What would you do with a Billion $$$ dollars ?
6 Principles to guide Philanthropic Life
A few weeks ago, Powerball, the multi-state lottery broke the two Billion dollar threshold. Yes, two billion, an amount that turns lottery winners in to instant billionaires, and this after taxes and other fiscal withholding. I confess. I could not resist. I partook in the frenzy and my wife and I played 40 dollars. We allowed ourselves to dream of instant riches. At the end though, with odds of winning around 1 in 300 million, our tickets came up short, miserably short. All we were left with was our imagination, and the dream, the desire of playing again when the next jackpot prize becomes big enough. [1]
But let’s just imagine that for a moment that we did win and won big, one Billon dollars big. Wow, what a dream ! All worries gone in an instant. A new world, a new life. An unimaginable surge of happiness, and a state of carefree joy. But even in this dream land, things might not be as rosy as they are imagined and it would best for a small reality check. Such a life changing event might be more like a very sharp double edged sword as statistically around seventy percent of lottery winners end up broke. That’s right. More than 70% of lottery winners blow away their new found riches after a few years. [2] So let’s temper this exuberance a bit, and keep our heads on.
