How to Fail at Absolutely Everything!

Lose Money Playing the Lotto / National Lottery

October 27th, 2006 Ozzy

Based on in depth research undertaken over an extended period of time I am delighted to be able to offer you some golden rules for reliably losing money playing the Lotto / National Lottery - a must read for all those people who find themselves with too much spare change each week.

First of all you actually have to buy some lotto tickets if you’re going to stand a chance of losing your hard earned cash. You’re never going to get through your excess money if you can’t decide what numbers to go for.

Lotto Tip #1: Decide the amount of money you want to lose before you buy your lottery tickets, multiply this amount by 1.2 and this is the number of tickets you should buy (on average)… so lets say you want to lose £10 per week, then this would mean buying 12 £1 tickets.

Lotto Tip #2: Don’t check the results of the draw! Just assume that your tickets weren’t winners, that none of your numbers matched, and bin your ticket - this assumption is correct most of the time anyway so you’ll save time as well by adopting this approach.

Lotto Tip #3: Just view your buying of lotto tickets as your way of doing ‘your bit for charity’. It’s not the winning that matters it’s the charitable giving, did you know that for each £10 you spend a whopping 50p will go to ‘charity’! Just write the other £9.50 off as stupidity tax.

Lotto Tip #4: Gambling in the UK and other parts of the world is reserved for only ‘adults’ i.e. those being 18 years old and up. However, the Lotto is an excellent way for youngsters beneath this age to lose unneeded pocket money and develop deleterious gambling habits early in life as you can legally ‘play’ the National Lottery from the age of 16 years old - this legislative inconsistency is a very noble gesture from the Government.

Lotto Tip #5: Finally, remember you’re in it for the long haul so don’t be put off by any short-term wins… if you do win then don’t lose heart, just buy a few extra tickets next week and you’ll soon be back to your losing ways.

Should you be extremely unfortunate and actually win the UK Lotto jackpot then you will have to resort to other money shedding strategies to deplete your cash winnings at a suitably quick rate as buying millions of Lotto tickets would only really be feasible for people whose favourite video is the unabridged version of the “Top 100 Puddles Evapourating Caught on Camera”.

Thankfully though the chances of you winning the UK Lotto / National Lottery are approximately 1 in 14,000,000 which means that if you spend £10 per week on Lotto tickets every week from your 16th birthday then, discounting the money you’ve spent on the tickets, you would have a 50/50 chance of having strook it lucky by your 13,477th birthday! Interestingly, taking today’s £million as a benchmark, if the winnings went up (say with inflation, cost of living etc) at a rate of say 4% per year then the jackpot would be an amazing £3.7614E+229… or, to put it another way, £376, 140, 000, 000, 000, 000 , 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 (no joke!)

Or, an equally bizarre way of looking at it would be that, if you played the Lotto every week from your 16th birthday then you’d need to buy 2,104 lotto tickets per week every week (yes, that’s nearly £110,000 per year!) to have a 50 / 50 chance of winning the lottery by the time you reached 80 years of age!

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Entry Filed under: Money and Finances