With the Powerball jackpot climbing above $300 million for Saturday night’s drawing, you might be tempted to go in on tickets with co-workers.
Proceed with caution.
“If you go in on an office pool, make sure it’s done right,” said Jason Kurland, an attorney with Certilman Balin Adler & Hyman, a law firm in East Meadow, New York.
“People don’t treat it like a transaction [potentially] worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but that’s essentially what it is,” said Kurland, who specializes in helping lottery winners.
With no tickets hitting all the winning numbers on Wednesday, the estimated Powerball jackpot now stands at $306 million, or $182.8 million if the winner chooses a lump sum instead of spreading it out over 30 years.
While not among the top 20 biggest prizes in the game’s history, it would nevertheless be a huge amount of money to handle.
Hitting the jackpot with co-workers would bring additional challenges.
For starters, it would be much harder to follow the expert advice to remain anonymous in states where winners are permitted to shield their identity from the public. If you win in a pool, there’s already potential leakers of your business from the get-go.
Past lottery winners have discovered the hard way that the more people who know they’ve won, the greater the chance they’ll be approached for things like personal loans, handouts, investment opportunities and charitable donations.
There’s also the challenge of figuring out exactly how to split the winnings. There are tax considerations, and some states have limits on how many checks they will cut. In that case, winners would end up turning to a more complex solution, such as forming a trust.
“Say there are 15 people who win a lot of money. Getting 15 people to agree on anything is difficult,” Kurland said. “And then if they each get their own attorney, you’ve got 15 attorneys who are supposed to agree.”
If you’ve already gone in on tickets or want to despite the potential pitfalls, at least make sure the pool’s coordinator documents the whole affair.
“The person should give a copy of the tickets and a list of [participants] to everyone who’s in the pool,” Kurland said.
This protects the people in the pool and the organizer.
More from Personal Finance:
How much home you can really buy with $300,000
The number of 401(k) plan millionaires hits new high
SEC sets up bogus coin offering site to warn investors what scams look like
“That way, if the person who’s in charge also bought a ticket on their own and it ends up winning, there’s a way to prove it wasn’t part of the pool,” Kurland said.
The simpler thing is just to buy tickets on your own.
The odds of nabbing the jackpot is 1 in 292.2 million for a single ticket, according to the Multi-State Lottery Association. Buying more than one — whether through an office pool or on your own — doesn’t increase your chances by much.
“You’re still talking about huge odds,” Kurland said.
