Summary
Admit it; you very likely have fantasized about hitting the jackpot when the lottery balloons to dizzying heights. There’s nothing wrong with letting all of the options for decadent spending run through your mind. But would you really want all that comes along with winning?
You may be surprised to learn of the fates of many lottery winners, who quickly find themselves worse off than they were to begin with. Yet huge swaths of the public still seem to be banking on winning the lottery as their hope for achieving financial independence. But why not focus on winning a game with better odds that you’ll come out top of?
Read on to learn more on how those dollars dished out for your lottery ticket would be far better spent being put to work for you elsewhere.
Transcript
The recent craze over the Powerball drawings has led to a lot of us idly dreaming about what we would do with a sudden influx of cash. Given the dream that many of us have for a reliable surge of passive income, hitting the magic numbers holds an obvious hold on our imagination. It can even be fun as a thought experiment. Just what would we do with our time and energy if money truly was no longer an object? Would we travel, focus on hobbies we’ve neglected, give back to charity?
Winning The Lottery Is Not A Retirement Strategy
There’s no harm in some idle speculation; heck, it might even be worth the two dollars for a ticket once in a while to allow yourself the fantasy of speculating what would happen if you were the lucky winner. But too many people seem to regard the lottery as an actual, viable option for ensuring their financial security. In fact, a survey conducted in Canada by the Bank of Montreal found that 30% of respondents were actually banking on lottery winnings to fund their retirement and get ahead in life.
Like any investment strategy, actually making this pay off would require a commitment to being involved in the lottery; not just playing occasionally on a whim, but making lottery tickets a regular, ongoing part of your budgeting. This is a recipe for long-term ruin. If you are ill-informed enough to believe that you can “game” your chances of prevailing against some very bad odds, the likelihood is good that you are misreading the numbers across the board in your financial dealings.
The chances of winning most lotteries are exceedingly small. The odds of winning the recent $415 million Powerball in the U.S. was about one in 292 million. This would be the equivalent of flipping a coin 28 times and landing on heads every single time. This is borne out by the reality that many lottery contests continually ratchet up their stakes as no winner emerges. Perversely, the ballooning prize only compels more players and even non-players to come out of the woodwork for a shot at the brass ring.
Play The Odds In Your Favor
You are far better off playing the odds in your favor. If you can reframe your thinking to see the entire world as one big casino and all of life as a game, you may find that there are plenty of competitions out there you can play that offer far better chances at winning. When you choose an academic focus or vocation, you tend to focus on the fields that can offer the greatest returns or in which your skills give you the greatest competitive edge. Why not do the same in where you spend your money?
There is far better potential for returns on investment if you devote those dollars to playing the lottery elsewhere. Even just a few dollars a week that you devote to your retirement account or to professional development funds make a big difference. You can win the real lottery by taking charge of your own life and deciding your own future, through aggressively pursuing opportunities in business and real estate.
It’s true that there are no guarantees of success, but the odds are much better than simply throwing a bottle in the ocean, which is what buying a lottery ticket really essentially breaks down to once you crunch all of the numbers closely. If you are really looking for a sure thing, you could do no better than to pay off debt, which amounts to a guaranteed 100% return on your investment and will allow you to sleep far sounder at night.
Too Much Too Soon
You might also consider the fates of so many lottery winners. The media landscape is dotted with stories of winners who took home the big prize only to suffer consequences they never anticipated when they were handed that oversized check. They often find it extremely difficult to cope with the pressure of inheriting a sudden windfall.
When you have every option and whim available to you all of a sudden, you can lose track of all prudence and the need for planning. Winners can let their imaginations and appetites run rampant, quickly diluting their wealth away with fancy electronics or flashy cars. Material goods are a pleasurable thing if you have made trade-offs and sacrifices to reach them, but being released like a kid into a toy store is often a surefire path to a hollow feeling of meaninglessness if you are solely focused upon toys for yourself. You often see the same syndrome in celebrities and professional athletes who hit it back, but fail to stash away reserves away for a rainy day, preferring to spend it all on flash and bling in the moment.
You can tell a lot about a person by how they grapple with a sudden windfall, but we are remiss to not note that this mania can happen to anyone. There is a pretty good service rendered by the limits of finite money; it compels us to make trade-offs and decisions about what we value and how we want to spend our time. Unmoored from any boundaries whatsoever, many of us are left wondering what really lies at our core after all.
They also can find themselves the target of unwanted attention and pleas for help from others, especially as many states continue to publically list the names of lottery winners. The requests for help and attempts to induce the winner to feel guilty can seem to never end. Sadly there have been even many tragic incidents involving winners coming into harm from others determined to get their own slice of the winnings.
Furthermore, there is something about unearned wealth that can just be unfulfilling. As nice a fantasy as it is for all of your needs to suddenly be taken care of, a big positive aspect of income is the pride you generate by making your own way in the world. Even picking the stocks and mutual funds in your IRA or 401k depends on varying degrees of skills, giving you a greater sense of pride and accomplishment at the returns on the portfolio that you build over time. I assure you that you will have a much greater sense of pride by taking the path of investing in your own talents and abilities. You will also have the benefit of being able to only flaunt your wealth to the degree that you want, keeping your name firmly out of the winner list in the newspaper.
What do you consider to be your winning lottery ticket? How can you best improve your odds at succeeding in the game of finance and freedom? I would suggest that you begin with focusing on the games in which you are most able to thrive, which include focusing on making the most of your skills and personal capacity to address challenges. Obviously there is a degree of luck to all success in one’s career, but it is only foolhardy to rely solely upon luck as your basis for getting ahead in the world.
You can also learn more by visiting my website: tonyneumeyer.com and registering to receive free trainings articles and more. Also subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Facebook. You can get your copy of The 7 Minute Millionaire and check out my other books at https://tonyneumeyer.com/books/.
