Out of curiosity are you doing an LPN, ASN or BSN?
I am in the BSN program at school (at least for this week). However, I work as a Home Health Aide/QMA. I’m also a First Responder and currently taking EMT Basic classes on the weekend for the local volunteer fire Dept.
I’d say blowing 10 bucks a week on the lottery is still a better investment than the same ten dollars a week on cable TV.
Your children will be less glassy-eyed and might earn a college scholarship.
I don’t understand your desire to be wealthy, unless you want to increase the laziness of your children and raise their expectations for handouts from society.
You want to make enough to quit working?
What kind of an example is this to them?
No I want to make enough money to retire and do what I want to do. That would inlcude hiking, traveling around the world, exploring remote locales and conducting various research expeditions.
The point remains the same. If you don’t need money for anything, why do you want to be lottery-rich.
To paraphrase a quote from Office Space, “you don’t need a million dollars to do nothing”. There are plenty of people who are broke who do that already.
If your goal is to not work in your 20s, I would say that you are correct. Other than marrying rich, an inheritance, or robbing a bank, winning the lottery is pretty much your best bet.
I’m guessing you didn’t try the get straight As in school and go get a job as an investment banker approach?
Perhaps he only wishes to have enough to have a CHOICE about what he does and when he does it. There’s nothing really ennobling about doing what someone else tells you to do, or being a robo-slave in a service job, except that it’s better than robbing people or begging from them. But if you had the choice of doing what YOU thought was the best possible use of your talents and abilities, rather than someone else or whatever the labor market demands, you might just like having that choice.
Oh, for crying out loud.
I suppose Roland is asking, what is the best way to become a millionaire without actually having to do anything to earn a million dollars. Well, the reality is that you’d be better off taking all that lottery money to Las Vegas and putting everything on 27 at the Roullette table than playing the lottery. For the lottery the house rake is 50%. For Roullette, it is on the order of 5%. You’re twice as likely to become a million dollars by putting all your money on one number, hitting, putting it all on the same number again, hitting, and putting it all on the same number again and hitting. That would be much more reasonable.
And Roland, when you exclude “starting your own business”, you’ve basically excluded the way the vast majority of people become millionaires. What exactly do you think starting your own business means? You don’t need a huge amount of capital to start a landscaping business, you need a lawn mower and a pickup. When you get more work than you can do yourself you tell your nephew that you’ll pay him $8.00 per hour if he’ll help you. Or maybe you detail cars. Or clean windows. Or houses. Or whatever. Sure you need some money to start out, but you can save a few thousand bucks over a year or two working as an employee in one of those businesses. If you can’t save a few thousand bucks a year, you might as well not even bother, because your business will fail on the financial side even if you are making tons of money.
So your question isn’t really, what is the best way to become a millionaire, your question is really “What is the best way to become a millionaire if all you do is sit on the couch, watch TV and smoke pot?”.
But how would I get all the way to Veeeeeegas? It’s so much trouble. Can’t I become a millionaire without lifting my fat ass off the couch?
Well Blue, I suppose in exceptional cases like yours, I could recommend one of the many fine indian reservation casinos that are spread throughout this fine country. This is just for you, of course, we can’t expect the normal rules to apply to people in your situation. Everyone else should stick with Vegas though.
For me starting another business is not an option. We did that once and not only did we lose the 50K we had saved, but also our house, and about 145K that we borrowed. I would try again, but there is no way that my wife would ever stay with me if I did.
Starting this year you can now invest $4,000 a year in a Roth IRA. Its post taxed money that is never taxed again. If you start at age 20 and invest $4000 every year (averaging 5% return) you will have $640,000 TAX FREE when you turn 60.
Or you can risk the same amount ($77 a week) on lottery tickets and give the state $11,700. Don’t expect a thankyou card from the State when you retire.
Do you think they will have free shuttle vans or better yet, a car with a personal driver that will take him curb to curb and back? A future millionaire needs to get accustomed to the lifestyle.
Well the best possible scenario or us would be if both my wife and I became CRNA’s earning around 150,000 each. However, the soonest this could happen is when we were both around 42. The plan then would be to live off one salary and invest the entire other salary until about 65 when we retired. However, I think that even grossing $300,000 per year that we would need some sort of “business” to supplement our income to achieve real wealth considering our advanced age.
However, getting back to the OP for the average “lower class” working family with a couple of kids just keeping the power on and the rent paid is a major accomplishment. Starting a business or getting more education is often out of the question. For these people (who constitute as much as 50% of Americans) the lottery probably represents their best chance of becoming wealthy before retirement age. Note also, that going to Vegas and putting it on a number wouldn’t work unless you had a great deal of money to bet. Even $10,000 paid at 35 to one would “only” be $350,000 before taxes, hardly the kind of money needed to retire wealthy (or the kind of money lottery Jackpot Winners usually get).
Again consider this simple question. Are more millionaires created each year from the lower classes by any other method than the lottery if you exclude business endeavors? For that matter how many millionaires are created from the lower classes even IF you consider self employed efforts. We know that the lottery creates hundreds of millionaires each year from these classes.
It depends on how you define millionaire. Most, from what I understand, own their own business, own real estate, or inherited it. A handful are just highly skilled workers (certain types of medical professionals, some lawyers, etc) who invest their money.
http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/archives/000405.php
1 in every 125 Americans is a millionaire
So about 2.4 million millionaires in the US. I don’t know if this includes owning your own house, and I assume its just $1,000,000 tied up in non-liquid assets (a house, stock, 401k, personal investments).
You are probably right that playing the lottery is the only way for a lower class person who doesn’t want to get an advanced degree in something like medicine, or who doesn’t want to start their own business or make business ventures can make a million.
