Poor people spend 9% of income on lottery tickets; here's why [View all]

[Johnny Rico]

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/05/31/poor-people-spend-9-of-income-on-lottery-tickets-heres-why/

The Consumerist recently had an interesting post about a study that shows that poor households, with annual take-home incomes under $13,000, on average, spend $645 a year on lottery tickets, which comes to about 9% of their yearly income.

While the study is about two years old, I doubt things have changed much since then, and it got me to thinking about how I grew up. My parents never played the lottery, but I have a grandmother who did -- and probably still does -- and I had a lot of uncles and aunts who also played. One might think that would have influenced me to play, but if anything, it probably did the opposite. After all, even when I was eight years old, I could see that my uncles and aunts, despite playing the lottery every day, weren't exactly rich. And my relatives always made it clear that they knew they were on a fool's errand.

How foolish? Well, according to Powerball's website, the odds of winning the grand prize are 1 in 195,249,054.

So why do people without a lot of money play the lottery, especially if they know that the odds are against them? I have some theories, ranging from the obvious to, hopefully, the insightful.

(more at link)

Given the hype over the biggest lottery in history tonight, it seemed timely. How many tickets did you buy in the last couple of days?

(Confession: I just bought five tickets, but for what it's worth this is the first time I've bought lottery tickets in 5 years, so I'm only spending 0.002% of my income on the darn things)