(RNN) – Most of the nation is rushing to convenience stores and plunking down their money for a chance to win the second largest Powerball jackpot in history.
Tickets cost $2, but many are plunking down well more than that for a chance to win. The reason the jackpot is large is that no one has won since June 10.
Powerball drawings are held Wednesday and Saturday at 10:59 p.m. ET. The Powerball site can be reached here. If there are no winners on Wednesday night, the jackpot would reach $1 billion, ABC News says. If someone wins, the jackpot will drop back down to $40 million.
There was no winner last Saturday, so the Powerball jackpot increased to $700 million. The massive prize is still less than half the all-time biggest jackpot, the incredible $1.6 billion Powerball that was split among three winners in January 2016.
Here's a little financial planning help in case you beat the 1-in-292,201,338 odds: If you take the lump sum payment of $443.3 million, after the upfront federal tax hit, you'd walk away with between $300 million and $332 million depending on local taxes, according to lottery site USAMega.com.
If you take the annuity, which gives you 30 payments over 29 years, your take-home pay would be somewhere between about $15.5 million and $16.4 million a year, give or take a few hundred grand, depending which state you live in.
Check your ticket even if you didn't match all the numbers. You could win $1 million for matching the five regular balls (1 in 38 odds) or match the Powerball for a $4 prize - which you can spend on more tickets.
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