Probably opening up myself for attack but I decided to keep track last year of all lottery playing, I quite enjoy playing the scratch off’s every Thursday and Saturday night, the Cash 5 every night and other draw games when I get the notion.
Losses
Scratch offs 2,390.00
Cash Five 426.00
Other Draw games 371.00
Out of area scratch and draw 127.00
You flushed over $3,000 down your toilet and did not even clog it up! What a waste of part of your hard-earned cash, after paying taxes and other expenses of employment. If you had invested that money into a low-cost stock ETF fund, you would already have more than you lost! Most likely your $3,314 would double to $6,628 in about 8 or 9 years.
Comes to about a pack a day of cigarette habit (I don’t smoke) comes to about 9.08 a day, the average pack of cigarettes in my state is 9.54, and it doesn’t kill you.
I do give to the needy, in my state it benefits older citizens with property tax/rent rebates, transportation, prescriptions etc.
The other “needy” in my state are well compensated by Harrisburg trust me, they get plenty from me in taxes, plenty.
Agreed. If someone is pissing away $$$ in lottery tickets and can’t eat or pay the mortgage (it could be $100/mo) then that’s a problem.
If someone uses a tiny part of their wealth to buy tickets, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s no different then spending $3,300 on football season tickets
Don’t kid yourself. The well-known mathematical probability of you winning any given lottery is so small that you can gamble all your life and not ever win any significant amount. Do you enjoy beating your head against a concrete wall? Most addictions are like that. You know you should quit, but can’t. There are so many useful things that you could be doing instead.
Lots of things are enjoyable. Most addictions are enjoyable, or people would stop doing them. The only solution is to learn how to overcome your addiction and find other, less harmful things to enjoy. Flushing money down a toilet, no matter how small the amounts, will add up to a major problem as the addiction grows so that you require larger and larger amounts to feed your habit. Stop now before it is too late. I used to gamble in my stupid youth. I quit voluntarily when I finally realized how silly it was, and that gambling was getting me nowhere and nothing.
Go for something that has a better-than-even chance of making you rich, not a million to 1 chance to make you poorer. Stock mutual funds? They worked for me, and I still enjoyed the trip along the way!