The LifeMaven

I grew up in a household with the lottery. Every week my dad would play his numbers in the hopes of hitting that one big jackpot. My mom would get tickets too, but only when the prize was really big. We would win a few small prizes, but never that really big one that would change our lives.

In retrospect, my parents’ lotto habit may have been one of the few flaws in their generally thrifty habits. I mean we would always buy things on sale, try to avoid big purchases we don’t need, didn’t take extravagant vacations, or move around a lot.

The lotto is one of those things that seems innocent enough, like bargain stores or 99 cent stores. The incremental cost is very low, but the long term cost is signficant.

Take my father as an example. He would play the lotto once a week, playing maybe about $14 worth. Multiply that by 52 weeks and you get $728 a year. That’s a good chunk of change. Money that could be put in a savings account, invested in the sotck market (ha!), used to pay off our mortgage or just to buy other things we wanted.

But ultimately the motivation was hope. Hope to hit that one big prize that would make us rich and change our lives.

And that’s what makes the lotto dangerous. It offers people the hope that they’ll get really rich, with low incremental cost and almost no effort.

PS: The reason for the sudden lotto musings? Gregg Easterbrook over at ESPN’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback wrote about a new program with NFL themed lotto tickets. His thoughts on it are here. A great football themed column with a little political views mixed in. Still, very worthy of my recommendation.

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