Nov 9, 2022 3 min read

If you won the big Powerball $1.9 billion jackpot Monday night or even hit five numbers to win about a million or more bucks, you’re probably not reading this. I’m writing this as of Monday and you’re likely seeing it in your Wednesday morning newspaper. If you won, you may still be in shock. Actually, if anyone wins, we all may be in shock since it seems like it takes months for anyone to ever match all of those numbers!

This Powerball jackpot was teetering near being the largest lotto prize ever offered. No one won Saturday’s drawing for nearly $1.6 billion. In fact, no one has won the jackpot since Aug. 3. But just when you start thinking it will never happen to you, there’s this: That Aug. 3 winning ticket was sold in Pennsylvania. Better yet, it was sold at a Sheetz in New Stanton. The winner could have been anyone from the tristate area or anywhere in the country just passing through on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

According to the Pennsylvania Lottery, that ticket sold in Westmoreland County matched all of the numbers to win the $206,900,000 grand prize! The lump sum payout would be $122.3 million cash, so even after taxes that is not exactly chump change. This week’s record-setting jackpot would offer either 30 annual payments of around $63 million or a lump sum cash payout of around $929 million. That payout amount is after the IRS withholds a mandatory 24% for federal income taxes. However, winning that amount would shoot you to the top IRS tax rate of 37% for 2022. If you grumble about how much you pay in taxes now, just imagine how mad you’d be if you looked at that tax withholding. Then again, if you’re sitting on $929 million, it would be hard to be mad at anything ever again the rest of your life, right?

We’ve been buying some Powerball and Megamillions tickets in hopes of scoring a big win, but so far, the biggest amount we’ve won has been a whopping $7. I am always disappointed when I don’t win, thinking that I should have just put that money in the bank instead. But you can’t win if you don’t play, right? So, we have taken our occasional $2 or $7 winnings and reinvested them in another round of possible winners.

I’m calculating that we’re probably in the hole around $40 by now rather than seeing any profits. We did win $30 on a scratch-off ticket, so that gave us some hope. I still wonder if I plunked down money and bought an entire roll of one scratch-off ticket game, would I be guaranteed to get a big winner?

Some Texas furniture store tycoon just won $75 million on the World Series after betting merely $10 million. I’ll stick with my $5 scratchers!

Kristin Emery can be reached at kristinemery1@yahoo.com.