How to Handle Winning the Powerball - KXNet - Bismarck/Minot/Williston/Dickinson

How to Handle Winning the Powerball

Tonight's Record powerball jackpot has people flocking to stores selling tickets...

Jon Schaeffer is at one local gas station that has been talking with people hoping they bought a winner.

Today people have been into Lander's Conoco with money bags in their eyes and crossed fingers-- hoping to have the ticket that wins them half a billion dollars before taxes.

But What do you do with that kind of money?

Tonight hopefully some lucky person or group will be multi millionaires -- and will have to figure out how they want to use all of that money.

"Take some trips" "probably a camaro or corvette" "take an extended vacation"

But before you get down to the fun stuff-- there are some steps to handling the big win besides whether you want a lump sum or payments.

Financial Advisor, Jason Kirchmeier says,"It would be a very exciting time. Initially obviously you want to surround yourself with people you can trust such as the spouse who may share in the benefits but beyond that you would want to assemble a team of trusted advisors such as a tax advisor a legal advisor and a financial advisor to help make some decisions."

Kirchmeier says its important to have that game plan put together so you don't end up spending all of that money.

"You would wanna look at insuring your lifestyle beyond your essentials which would be enjoying some of it traveling helping family you can do some exciting things from a charitable aspect but you really wanna have a game plan put together so its not spent frivolously. obviously you don't wanna run out of money with that big of a sum." says Kirchmeier.

so whether you plan to "take care of my local church" "help my kids off with their bills and stuff" "buy out my retirement" or invest it-- plan for the future.

Kirchmeier says, "With that much money you could afford to be fairly safe and secure with it and probably still have more then enough on the flip side you could argue that you're never going to spend all that money as long as its managed appropriately and right in your lifetime and you could probably be investing some of that for the next and beyond generation."

There's no doubt people all over the country will be watching and waiting to see if they are the winner.