012: Dreaming Big




Uncommon Sense: the This is True Podcast show

Summary: In This Episode: I like to make fun of the lottery, but if you are going to play, here’s how to apply some Uncommon Sense to the mix, whether you win or not.<br> <br> <a class="twitter-share-button" href="https://twitter.com/share?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">Tweet</a><br> <a href="#transcript">Jump to Transcript</a><br> <a href="https://thisistrue.com/category/podcasts/">How to Subscribe and List of All Episodes</a><br> Show Notes<br> <br> * It’s lore that most lottery winners are actually unhappy or, worse, quickly worse off financially than when they started. But those conclusions are based on small sample sizes of people who typically don’t want to be found, or (if found) don’t want to talk about their personal finances …just like most others. (<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/lottery-winners-research/423543/">The Atlantic</a>)<br> * I argue it’s fine to play with what you can afford to lose (e.g., a portion of your entertainment budget), but some vehemently disagree, such as <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/01/the-sublime-beauty-of-powerball-contd/423819/">this response</a> to the above article, and the author argues it well, including this tweet from a PhD student in machine learning: “My hobby: watching underpaid, overworked engineers sacrificing their 20s to an early stage startup ridicule people who buy lottery tickets.”<br> <br> <a name="transcript"></a><br> Transcript<br> I like to make fun of the lottery; a common joke is, it’s “a tax on people who are bad at math.” But if you are going to play, here’s how to apply some Uncommon Sense to the mix, whether you win or not.<br> Welcome to Uncommon Sense. I’m Randy Cassingham.<br> It’s a common news staple: groups of people who work together, and pool their money to buy lottery tickets. It’s often in the news because when they win, they all quit their jobs en masse or, worse, one tries to steal the winnings, saying the group tickets didn’t win, but the one they bought “with their own money” just happened to be the one that brought in the big cash!<br> That doesn’t seem to be a worry for a group of about 140 nurses who work together in the NICU — the neonatal intensive care unit — at Mercy Children’s Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri. “We have a very stressful job,” acknowledges nurse Gretchen Post, who has worked at Mercy’s NICU for 28 years, “so it’s just something fun that keeps us going.” The group has been pooling their money for years, and only played when the jackpot got into the hundreds of millions. But in all those years, they had never won more than $20 — to get back to the math part!<br> This past October, there was a frenzy when the Mega Millions Lottery, a multi-jurisdictional game that pools tickets from 44 states, Washington D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands, grew to the point where the estimated jackpot was 1.6 billion dollars — that’s billion with a B. To put it another way, that’s sixteen hundred million dollars.<br> Once all the dust settled, the final jackpot for that drawing was one billion, 537 million dollars, if paid over 30 years. Most take the lump-sum cash value, which in this case was $878 million. Of course, that’s reduced further by taxes. And I’ll admit it: I put a $10 bill into the pot for a few chances at that. And decided up front that in the unlikely event that I did win, I’d put 90 percent of it into a foundation so that I could give it all away.<br> On the night of the huge drawing, nurse Stephanie Brinkman, the group’s pool organizer, stayed up late to watch the numbers come in. Before she could even check all the tickets herself,