Ben by Daniel Shelton for January 28, 2021

Sorry Ben, your joints are too stiff to bend into,a Lamborghini.

Ben, do you really want to leave your Lamborghini at the airport? Better to get a stretch Limo for the whole family. And actually, if you win the lottery, how about chartering a private plane to take you all there?

For the most part, regular folks don’t know how to handle so much money. I know I don’t.

My first two calls would be to a lawyer and my investment advisor. The lawyer’s first job would be to protect my privacy.

No WAY would I leave a new Lamborghini in an airport parking lot for a couple weeks.

Red and Lamborghini don’t go together — red and Ferrari, yes,

So, Ben isn’t taking the family then.

I’d buy a cabin on a trout stream in the mountains and get snowed in until spring with a lot of books and no outside communication.

When I was young I wanted a Ferrari. When I was doing development work, and needed to test in a Trans Am, I realized that just because I like to look at a certain car doesn’t really mean that I’d get much out of owning it. I like to see Ferraris, I no longer want to own one. Comfort and practicality top my list.

It’s nice to dream, but it’s not very practical for us with SUV bodies.

We said a long time ago that if we ever won big bucks we would divide it into thirds. 1/3 to invest for the future, 1/3 to put into trust for the kids and 1/3 to splurge. Of course, we don’t very often even enter the lottery (believe it or not, the lotteries are illegal here in Nevada).

Everybody here seems to be on a different timeline. Nobody’s going to be booking Carribean travel for a while.

Many lottery winners end up declaring bankruptcy. You might win $5 million, but if you start by taking your extended family to the Caribbean in your red Lamborghini, you might discover you’ve spent 20% of it before you even get home.

That said, imagining the crazy things you’ll do with your lottery winnings is the fun part of playing.

Never buy lottery tickets – just a waste of money. If we did get some windfall I would redo the electricity in the house and maybe buy a new furnace – ours is the original to our house and it was built in 1950. Mostly I would push to save the money and husband would look to spend some of it on small things. Oh, and buy a house generator which would come on immediately when the electricity went out and was enough for everything in the house to make husband happier and not have to worry about losing electricity – again.