YAY! We won again!

Last year i've been working for a while and - even though i didn't work in december - they got me a Christmas package (in the Netherlands it's customary your boss gives you a present around Christmas, usually a filled box).

My christmas package gave me the option to go online and select whatever present(s) i'd like myself. A nice gesture. Given the nature of the sort of stuff you can get (usually crap no-one needs), i donated part of my present to charity and bought lottery tickets from the rest.

So we played the lottery in january. And won. Not all that much, but enough to buy ourselves three new tickets for the february draw. And we won again, buying us four tickets for the march draw. And we won again. € 72,- this time. So we'll buy lottery tickets once again for next months draw, five tickets, leaving us with € 4,50 cash.

It actually is fun playing the lottery like this, but when will we give up? I think we'd keep on converting winnings to new tickets, until we buy a straight (10 tickets). Any amount over that, well, just put it in our savings.

More likely is we'll win some again next month, put it towards another ticket and don't win on that one.

Still, we are having a lot of fun playing like this, dreaming of what we'd do when hitting the jackpot...We always buy tickets for the two big draws (1 january and 30 april). 25 million jackpot. 25 million. WOW! We could buy a couple of houses. One in London, one in Amsterdam, Bali, Greece. And a yacht. A Lotus Elise. And. Euhm, yes, what else? Honestly, i'd not want a couple of houses. Nor do i care about expensive cars. And that yacht, well, a small little boat would be great. No matter how hard we try, we never ever manage to spend the whole 25 million. So, let's say we'd spend 10 million. That still leaves us with 15 million. Stuffed into whatever against an interest rate of 4% means a whopping 600.000 a year. That's almost 50.000 a month (after taxes). We would have a very good life on 50.000 a year, what the heck should we do with that much a month?

No, maybe winning that much just isn't a good idea. One million sounds much better: Put 600.000 in a savings account; at 4% interest and after taxes we'd have almost 2.000 a month to spend. That's more than enough to have a very decent life. The rest, 400.000, would buy us a nice plot of land somewhere in Greece to build our dream house. With pool and two separate guest suites. I'd go for that.