Don't make plans for a billion-dollar bracket payday

Take the C-J Bracket Challenge for your chance to win an iPad mini

You begin by paying off the mortgage, the car loan, the credit cards and the bookies. Then you buy a round for the house, maybe two, maybe six, overtip your waiter and call a cab — nay — a limo.

Spending $1 billion demands a long-term commitment to conspicuous consumption (and/or philanthropy). It requires a grandiose vision, sophisticated spending, a skilled accountant and, well, $1 billion.

Warren Buffett, that's your cue.

America's second-richest man and his National Indemnity Co. are underwriting Quicken Loans Billion Dollar Bracket Challenge, smugly certain that March Madness is too crazy for anyone to pick 63 NCAA Tournament games correctly and that Buffett's billion is safer than the nuclear launch codes.

Buffett is probably, and almost certainly, right about that. The odds against selecting the right side of a 50/50 proposition 63 straight times have been calculated as 9.2 quintillion-to-1. Basketball expertise might improve those odds, but not enough to deprive the house of its considerable built-in advantage or of the copious contact information provided by millions of contest participants.

Dreaming, fortunately, remains free.

But if you're still planning on pocketing the 10-figure first prize, be advised that it arrives in $25 million installments over 40 years.

If you're not prepared to wait/live that long, you can choose to cash out for the lucrative lump sum of $500 million.

Since that payment would place you in the top federal tax bracket (39.6%), you'd stand to clear about $302 million provided you established residency in a place with no state income tax. For the purposes of this exercise, let's pick Florida, and Rick Pitino's swank stomping grounds on Indian Creek Island.

There's a two-acre waterfront property at 17 Indian Creek Drive that has appeared in Architectural Digest, includes 16,070 square feet of living space, and is listed at a mere $34 million. Figure another $8 million for a starter yacht like the 150-foot Perfect Persuasion, and you're set on land and sea with $260 million to spare.

Florida summers too harsh? How about a $16 million ski lodge in Aspen, Colo., (649 Hunter Creek Rd.). Or William Randolph Hearst's original Quintuplex Penthouse on New York's Riverside Drive ($38 million). You could also spring for a chateau in Bordeaux, a villa in Tuscany and access to the Mansion at Churchill Downs without having to resort to ransacking the couch cushions.

Any way you slice it, Buffett's Bonanza is a lot of loot. If you were to take the billion on the installment plan, you could buy a new 2014 Ferrari F12 Berlinetta ($315,888) almost every week and never need a trade-in. For those of a more charitable bent, you could provide medicine to millions or feed thousands of the poor in perpetuity. Or you could do as a Twitter type operating as Dimitrov Pavlovsky suggested Tuesday, and "buy the Courier-Journal and keep everything (the) same, except maliciously not covering #UK, at all, ever."

My own plans for life-changing wealth are more modest. The bride likes to travel. My son could use a car made in this millennium. And I'd like a new pair of loafers to eliminate those tedious shoelace trials at airport security.

So I filled out a bracket Tuesday afternoon, submitted it online, only to learn my projected Final Four consists of the regional betting favorites and matches the personal picks of President Obama: Arizona, Florida, Louisville and Michigan State. Since contest rules limit entries to one per cell phone and March never seems to unfold according to form, I suspect my bracket to be wrong as well as unoriginal.

What I know, and too well, is that I have already blown my best shot at Warren Buffett's money.

In 1981, as a novice baseball writer for The Cincinnati Enquirer, I succeeded in ignoring financial advice that might have meant Brioni suits and Maui beachfront. Reds General Manager Dick Wagner, a Nebraska native who was ordinarily ornery, kindly suggested that I invest in an Omaha company he found promising.

Berkshire Hathaway's Class A stock ended that year at $560 per share. Its closing price Wednesday afternoon was $183,860. Moral: It's better to bet on Warren Buffett than against him.

Contact Tim Sullivan at tsullivan@courier-journal.com or (502) 582-4650. Follow @timsullivan714 on Twitter and keep up with discussions using #cjsullivan.