Roland, you weren’t paying attention to what I said.
You don’t need to save $10,000 dollars for that one spin of the wheel. Simply save all the money you would have spent on the lottery over a year, then go and put that on the number. When you win, let it ride, when you win let it ride again, and when you win let it ride again.
You have much better odds of becoming a millionaire by putting your money down at roullette and letting it ride again and again at 35-1 until you have $1,000,000 than by taking that money and buying lottery tickets. The fact that the roullette scheme seems more risky and less likely to work than the lottery just shows that you have no understanding of risk or probability.
This could be related to why you aren’t a millionaire yet.
Maybe that strategy would be superior. However, you fail to consider the expense of the trip to Vegas. Most of the people in the class that I am referencing cannot afford to spend $1,000 dollars plus/ and miss time off of work to go to Vegas for something that will probably fail. The lottery requires at least SOME chance of becoming wealthy (again hundreds of people in the lower classes become millionaires this way each year) with relatively little pain. Now if you lived in Nevada, Arizona, Utah, or California (or a state that borders New Jersey) your approach would be more feasible.
I’ve only been skimming the thread since I last posted, but I have to agree with Lemur. Everyone in the country is within a 3 hour drive from a Casino now that the Indians have opened so many. Granted, you do need Vegas (or AC) for unlimited tables, but you could do the far likelier to win strategy of betting the max allowed. I’m pretty sure you could bet up to a thousand or two on a single spin and get paid for a win. So sock away your lottery money into a kitty until you get to the max allowed bet, drive 3 hours on a Saturday afteroon to your local casino, plunk it down on a single number of roulette, and you could walk out of there with $35,000.
Figure $10 a week means every other year you get to try it. That gives you an actual, reasonable chance to win $35,000, as opposed to the lottery, which gives you no chance at all.
I don’t think it’s fair to count the number of lottery winners and conclude that since thousands of people have won, the odds aren’t as bad as being hit by lightning. The odds are what they are. If there were only 10 winners in the history of the lottery, or 10,000, it doesn’t affect the odds of any given individual winning.
For example, flip a coin ten times in a row looking for 10 heads in a row. How many people have ever seen it happen? Probably none. However, if everyone who ever bought a lottery ticket tried 10 coin flips when they purchased each lottery ticket, I’m sure thousands upon thousands of people would have seen 10 heads in a row. But just because more people have now (in the hypothetical) seen it happen, it does not in any way affect the chances of it happening for any one particular trial.
Same thing with the lottery. Just because somebody won, it does not mean that (editorial) you have any real chance to win it yourself. It’s just that the lottery has experienced so many countless millions of trials that of course by now there have been some winners. (Figure every 1000 lottery winners means that seven billion lottery trials were attempted.)
Over and over throughout this thread, I’ve gotten the impression that Roland is overestimating the probability of winning the lottery—that he fails to appreciate just how unlikely it is. And he’s not alone in this; that’s why so many people play the lottery. In the Illinois State Lottery’s Lotto game, for example, the chances of winning the Grand Prize Jackpot are 1:10,179,260 (as given on their website; though elsewhere it says 1:20,358,520). If you played once a day for 50 years, your chance of ever hitting the jackpot would still be well under 1%, and you’d have spent over $18,000.
Lemur’s plan does actually give you better odds (though it’s still a long shot). If you wanted to turn $1 into at least a million, you’d have to win four times in a row. The chances of that happening are 1 in 2,085,136, if I reasoned correctly. (Note that these numbers are used for example purposes only; there are plenty of variations in lotteries and in casino games, so that comparing could get complicated.)
Having read most of the posts in this thread, I’m surprised (and disheartened) at how people are jumping all over Roland (I think you’ve handled your responses in a very civil manner). That’s not to say that I disagree with the basis of their viewpoint – obviously, there is a strong correlation between hard work and financial success. But gah! Why impugn how he’s going about his career aspirations or other personal aspects of his life? As a disclaimer (and shield against what may end up coming my way) I should also say that I don’t play the lottery, and never will – for any number of reasons already given.
At any rate, I find that it’s an interesting OP, although the conditions necessary for the intent of the question border on “begging the question”. To explore the question a little more, let’s try this: what percentage of people remain at the lower-class level their whole lives? Note that this passes no judgements on their work ethic, relative intelligence, luck/fortune, or anything else. It’s simply a segment of the population that is mutually exclusive of those who “started low and finished high”. In other words, we take it as a given that neither “working hard” nor “investing” is going to be enough to move them into a higher income bracket; if they were going to “work hard”, they already are and if they had the knowledge/desire to invest, they would already be doing so. The preconditions for the question already exclude others not in this category; most of the responses, on the other hand, point to those others and say, “See! Of course there’s a better chance to obtain wealth that way.” Furthermore, the cries of “underserved reward” or “they’ll end up pissing it away anyway and be miserable” are irrelevant, since they’re not concerned with the question itself, but with the outcome.
Anyway, out of that percentage of the population outlined above, how exactly can they become wealthy? To actually calculate any sort of statistics, that would need to be answered first, I think. At this point, one could claim the begging the question objection, since it may very well be impossible (already having ruled out all the other ways).
I don’t have an answer, but the question gave me pause long enough to consider whether those who will not jump up in income bracket and cannot expect to over the course of their lifetime – and surely it’s an empirical fact that such people exist – might be justified in playing the lottery, as it may be the most likely way they have of becoming “rich”, at some level of monetary value. Perhaps the casino strategy is a possible answer, with better odds able to be calculated. However, it’s effectively equivalent to gambling on the lottery, just in a different form.
As I said, I find it an interesting question to ponder.