I feel like this post, and a frequent problem with these types of conversations online, is that it confuses millionaire and billionaire.
You might be able to become a millionaire if you invest in a retirement fund your entire working life. It's basically required to do so if you expect to retire middle class.
But you cannot work or invest your way towards becoming a billionaire. You can only get there by being extremely wealthy to begin with.
Or through really hard work, right? Like if you worked really, really hard and maybe visualized it?
Give me one very good month of buying lottery tickets and I can get there. I swear I can get there..
I do wonder about that. Odds of winning the Powerball are 1 in 292.2 million. So theoretically if you spent $292 million on a $1B powerball payout (and no one else won), you be guaranteed to win and should come out well ahead because you’d have other tickets that would win downstream amounts. It’s just having that initial capital and surprised we haven’t seen someone try to invest that amount.
Most lotteries are setup to prevent this. There's a fun movie "Jerry and Marge Go Large" based on a true occurrence of this happening.
But I think it’s a bit incidental, no? That is, you have a logistical problem of not having enough hours in the day to stand at a machine and enter numbers by hand (even if you hire others). Guess that would vary state to state, country to country, in how they sell them.
Of course the catch is that even if you pull it off, you have no certainty on how many people you will split it with.
I only play when the odds are favorable. That is, when the statistical expectation is at least nearly the cost of the ticket. But I’m a bit put off by the fact that I cannot order a machine-generated number that has not yet been sold.
I don't know about that lottery specifically, but surely the tickets cost more than $1 then? The payout is usually less than the cost of buying every ticket. There's an interesting chapter in Alex's adventures in numberland about this, about how a mathematician actually did this, but was only able to do it because the prize had rolled over from multiple draws, ordinarily it would not be viable.
The issue is that multiple winners split the jackpots, which is why playing common numbers like dates (birthdays) is a terrible strategy since so many people play those.
When the Powerball exceeds the value of being able to purchase all of the numbers it is common that the number of tickets sold more than doubles the Total number of numbers which statistically guarantees multiple winners. Almost nobody wins those billion dollar jackpots by themselves.
I’m two years away from problems.
That said, I’m a decade away from being a millionaire, which puts me at two decades away from a retirement at my current non-crazy-but-eat-out-a-lot lifestyle.
A big part of this is people not living within their means.
I keep hearing about people making 6 figures a year living paycheck to paycheck and honestly I have no sympathy.
You don't need that brand new car that has $600/month payments. You don't need a 3 story house. You don't need every luxury under the fuckin sun.
Live within your means and you'll rarely go wanting.
This is coming from someone who's been legitimately poor their whole life. If you can't make it with that much money it's your own fuckin fault.
I'm exactly who you're talking about and i can say its not as simple of a take now primarily because housing is exorbitantly expensive and it looks to be only getting worse.
Idk if I even disagree with what you're saying. But its so frustrating bc i really spend on just food an housing and i'm barely getting by. And i hate it.
I wanted to see if the image is small enough for me to fetch:
$ curl -I 'https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/a1582706-199c-4994-9c4b-3057f85f3b97.webp'
HTTP/2 405
server: nginx
date: Sun, 11 Feb 2024 09:39:44 GMT
content-length: 0
vary: Origin, Access-Control-Request-Method, Access-Control-Request-Headers
allow: GET
cache-control: public, max-age=60
access-control-expose-headers: allow
The content-length is zero. #LemmyBug indeed.
For those on limited connections and for the blind, what does the pic show?
Whenever I try to get people to understand where they *actually* are in the class war, the reminder that "you are *always* three very bad months away from being homeless, but *never* three very good months away from being a millionaire", can be clarifying
here, lad