WINNING IS HARD

Winning is hard. If you are playing the U.S. lottery, even harder. As Lifehacker explains:

The odds of having a jackpot winning ticket for the current Powerball is about 1 in 292 million. Just to emphasize how small of a chance that is, you’re looking at around 0.000000003% of buying a single winning ticket. You have a better chance of finding the last of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets. Mainly because they’re fictional and nobody would care if you said you found one, so you might as well spend the $2 on a Wonka bar and eat some chocolate.

If the odds are so small, though, why do so many people play? We like to daydream of a better life, it’s super easy to buy a ticket and play, and somewhere deep down we all know that someone has to win and it could be me. If you want to buy a ticket for fun, there’s nothing wrong with that, but spending more than a few dollars on tickets isn’t worth it. Mathematically speaking, the only way to increase your odds of winning Powerball is to buy more tickets, but that doesn’t mean you should.Unless you’re willing to throw down outrageous amounts of cash, your odds hardly increase at all. 

Buying 10 extra lottery tickets only increases your odds from 1 in 292 million to, well, 11 in 292 million, which is still astronomically small.

Of course, if you were determined to earn some kind of prize and “win” the lottery, there are ways to do that. Based on the numbers from a previous high-prize Powerball in 2013, Business Insider explained that it’s possible to guarantee a “win” with some math. If you buy somewhere between 200 and 300 different lottery tickets, you’re all but guaranteed to end up with at least one cash prize. Then again, the non-jackpot cash prizes range anywhere from the most common $4 prize all the way up to the extremely rare $1,000,000 prize. So you could buy 300 Powerball tickets and guarantee a “win,” but that prize could be a measly $4. If you really wanted to cross “winning the lottery” off of your bucket list, a better approach is to buy 35 tickets that each have a different Powerball number. You’ll be guaranteed a $4 win, but be down $66. 

Even if you were already incredibly wealthy, you couldn’t even game the system to win the jackpot. You would have to buy every single one of the over 292 million different number combinations. That would cost you around $584 million and—even with this epic jackpot of $1.5 billion—would still put you in the hole. You would only get about $886 million if you took the lump sum payout (which most people do), and you would have to pay 39.6% of that in federal taxes. That leaves you with around $624 million. But that is even a myth because one would have not enough time to purchase all the required tickets.

 Furthermore, if you were crazy enough (and rich enough) to do that, you better hope you’re the only one trying because it would be possible that you would have to split the winnings if someone else tried use the same strategy, or worse, a dumb luck shmuck who waged only two bucks.

If you want to experience how remarkably small your odds of winning are first hand (and without losing any money), try this Powerball simulator from the Los Angeles Times to see how truly bad your chances are. If you’re still not convinced, financial experts state that you are around 1,488,095 times more likely to die in a car wreck on the way to the gas station to buy the lottery ticket than actually win the jackpot.

To guarantee a cash prize,  you have to buy the 300 or so tickets. At $2 a ticket, you’ll be spending $600. If you don’t live close to somewhere that sells Powerball tickets, you should consider your travel time and fuel consumption as well. Some folks drive for hours to buy tickets, and that makes buying tickets cost even more.
 
If, for example, you were thinking about driving a few hours to buy $600 worth of Powerball tickets, you could be spending closer to $700 or $800 (plus the potential opportunity cost). As Kiplinger newsletter stated,  you are far better off in the long run putting that $700 toward paying off credit card debt or student loans, increasing your 401(k) contributions, starting a savings account, or investing in an index fund that all but guarantee an actual return on the money you spent.

Experts conclude that large-scale gambling like lotteries is merely a tax on poor folks, vulnerable people, and people who don’t understand math. Essentially, it gives a sense of false hope to the less fortunate that are willing to reach out for anything that could possibly help their financial state, or trick those who don’t get the math. It’s just one more thing that can make being poor too expensive.  

However, occasionally paying a dollar to daydream about being a millionaire is harmless fun. You’re probably not going to win, but if you go in with the right mindset, buying a lottery ticket can give you a nice little morale boost for the day. Plus, portions of the money people spend on lottery tickets usually goes to something beneficial for your state like education or parks, so you don’t have to feel too bad for playing unless you are in a state like Illinois which has failed to pay its lottery winners over $600 for months due to a budget stalemate.