I Should ‘a Played The
Lottery!
It is a lot
of work handling that much money. Most
winners of big lotteries end up badly.
If you are not brought up with that kind of money, you just don’t know
what to do with it. It becomes a full
time job investing, giving to charities, and spending it.
I know, “Just
let me win, I’ll chance it…ha ha ha.”
Well about
70 % of the people that win multi-millions file for bankruptcy within five
years.* Marriages fail and people die.
Sure you can
hire someone to manage all that money, but then you need to hire someone to
watch the manager, and with that much money involved they could join together
and rip you off.
Who needs
all that worry?
Still most
people dream of hitting that life altering bonanza and will invest in the dream
every week or even every day. Some
people even think they can develop a system to win.
I once
waited in line behind someone who failed to play a million dollar game the week
before. This was the honest to God
conversation he had with the clerk.
“What were last week’s winning
numbers?”
“25, 19, 6, 45 and 7”
“No way! I would have played those numbers…no I swear
I would have. 25 is for Christmas, my
favorite holiday, 19 was my baseball number in high school, 6 is my third sons
age next year, my wife is 45, and 7 was Mickey Mantle’s number…I know I
would have played those numbers!”
“Too bad sir, maybe if you play this
week you will win.”
“Damn straight, let me play 24, 14,
38, 11 and 9…three times!”
Funny how he
played different numbers than the ones he knew he would have played the week
before. I guess he figured the numbers
would never come out the same twice.
Smart. Especially smart to play
those numbers three times; that way if they did come out he could share all
that money with himself…three times!
Here is my
secret to winning the lottery:
Every day take the four dollars you
spend on scratch-off tickets and put it away in a solid mutual fund earning an average 7% interest. Every payday, take the twenty dollars you spend
on the jackpot lottery and put it away at 7% interest. Do this every month for 40 years, and at
the end of that time you will have over $200,000 in the bank. I think you would have to be pretty lucky to
hit the lottery every 40 years, and yet it could be a sure thing!**
I wish I had
followed my own formula 40 years ago!
*Ok, I made that figure up, but it is fairly common.
**Once again I don’t really know, it is just a
guess, you do the math, I’m sure it is a bunch of money.
*Ok, I made that figure up, but it is fairly common.
Wish I had also followed this advise. Well, I didn't play the lottery but I sure wish I would have put away even $10 a week. I don't do math anymore so your figures work for me.
ReplyDeleteHow come you always realize later in life all the things you SHOULD have done?
ReplyDeleteI spent all my money on women and, well, that's it. The rest I just wasted. :)
S
3x cracked me up!
ReplyDeleteWhere can I get 7% interest? I'll be there like a shot as it's generally below 2% right now here in England.
ReplyDeleteMy husband has a budget for lottery tickets, etc. and maintains a spreadsheet of losses and gains. He's very meticulous with it. I could never be that thorough with that stuff.
ReplyDeleteA group of my golfing buddies & I played the lottery for years. I think we won a TOTAL of $100.00!!
ReplyDeleteMy brother-in-law's greatest regret about retiring: missing out on the office lottery pool. Did they every win? No. Did he ever figure out he'd never win? No.
ReplyDeleteSend me the $600 mil. I'll worry about it day and night from Bora Bora.
ReplyDeleteWhen ever I do buy one of the tickets for the HUGE payouts, I pray fervently that I don't win the big one. I have my eye on the lesser prizes. So far, my prayers have been answered.
ReplyDeleteWish I had 40 years left to test your theory.
I play the lottery here and there. Not on a daily basis, and the big ones only when the jackpot is high. As far as the 7% interest, though...I'm lucky to get .5% on my savings. Might as well invest in a new sock and stuff my money in it and bury it in the back yard.
ReplyDeleteI once worked with a woman whose sister won $100,000 in a Canadian lottery. This hard-working thrifty woman was broke and divorced within a year. This would seem to confirm your assertion that these people end up worse off than if they'd never played.
ReplyDeleteI wrote a post of the Lottery a while back. Yours made me go back to see what I said.
ReplyDeleteI share your not-so-enthusiastic view of it and your ambivalence, too. In other words, a cool million (after taxes) would be nice. We can handle that, right? without divorcing or going bankrupt.
I did one of those retirement calculators last year and according to it's calculations it's a little too late for me to sign up for Cranky's plan.
ReplyDeleteWhen Minnesota joined the Powerball, we started playing a set of numbers. Now we continue to play them, because if our numbers won and we didn't have a ticket we'd have to kill ourselves, right? Remember the old TV show The Millionaire? Things usually went wrong for those folks, too, but of course we figure we could handle it just fine.
ReplyDeleteI would love to win millions of dollars and I know exactly what I would do with it. I have a brother, a sister, a niece, four children, five grandchildren, two ex-husbands.....split the winnings evenly, everybody is happy and I only have to worry about how to spend my share.
ReplyDelete