Lotto Winners – Meet Your New Relatives

The people who are sharing the big-bucks Powerball Jackpot likely are about to meet a lot of friends and long-lost relatives they didn't know existed.

This is high finance we're talking about. Splitting a $448 million jackpot three ways, and taking the lump-sum payment, amounts to $58,300,000 after the taxes are taken out (I put all of the numbers in so we could see just how much dough this is).

One of the tickets was held by a group of 16 co-workers from New Jersey who even showed up for work the next day. Their boss calls them wonderful, hard-working people, so to me, they seem to be the kind of people you'd want to be that lucky.

Another winner is an engineer from a Twin Cities suburb, who says he'll finish up a few projects he has going, and then he'll step away at 45 years of age.

But all of these people, especially the Minnesotan, could find themselves busy fending off the requests and sob stories they're no doubt going to hear from people who feel like they should have a piece of the action.

I'm always reminded of the early days of the South Dakota Lottery, when the big lotto game was called "Lotto America." In those days, the minimum was $2 million, and when the jackpot got up into even the high double figures, people would really start to buy tickets.

A friend who worked in the Lottery office in Pierre would marvel at that. As she would say "Isn't $2 million enough?"

Now the numbers are bigger, and I hope the winners are able to enjoy what they've won, even for the sake of those long-lost relatives and friends.