He really is.
I'm not talking about his blog. He's not a slacker there. The guy is a finalist for no less than seven Plutus Awards, one of which is for his PF Blogger Showdown series. (By the way, it looks like PT Money has a comfortable lead in our showdown, but there may be a small amount of time left to tip the scale should you so choose.)
What I am talking about is that he's a slacker at buying lottery tickets. He'd need to buy a whole lot more of them if he wanted to excel at it. I mean, he did drop $100 on his Budgets Are Sexy scratch off lottery project, but that was only one-fifth of what the average American household spends on lottery tickets. (Hat tip to JLP for that link.) The fact that J. slacks at this job is a good thing!
Five hundred dollars per year is the average, according to that Washington Post article. Now, $10 a week isn't high finance — a daily Starbucks will run you that — but the lottery is almost certainly a loss in the long run. Even if the winnings per week are $4 (about what J. Money saw in his project) then it's still a $6 per week loss. Why knowingly go into this kind of arrangement?
Bringing up math in conversation, even in passing, usually does one of two things: (a) it causes people's eyes to glaze over, or (b) it annoys them. Case in point:
A Friend: So, do you think so-and-so is going to have a boy or a girl?
Me: A boy.
A Friend: Why do you say that?
Me: Because there's a 51.5% chance that I'll be correct.
I'd annoy a lot more people if I told them exactly how much per ticket they were losing. They'd be annoyed that I was ruining their fun. They might do something about it, perhaps, if I say that they could easily pay for a Netflix subscription with the amount that they're blowing on lottery tickets.
But nonetheless, being a slacker at buying lottery tickets is something to be proud of. To J. Money and all of the other lottery slackers out there, I salute you!
My husband and I have a running joke about the lottery. One of us will complain we didn’t win when the news gives the “winning” numbers. The other one remarks that we have to play to win. (I know we’re kinda lame.)
The point is we’re not willing to waste money on such terrible odds.
Haha…at first I thought you caught me slacking on all the other things in my life! 🙂 But you are correct – I haven’t been spending much in the lottery department lately except for a binge last week when I tried one of those $10 scratch offs. Always wanted to give it a shot, and as you could guess from my lack of a post on it, I lost.
But then again I’m in it for the entertainment 🙂 It’s budgeted into my “fun account” and I never count on winning.
That reminds me of saying I heard from somebody along time ago about the lottery.
“The lottery is the only game that I have the same chance of winning whether I buy a ticket or not”
I thought that was always funny, also pretty accurate.
This is funny…I did a quick post about the lottery on Friday. The point was that I was a dreamer because I never play. I still think about the “what if’s” though (LOL)..
I used to buy lottery tickets in my 20s but found that it stressed me out so much when I lost (which was most of the time) that I had to stop buying them to get my equilibrium back!