Posted on 12/20/2025 9:50:46 AM PST by where's_the_Outrage?
Would you rather be a millionaire or have safe, reliable passive income for life? That’s the difficult choice that many lucky lottery winners are frequently faced with. While the prospect of a seven-figure payout is tempting, 20-year-old Brenda Aubin-Vega from Quebec, Canada recently decided to take the recurring payment option instead.
After scratching off three piggy bank symbols on her Gagnant à Vie ticket, Aubin-Vega was stunned to discover she had just bagged the game’s top prize. “I couldn’t believe my eyes! I checked my ticket over and over again,” she told Yahoo News Canada (1).
After calling her dad and taking time off work, Aubin-Vega reached out to Loto-Québec to let them know she would be claiming her prize in the form of a $1,000 weekly annuity instead of the $1 million lump sum that was also available.
The decision prompted ridicule across social media, with Reddit commenters insisting the upfront payout was the rational move. The reaction underscores a broader debate about whether large windfalls are superior to guaranteed income.
Here are some of the pros and cons of Aubin-Vega’s annuity approach.
Pros
Taxes are, perhaps, the most important factor to consider if you’re ever faced with a choice between a sizable windfall or annuity. Income from gambling is fully taxable, according to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) (2). Many American winners also face state and local taxes on lottery winnings.....
Cons
One of the downsides of picking a weekly payment instead of an upfront jackpot is the lack of flexibility. An annuity is permanent, but $1 million in cash can be freely invested in a wide range of asset classes, some of which could have delivered better growth opportunities.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
This sounds different that Mega Millions or PowerBall, which have a fixed jackpot that you can take as a smaller lump sum, or, supposedly, a larger annuity paid out over 20 years. With PowerBall or Mega Millions, it’s definitely better to take the smaller jackpot in a lump sum. If you take the annuity but die before the 20 years are up, the remaining value of the annuity is taxable to your heirs as part of your estate, even though it will continue to be paid out over the remainder of the 20 years, So your heirs will owe the IRS on money they don’t have yet.
“ If she lives to be 80, she will have gotten over 3 million dollars.”
No, she will not. Not even close.
She would have to calculate each payment to the NPV at unknown interest rates each month.
Moreover, the life expectancy of a twenty-years-old is not known.
The market can and will crash again. The dollar will continue getting weaker as the government keeps printing excess money under DJT. In the long and not so long run gold neither loses nor gains value. It preserves it. As the money loses value, gold maintains value.
Just so. At my age, I want to have a store of value to live on if/when the dollar shatters. If we don’t get real about Islam, pace “radical Islam” I may well live to see it.
A thousand a week comes out to over three million. I think that outruns inflation and if it doesn’t it won’t matter anyway.
I noticed the fine print, which they flash by very quickly, in the America’s Got Talent show. The award is a million dollars, but the monthly payment is stretched out over forty years. That used to be a mortgage note per month. They could generate the annuity for that with about one of those one minute advertisements. Your logic might hold with that.
To me, the answer to this question is a matter of how well you handle money. If you handle money well, then then you take the million. If you do not handle money well, then you take the $1000@week.
that’s why I have not heard from Publisher Clearinghouse. there were years when I thought about playing their game. Never did.
I disagree.
The 1980-2025 correlation between the price of gold in US Dollars, and the value of the US Dollar against a basket of foreign currencies, often looks completely random to me.
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