Why Don’t You Put Your Lottery Energy into Making Money? Let’s Count the Money, Time and Effort You’ve Spent!
Spending Money to Make Money… Is It Really Worth It?
You’ve heard the age-old adage that you’ve got to spend money to make money. Now, while this is true to a certain degree, there has got to be a point where you say screw it and just stop throwing your hard earned money down the drain and pocketing it?
This quandary has been around for a long time, and in all honesty, it
The Experiments
There have been numerous experiments where people have taken $100 and purchased 100 scratch-off tickets. The experiment is to see how much money can be won if you play these scratch offs. The result is rather abysmal.
One person won as much as $41 while another won $38. When you think about it, you are losing a lot of money. Oh! And what about if you spend a large amount on scratch offs every week or every day? When you look at it that way, it’s such a waste of both time and energy!
The Breakdown
Now, I’m going to be honest. I am cheap and broke, otherwise I would do this experiment myself. It would be interesting to see with my own eyes the results. But, alas, I am a college student who makes ends meet by writing (the perpetual starving artist, that’d be me!). So instead of giving you first-hand numbers, I will relay information from the experiments I’ve stumbled across.
Monetary Investment
• $100 for the tickets
• Estimated $10 for gas use and extra purchases made at the store (how many times have you went into a store and purchased JUST lotto tickets?)
Time Investment
• 30 minutes researching games with the best odds of winning
• Estimated 15 to 30 minutes going to buy tickets
• 60 to 120 minutes scratching the tickets and double checking them
Emotional Investment
• Hopeful
• Anger
• Sadness
• Desperation
• Regret
All in all, you are going to spend $110 and potentially walk away less than half of that! Let’s not forget the approximate 3 hours you will never get back.
We cannot forget the emotional turmoil that you are putting yourself through. While you are sitting on the edge of your couch, your emotional responses go all over the place. You can be ecstatic when you win and then as the pile of losing tickets mount up, you slip deeper and deeper into despair and anger when you ultimately reach anger and regret.
It’s Time for Math!
Now, while people may not shell out $100 at a clip on these scratch offs, how about we say they spend $100 a month. Let’s do some math here.
Money Spent — 110 x 12 = $1,320 a year
Time Spent — 180 x 12 = 2,160 minutes (36 hours or 3 days) a year
Let’s say someone does this every year for the next 20 years.
Money Spent – 1320 x 20 = $26,400
Time Spent – 2160 x 20 = 43,200 minutes (720 hours or 30 days)
A Realization
Now we know this is a one-time experiment and the people who did it only go through these things once. But for millions of people, they experience this kind of stuff sometimes regularly. For many people who suffer from gambling addiction and they cannot live without this rush. While these numbers are made up, a lot of people spend more than this and often go into debt because of it. I understand that it is a personal choice and it is no different than spending $110 on a new pair of shoes every month—but the amount of time you spend and the emotional roller coaster that you go through… Is it worth it in the long run?
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