Have you bought your Powerball ticket yet? If not, don’t bother because I’m going to win.
The grand prize for tonight’s drawing is expected to be worth $750 million, but I’m going to take the lump sum of $465.5 million. I have big plans for that money.
Of course, while my accountant’s quite good, even he isn’t going to be able to save me from a hefty tax bill. $465.5 million minus 37% to Uncle Sam leaves me with a paltry $293 million.
I’ll set aside a sensible $20 million for my retirement needs: healthcare, food and boring crap like that. And I’ll also set aside $100 million for my daughter. (That seems like enough, right?)
So I’ll have $173 million left to play with. Here’s how I plan to divide it up for the ultimate tennis life:
The house: Obviously, it needs to be palatial. I’ll have six outdoor tennis courts, two each of hard court, clay and grass. Plus one more indoor hard court in case it rains. All courts will have Hawkeye. Naturally we’ll have pools, hot tubs, indoor bowling alleys, and that sort of thing. I figure the house will set me back $50 million.
Live-in tennis pro: He’ll need a salary. $1 million ought to do it. I’ll play into my 80s, so I need him for 30 years. That’s $30 million.
Tennis balls: I’m not skimping here. I want to pop open a new can every nine games, just like the pros do. Let’s say I play every day, winning 7-5, 5-7, 7-5. That’s 36 games, divided by 9, equals 7 cans of balls a day. Times 365 days for 30 years equals 76,650 cans. I’ll save some money by buying my balls in cases, which works out to 3,194 cases of balls. At $90 a case, I’ll be spending $287,460 on tennis balls. (Didn’t you think it would be a lot more than that? I did.)
Tennis outfits: Here’s where it’s going to get expensive. I’ll need a new outfit each day, at $120 each, for 30 years. That’s $1,310,400. I also need someone to go buy them because I hate shopping. Plus sneakers to match the outfits. Then there’s the coordinating visors, warm-up clothes, tennis bags… We better round this whole category up to $5 million.
Racquets: A new one every day, strung and gripped, at, say, $250 a pop should set me back $2,737,500. (I’m economizing here by having my live-in pro do the stringing and gripping.)
Travel: Four Grand Slams at $50,000 each (I like to travel in style), plus a couple of tennis retreats at $10,000 each, times 30 years equals $6.6 million.
Friends: After I win Powerball, all my friends will hate me. But I can’t play tennis by myself, so I’ll have to buy new ones. Twelve “friends” for a lump sum of $1 million each is $12 million. At that price, they better let me win.
The grand total for house, pro, balls, clothes, racquets, travel, and “friends”: $106,624,960
Hmm. I have a lot of money left over–specifically, $66,375,040.
Apparently it’s really hard to spend $173 million on just tennis. I must be overlooking some key areas where I could be indulging myself.
More realistically, suppose you had an extra $10,000 a year to spend on tennis. What would you splurge on?