“We’ve all heard stories of lottery winners, rock stars, heirs and heiresses, and professional athletes becoming millionaire morons who wake up rich but are broke by nightfall.” – Robert Kiyosaki
Imagine winning $500 million dollars from the lottery. Imagine the cars you can buy, the celebrities your money can get you rubbing elbows with, the 7-star hotels you can stay at in Dubai, and the expansion you could have for a home. So many possibilities right? Well the likelihood of that happening, unfortunately, is very slim. There have been some people who got lucky and “scratched” it big. After 10 plus years of scratching cards, very few people just so happen to choose the lucky numbers. Now, this post is not just about why I have never played the lottery but also why YOU shouldn’t either.
I have been of legal age to gamble and do lottery for some time now, yet I have NEVER BOUGHT A SCRATCH CARD. Some people might think “what the hell did you do when you became legal then?”. Well, I got extremely wasted with a bunch of friends and blacked out before I could even get into the venue. But that is another story. Anyways, around the time of my birthday, I had already been obsessed with wealth. In the hundreds of books that I had read about financial success, one of the things that were opposed heavily was the idea of gambling. It was so engrained in my brain that when I turned of legal age, it didn’t even dawn on me that I am capable of gambling. So many people that I knew wanted me to go buy lottery tickets but instead, I opened up a brokerage account and started investing in companies that still pay me back even up to today. In all of the books that I have read, gambling is condemned because it enables you to mentally prefer handouts rather than hard work. In my honest opinion, I think that anyone who buys lottery tickets religiously is destined for poverty for the rest of their lives. Tell me five millionaires or billionaires who invest in the lottery religiously and I will liquidate all my investments and send you the capital in cash.
So now, let’s get to the reasons as to why you should not buy lottery tickets. First of all, I am assuming now that you want to be very wealthy in your life. If I am correct, one of the key determinations of your future wealth is how much cash you have. When I say “cash”, I’m not only referring to the physical cash that you have but also the amount you have sitting in whatever investment account awaiting for its use. Since this is important to a true investor, cutting your costs is more important than blowing that money on trivial or immediately gratifying things with no true value. This includes excessive take-out food, clothing, trips, and especially lottery tickets. At one time, my biggest excesses of expenditures were on luxury items and food. I was making money and I was making sure the banks knew that! As I got older, I got wiser. I proved to myself that I knew how to spend money but not I needed to prove to myself that I knew how to turn a few thousand dollars into hundreds of thousands of dollars, then millions.
The main reasons that I advise you not to get into the habit of buying lottery tickets are that it stops you from investing in things that bring you a return, but also because you will start to depend on others and “luck” to make it big, rather than you putting in the work and building your empire from your sweat and tears. Many liberals thrive on demanding that the government fund their poor habits, and that’s not how it should be. Some people actually think that their actions shouldn’t affect them in other aspects of their life. All that money that is put towards scratch cards could be put towards a high-yielding mutual fund. Anyone who justifies wasting money on trivial things like the lottery has a lot of self-evaluating to do.
Isn’t sad how the majority of people playing the lottery are older folks in their 50’s up to their deaths? Most of them lived a mediocre life too. They were so focused on mere luck that they didn’t use all of those years to build their own wealth. Do not be like those men and women. They are the same ones who complain about how unfortunate it is that they are working past their retirement because they didn’t plan for it when they were young. I bet they wish they could refund all those scratch cards…
Until next time,
Live Long and Prosperous.
J.M.
Wealthy Fools 