lump sum or installment plan....

bmwhype

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anyone want to calculate it out? im at work right now so i dont have my trusty TI BA 2 with me...







http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/powerball-winners-almost-gave-up-trying/20060928085209990019?ncid=NWS00010000000001


FOND DU LAC, Wis. (Sept. 29) - The organizers of a lottery pool at a cheese company were starting to get discouraged. They had tried good luck charms for three years and even considered going to a different store to buy the tickets.

But then a worker suggested rubbing the belly of a Buddha statue, which some say will bring good luck. They set the statue on the tickets in a worker's locker, and people went in to rub it.

Then their luck changed, as they won a $208.6 million Powerball jackpot in August.

"We don't know if it's the Buddha that brought us the good fortune to win this. We don't know if it was our prayers to God that were answered," said Mary Entringer, who organized the pool at Sargento Foods Inc. in Plymouth. "We're just grateful it was 100 people, and we're all going to share in this bounty."

The winners, who call themselves the "100 Miracles," turned in their Powerball ticket Friday and plan to split the prize equally.

Entringer, 55, said 70 to 90 workers on the plant's second shift usually pool their money for the lottery when the jackpot is over $100 million. But she said something made her go against company rules and make an announcement over the public address system the day before the Aug. 5 drawing. That boosted participation to 100 employees.

Entringer spoke during a news conference with about 75 of the winners Wednesday in front of Ma and Pa's Grocery Express in Fond du Lac, where they bought the ticket. The store will receive $100,000 for the win.

Entringer said four winners have left the company - a 63-year-old woman retired, a man went into business with his wife and another person wanted to pursue other opportunities. The fourth was a college student who worked at the company over the summer.

But other workers, including Entringer, said they plan to keep working at the factory. Most winners earn between $30,000 and $50,000 a year.

Entringer said she will invest her winnings and look for a lake home in northern Wisconsin - and keep playing the lottery on her own.

Shirley Roehrborn, 54, said her first day back at work after they won was emotional.

"Everybody is hugging, everyone is crying," she said. "It was just wonderful to share it with everyone."

State law requires a court order to split the prize, and the lottery said it expects to receive one within several weeks. Each person can pick either the lump sum or installments, according to the Wisconsin Lottery. Entringer said most people picked the lump sum, which is $660,000 to $670,000 after taxes.

People who pick the installment plan will receive about $1.4 million after taxes. Lottery spokeswoman Jessica Iverson said they will get annual payments for 30 years, with the first about $25,000 and the last about $79,000 after taxes.

Mike Theune, 23, one of the youngest winners, said he also plans to remain at Sargento, although he wants to pursue a degree in human resources management. He plans to invest most of his winnings for an early retirement, but does want to buy a house, an all-terrain vehicle and a vehicle for his father.

"I'm going to live the simple life and lead a low profile," Theune said.
 
you can't calculate it because you don't know the exact annual payment stream...always pick the lump sum unless you have a problem with financial discipline...
 
Well if you pick the annuity, they'll invest the balance for you in Tbonds. So unless you don't think you can earn anything over treasuries on a 30 years horizon, pick the lump sum.
 
"Well if you pick the annuity, they'll invest the balance for you in Tbonds"

I assume they give you a t-bond rate on your annuity, but they don't actually set any funds aside. I suppose there is some small risk that they don't pay...but, short of thermonuclear war I think you'd be okay. I think it would be an interesting study to contrast lump sum takers vs. annuity takers in kind of a "where are they now" analysis.
 
"but they don't actually set any funds aside"

I don't know about that - I would be willing to bet that most systems purchase an annuity for the payouts. Why would the Lottery systems want these 30 year liabilities on their books?
 
Why is it that the lottery's legal but other forms of gambling aren't?
 
yep, lottery pays into the tax system
gambling cannot be taxed
 
I think it has to do with the government taking over numbers games from the mob.
 
"gambling cannot be taxed"

huh? I'd say the Illinois casinos paying 50% taxes would beg to differ.
 
I've heard some estimates that 50-60% of lotto winners end up broke within 5 years. I'm sure someone has done a comprehensive study of this. Of course, �lotto winners� also include people who win 'just ' $1,000,000, which isn�t that much money and could be easy to blow.
 
Interesting question. If you compare taking $670k today and the the NPV of a 30 year stream of cashflows starting at 25k/year and ending at 79k/year and fitted to increase at a constant percentage rate, the values are equivalent at discount rate of about 4.65%. So I guess if you figure you can make it grow at more than that rate, it's better to take the lump sum.

In the lump sum vs installments, it may be important to look at the tax implications. If you have a huge payout of multi-millions, and your installments are on the order of 100k/year, both will probably be taxed at the highest marginal rate in either case, which suggests taking a lump sum, but if you are getting down to $25k, you might be in lower tax brackets. In fact, the article points out that you get 1.4M after taxes with installments and 670k after taxes straight up, so you're definitely getting a tax benefit from installments. Still, even with that benefit, it only takes investment performance above 4.65% annually to make the lump sum pay off.
 
"Interesting question. If you compare taking $670k today and the the NPV of a 30 year stream of cashflows starting at 25k/year and ending at 79k/year and fitted to increase at a constant percentage rate, the values are equivalent at discount rate of about 4.65%. So I guess if you figure you can make it grow at more than that rate, it's better to take the lump sum. "

can u explain the equation or math behind the constant percentage rate? i dont quite get how u calculated 4.65%
 
There were two constant percentage rate calculations. The first one was to estimate the annual cash flows and asked "what constant annual percentage increase will make a payment of 25,000 today turn in to a payment of 79,000 in 30 years" (25k and 79k were given in the article). This percentage rate was found by taking taking (log(25k) - log(79k))/(30-1) to find an annual increase in log(CashFlow), and then converting it back to dollars with exp(log(CashFlow)). This percent turned out to be around 4.5%; I don't remember the exact figure. (if log is the natural log, it turns out that the calculation of (log(25k) - log(79k))/(30-1) is a very close approximation of the percentage increase, or you can calculate exactly from the exact cash flows; also, the (30-1) division is because you have 30 years of payments, but only 29 payment increases, because the first year is just the base value of 25,000.

(Later, I realized, you could also just take (79k/25k)^(1/29) to get the annual increase, but I was doing this late at night and did the log method)

Once I got the cash flows, I then set up a column in excel to discount each cash flow at a constant discount rate, and summed them up. It's important here to remember that the first payment is not discounted at all, so that is 25k*[(1-DiscRate)^(payment# - 1)].

The next step is to find what discount rate makes this set of discounted payments sum up to $670,000, the value of the lump-sum payment. I used Excel's solver to do this, by setting up a cell that computes the value of (LumpSumPayment - SumOfDiscountedPayments), and asked solver to find the DiscountRate that makes the difference zero. This number turns out to be 4.65%.


Now, I am ashamed to admit that I initially tried to do this with Excel's IRR function, but did not get the same answer and am not sure why (I got something like 4.85%). I took the cash flows above , and added -670k to the first payment of 25k, so that my payment streams were -645k for year one, and the estimated payments as above for all following years. The IRR should then have given the discount rate where the installments after the first exactly balance 645k (how much money you forego right now one by not taking the lump sum, remembering that you get 25k right now under the installment plan). However, I get a different answer with the solver method, and am not sure why. I trust my solver method more, so reported that result.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at Sunday, October 1, 2006 at 02:47AM by bchadwick.
 
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