, I could buy out a perfectly good home, a great car, and never have to work in order to feed myself. The next year's sum and I could start a business and earn an income by simply managing employees from my home. After that I probably wouldn't even need 1M/year to sustain myself if my business made any sort of decent money.


EDIT: About the possibility of not getting your cash if you choose the 40 year plan: the lump sum would probably be put into escrow at a singular date, and you would receive your money from a pile of cash that's pretty much already yours. Think of it as the cash in inside a box you own, but your bond holder owns the key.

EDITEDIT: and the same would go for my children, they'd get 20-23M per year, but they wouldn't be able to access it until their 18 years, or if they don't live with me/I've died, etc. (a trust fund, essentially). So it's not like I'll have a bunch of 6 and 7 year olds running around with $100,000,000 in their pockets, just looking for something to spend it on. In fact, I would raise them in extremely humble conditions, there's nothing worse than spoiled rich brats.

 

[Superfluous]

If interest rates are low, lump sum; else, yearly payments. Keep in mind that money depreciates; your $25m isn't worth half that in 40 years.

 

[MohtasaUnique]

If interest rates are low, lump sum; else, yearly payments. Keep in mind that money depreciates; your $25m isn't worth half that in 40 years.

This couldn't make any less sense
1) It's not interest rates, it's capital gains, and they've already told you the capital gains tax; it's 50%. Lump sum would only get you $500M instead of 1 billion. Interest rates would be how fast your money would grow yearly if you put it all into a saving accounts, and if that were a deciding factor in what you'd choose, you'd want to go with the lump sum if interest IS HIGH. 500M would give you roughly 2.2M in interest in a year, whereas 25M would give you 100K in a year.
2) Money does not depreciate. It's a bank note, legal tender, once and always worth exactly the amount printed on the slip. What you're probably trying to say is that the US dollar seems to be losing it's buying power due to inflation. It's hard to say whether the downward trend of it's worth will continue. The US could pull out of the recession with the simplest change. A new fuel source, a profitable war, medical discoveries, etc.

 

[psycho sales]

500m and use that to invest, day stocks, build interest, etc.

i'd probably die of an overdose b4 i blew through it all.

 

[Pockets]

25M/year and sell that annuity for a larger lump sum.

 

[Nicklaus]

i would take the 500M cash. You will pay slightly more taxes but at that point you have too much money. The interest on that money alone is too much money for you to spend in the year. A 350m bank account will gross $7.5m a year in interest at least. There is always a chance you wouldn't live 40 years to see all that money. People die in car accidents every day ect. You could still set up your own methods of restriacting your money to a certain extent and stick to your own rules. Such as hraving money in an account with a debit card and having the majority of your money in another account with no direct access to it like a debit card.

 

[TJOC]

500M up front. I'm fairly sure I could make 500M make me more than 1B in 40 years.

 

[BaLlSooHardd]

i'd buy 80 lambos , 80 prostitutes , 80 houses , and donate 80M to sythe :O