20 Years of Buying Lottery Tickets...

My Rich Nerds,

Growing up, I loved going to the gas station with my parents. Not just for the smell of gasoline (don’t judge me, you love it too) but for the candy and ICEEs🥤.

My parents, on the other hand, were filling in bubbles on a piece of paper and asking the cashier for "quick picks." Yes—lottery tickets. We were poor, and like many others, my parents hoped to get rich overnight. But before I tell you how much money they actually won, let's talk about the psychology, some statistics, and my real problem with this mentality.

🧠 The Psychology

Humans are remarkably good at tricking themselves into the "get rich quick" fantasy. Ironically, our brains are wired to take the path of least resistance, so I don't blame people. The simple act of imagining how your life could be if you got rich overnight is intoxicating and delivers a sweet dopamine hit. To make matters worse, humans suffer from many cognitive biases, such as survivorship bias. If you’ve ever thought, “Wow, everyone online is making so much money except for me”. The reality is, most people are making around $60,000 per year. THIS is survivorship bias in action; we focus on the 1% instead of the 99%.

So, whether it's the casino, meme coins, sports betting, or state mega-lotteries like Powerball, entire industries are built around exploiting this "feature" of the human brain and extracting money from your wallet. Now for some juicy numbers…

🔢 What The Numbers Say

Nearly half of U.S. adults buy at least one lottery ticket every year. In 2023, U.S. lottery players spent about $321 per person on tickets, totaling over $100 billion nationwide. I can buy 1 boba tea every week for an entire year for that amount! As I was typing this, I was curious how much my wife and I spent on boba in 2025:

The math is even more brutal than a Dark Souls boss fight on New Game+7—or trying to explain the Evangelion ending to someone who's never seen anime (please reply to this email if you understood any of these references). The odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are about 1 in 292 million — roughly the same ballpark for Mega Millions. Here’s a (totally not AI-generated) example to illustrate how insane this is: Imagine being blindfolded and randomly pointing to someone in the United States—your odds of picking one specific person are better than winning Powerball.

Now, most finance people will make the following analogy: “If you invest the same $321 each year in the stock market, you’ll make $150,000 after 40 years!”

My Take

While this is true, I'm not worried about someone spending $321 per year ($26 per month). What concerns me is the mindset—people hoping to get rich overnight through gambling instead of investing in themselves or setting up a monthly automated investment for their Roth IRA. Listen, buying the occasional lottery ticket is fine—just call it what it is: entertainment. It's not a replacement for actual investing or building better habits. The reliable path to building real wealth is boring and unsexy, not a random number generator 🎲

Oh, and my parents? They won a couple thousand dollars from the lottery over 20 years—and they’re still not profitable. Fortunately, their kids learned to be financially literate and set up their investment accounts 😉