Quick pick

This last week my husband and I did something we rarely do, we bought a few quick picks, . I even went so far as to join a pool at work with 4 of my dear friends (although one only joined because if we did win he didn't want to be the one left out).  I managed to make it to a store that didn't have one of the huge lines, and asked how we would go about getting quick picks, after a few looks of disbelief they pointed me to the front counter, I walked out with $25 for the pool and $10 for myself.  When I came back into the office we made our copies talked very seriously about who would keep the tickets and where was the best place to store them, then we moved to the more important parts of conversation...What we would do if we won, I found out a few things about my friends that I didn't know that day and even more about my husband while we were driving out to dinner that night:

- everyone knows what they would do with a little bit of the money but not what they would do with   the rest of their lives
- There's always a bit of money that goes to family and Charity - you know taking care of your parents and putting money away for kids college funds
- one of my more practical friends mentioned that we would need to probably get security for our children because once you claim your winnings it's on public record and you can't keep the whack jobs away after that
- 600 million dollars is a lot of money
- My husband and I have very different ideas about what we would do if we had lots of money
- I think he may be greedier than I am (and I do say this with as much love as I can after a statement like that)
- We all have different ideas about how much is enough money

We talked about what we would do first - Get a lawyer, then a financial planner. But then what?  I figured we'd need to stay working for at least a little while because I'm sure Saturday morning they weren't going to start writing checks and you'd still have to wait until the bank opened on Monday morning to deposit it - I'm sure those large cardboard checks you see on TV do not fit into an ATM machine.  On top of that the bank is going to want to put a hold on the money for a few days/weeks so they can earn some interest off of it before it actually goes into an account that belongs to you, and if your like me you don't have enough money to live on for a few weeks if your not working, while your waiting around for a check to clear.  And again then what?  I guess that's a question that only those that have won could answer, for most of us working Joe's we'll never truly know and for me that's OK, because even though I know we don't make enough to do all the things we want and sometimes even need to in our normal lives, I'm not sure that having all of that money would really fix any of the bigger problems we have and, more than likely they would just add on to what we already deal with.  Of course I say this also because we didn't win the big money - Just $2, and it's easier to take the lofty high road in a situation like this so that your less than middle class existence seems better that it is, but just to make sure I know where I stand in the world, God or Karma made sure to remind me that we were due up for our every 6 month plumbing fiasco in our back bathroom and I finish writing this I prepare to put on gloves and grab a wrench to stand shoulder to should with my husband and continue to fight the good fight.