Giddy with excitement and having not managed to give away the Readers Fund, The Money Mountain momentarily lost touch with reality when the Euromillions lottery came around last week.
With an estimated jackpot of around £143million, every last penny of it tax free, we did something irrational. We took £25 of our funds and bought ten tickets.
Between the three of us, that would have landed us a sweet £48.3million per person. Enough to let our imaginations run wild.
We’ve all done it. Ever since the National Lottery first came into being, there can’t be many people who haven’t allowed themselves to think “what it…” even if only for the briefest of moments.
And so, full of anticipation, we watched for the lottery numbers to come in on Friday night.
Was it us?
As it turns out, we won! Sadly, we only won a derisory £2.90.
On our £25 punt, that gave us an overall loss of 88.4%. That’s the sort of return that gets a fund manager packing his desk belongings into a cardboard box and being swiftly escorted towards the exit.
We weren’t alone, though. Lady luck didn’t smile on anyone last Friday. No one won the jackpot and, as we write this, the big prize now stands at £167m. Your odds of winning any prize stand at a reasonable 1 in 13; the chances of winning the jackpot stand at over 1 in 139,000,000.
Are we going to have a second go at it?
No – that’s us done.
So why bother playing the lottery?
We’re 3 reasonably well educated people, we knew our chances were not good. The magic of probability told us that there was a good chance we could lose the £25 and be left licking our wounds.
But clearly millions do play the lottery – many of them on a regular basis. Let’s think about why:
It benefits charity
We justified it to ourselves as around £7 of the £25 would be going to good causes (that’s 28 pence in the pound, according to Euromillion’s own information), so we partly viewed it as a charitable donation. It’s a weak argument, but when vast riches flash before your eyes and all you have to do is buy a ticket to have a chance of taking them home, then why wouldn’t you?
We chalked the charity angle up as a reason which, when added to the others, made us feel comfortable buying a ticket. But on its own it’s not great rationale.
If you’re looking to donate to charity, this isn’t a particularly efficient way to do it.
It offers hope. Delicious, delicious hope
When we contemplated buying some lottery tickets, it was only a matter of minutes before we started dreaming of all the things we’d do if we won.
The discussion on The Money Mountain WhatsApp group extended to how we would quit work on the Monday. Chris had some rather unique and specialist ideas here, which may well make a future blog post of their own. Dave, being self-employed, wouldn’t know the joy of leaving a present in his bosses desk drawer in announcement that he’s leaving. Ben probably got a bit too carried away with it all, too.
Even though we clearly stood next to no chance of winning an amount that would allow us to dramatically quit work on the Monday, it seems that those lottery tickets had given us some utility value already. If only in the couple of hours of escapism that they offered us.
That’s got to be worth something, right?
There’s a fear of missing out
This little adventure revealed that, although Chris had a real disdain for the lottery, he used to play in a syndicate at work.
Even though he knew the odds meant that, as a regular lottery player, you’re probably going to spend your life throwing away your money, he’d still chip in £2 each week into a syndicate with 8 or 9 other colleagues in his department at work.
You might think that is irrational behaviour, but it made perfect sense at the time. Frankly, the thought of his colleagues winning the jackpot and leaving him being the only poor sod in the office to take care of their mountains of work, whilst they cruised round the Bahamas in their private yachts, was a thought that terrified him.
The syndicate contribution of £2 per week seemed like worthwhile insurance against the unthinkable happening.
It’s typical of the thinking of a regular lottery player. If I don’t buy my ticket this week, then this might just be the one week where I was going to win it. Maybe it’s worth a couple of quid, if only not to live with the regret of not buying a ticket.
Eventually, by the way, Chris realised the folly of the whole syndicate idea and politely managed to exit the situation. Did his colleagues ever land that big win? Of course they didn’t*.
(* eventually the financial crisis came and most of them got made redundant – that killed off the syndicate for good)
There’s a chance – albeit a small one – that it will result in life-changing income
A win of significance would render The Money Mountain irrelevant. Why would we bother scratching around with a bit of matched betting or trying sell old football boots on eBay with millions in the bank, accumulating interest faster than we can spend it?
What happens when such a vast amount of money lands in your lap? It’s debatable whether it’s even a good thing. The travails of Lottery winners is well documented with divorce, bankruptcy and general misery being commonplace. People have even, incredibly, managed to lose it all and end up in worse situations than where they started (see this list of 21 winners who lost it all)!
But of course The Money Mountain is far too sensible for that to happen to them, right? We even went as far as discussing the fact that we didn’t want to go public should we win. What planet were we on??
Regrets, regrets, regrets… that’s enough lottery for us
Our brief flirtation with the lottery on Friday night felt good at the time. But the next morning we woke up disappointed, and full of regret. Oh, how that story has played out so many, many times in different ways.
In this instance Ben, our syndicate manager, woke up to find an email from Euromillions about our ticket…when he logged onto the account to be told we’d won £2.90, it was barely enough to warrant the time spent digging out his laptop.
And that’s where the reality hit. How could we have been so stupid? Could we have done something more profitable with the £25? Spent it on some stock to sell on eBay? Upgraded something on the site to promote it more extensively? Would they have brought us a better return?
Had we given the full £25 away to charity we would have almost certainly felt better about things.
It does us good once in a while to get a little slap around the side of the head; to wake us up and remind us that there is no substitute for hard work and effort.
Sure, someone will win that jackpot and for a moment we’ll wish it was us. But ultimately, we won’t begrudge them a penny of it – we wish them all the luck in the world and hope they love every minute of it. The reality is only a tiny percentage of people are ever going to make more in lottery winnings than they spend. And the vast, vast majority are simply going to lose. There’s no FOMO here.
For The Money Mountain, it was back to work on Saturday and matched betting to recoup our loses and get on with life. We’d rather invest in dreams we’ve got control over, rather than ones that rest on hoping that the lottery balls fall in our favour.
Do you play? Let us know…
Do you play? We won’t judge.
Do you allow yourself to dream, once a month? Once a week? Get in touch and tell us why?
And even more interesting: do you know anyone who has had their life changed (for better or worse) through it.