All Forum Posts by: Jim C.

Hey All,

Hope everyone is staying healthy in these trying times.  I'm an investor and Realtor down in Homer.  Always happy to chat about real estate.  All the best.

Very interested in making connections in the Alaska market. Life long Alaskan, hold several properties and land, am a general contractor and have investors. Looking for Deals, Investment, and other professional contacts.

All right, I'll try, just once. We're five pages into this thread. Who's ever going to read this except people with a real interest in it?

The odds of winning any Powerball jackpot is 1:292,000,000. The price of a single ticket is $2. That means that in a fair game, you would have a chance to win 584 million bucks with your one ticket, so of course, you would never play until the jackpot hit that number.

Let's ignore all chances of a split jackpot and of course let's ignore the annuity option if you win, because I'm way too lazy to calculate how crappy a deal that is with inflation. Let's just say you take the lump-sum option. Immediately, your 584 million bucks goes down to about 362-333 million. For argument's sake, let's keep this number at 362 here.

Federal withholding is going to take 24% off that . You're down to about $274 million. Let's say you're single. You're going to pay 37% income tax on anything over $470,001. Let's say, for argument's sake, that you have no income and you're on public support. Let's say you're  traded a package of American processed cheese product paid for out of your food stamp allowance for someone else's Powerball ticket. I'm sure plenty of poor people do.

After federal taxes (and we're ignoring all state and local taxes in this analysis), you're still going to get hit with a tax burden that gets you down to about $173 million.

Think about it. You laid down a bet at odds that should have fairly given you 584 million and only paid out at 173 million. Not in their most obscene dreams could a Vegas casino operator imagine a game of chance that paid out at 30% on the odds. That means the house edge is 70%. You're going to end up with less than a third of the money you should have received in a fair game of chance.

A non-card-counting casino blackjack player who plays perfect Thorp strategy on every hand can is fighting a house edge of between 1-2%. Blackjack is often considered to be the best possible deal a gambler can get in US casino gambling. Realistically speaking, no one reports small winnings from $2/hand blackjack in this country.

I don't play $2/hand blackjack in casinos, either. I don't ever fight a house edge in a game designed to be unfair. I would prefer to take other, far saner monetary risks in my life.

 Where does he write anywhere that the tenant isn't paying? It seems as if you made up your own story, instead of actually reading what was written here.