Yeah, somebody actually won that $1.08 billion Powerball. Just in case you were wondering, the winning numbers were 7, 10, 11, 13 and 24, with a Powerball of 24.
No, I didn’t win. You didn’t either.
Why?
Because it’s almost statistically impossible.
Of course the allure of a better life keeps people coming back to play because “you can’t win if you don’t play”, but the actual odds of winning if you buy a single ticket are 1 in 292,201,338 or 0.000000003%.
Of course the odds don’t stop people from playing, and a 2016 survey revealed that more than $70 billion a year is spent on buying lottery tickets. That works out to roughly $230 per American. And people DO win. So there has to be some way to increase your odds of winning, right?
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The short answer is simply buy more tickets. But how many more tickets is the key.
Let’s say you’re Jeff Bezos rich AND you can suspend time to prevent anybody from buying a single Powerball ticket. Remember that 292,201,338 number from earlier in the post? The reason your odds are 1 in 292,201,338 is that’s how many possible number combos there are in the Powerball drawing. So that’s how many tickets you’d need to buy: 292,201,338.
Each ticket costs $2, so buying all 292,201,338 combos would cost you $584,402,676.
That’s right. You can ensure a win by buying more than HALF A BILLION DOLLARS worth of lottery tickets.
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Bad news… even if it were doable (it’s not) and the prize were as high as it was recently ($1.08 billion), it still wouldn’t be worth it. Because lump sum payments and taxes.
If you take the lump sum payment, that’s roughly 60% of the total. That takes the total down from $1.08 billion to $644 million. And then you have to pay 37% taxes on almost all of that “income” you brought in, which would mean $239 million in taxes… which brings your winnings down to $405 million.
Remember, you spent $584 million to buy all the tickets, so if you only end up winning $405 million after taxes, you actually lost $178 million in the process.
At the end of the day, if you want to plunk down two bucks for a shot at maybe winning an almost statistically impossible game… go for it!
But don’t say you weren’t warned if you don’t ever win. Because now you know the odds.