The True Cost of Playing the Lottery

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The True Cost of Playing the Lottery

Learning more about the odds of winning a big jackpot may not be enough to discourage you from buying daily or weekly lottery tickets. Perhaps talking about the true financial cost of those tickets will help dissuade you from buying tickets. Most people do not like wasting money, but many will spend a small fortune on lottery tickets in their lifetimes, which is unlikely to ever pay off.Get more news about 彩票包网服务,you can vist loto98.com

Lotteries have often been called a “tax on the poor,” and for good reason. The majority of lottery ticket buyers are in the lower income tax brackets. Often less educated about finances and less likely to save money for retirement, these lottery players don’t view the expense of a few lottery tickets as a major cash outlay. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. In the long run, spending money on tickets that never win costs players more than just the face value of the tickets and prevents many people from ever getting out of debt.

To illustrate this point, let’s say an average lottery player spends $5 per week on Powerball tickets. That’s $20 each month or $240 spent on lottery tickets every year. This person buys lottery tickets every month of every year for 25 years, as my grandfather did throughout his adult life. The amount spent on lottery tickets over a lifetime is $6,000, which surely could have been put to better use. Instead, that $6,000 disappeared, and never won any jackpot big enough to cover the player’s expenses.

Now, what if that $20 had instead been socked away every month into an interest-bearing savings account, CD, or retirement investment, paying a conservative average of 5% per year? How much would that player have earned at the end of the 25-year period?

$12,027.23. That’s how much.

By depositing that $20 every month into an account earning just 5%, a lottery player could double his or her money in 25 years. Putting that money towards retirement, debt, or furthering your career with an education are all better ways to use your money, and with much better returns.