Farewell Middle Class, The Lottery is About To Make Me Rich

I hate being poor.

In movies, being poor looks great. You either work way harder than everyone else, eventually becoming successful and reaching that goal you have always dreamed of or you and your other poor friends spontaneously burst into song and choreographed dance. It’s fantastic.

In real life, it’s much less pleasant. Without money, it is very difficult to do the things I want to do. It basically means that my wife and I sit at home and, every so often, go do something fun, deciding we can go out “just as long as it’s cheap.”

Well, I’m tired of doing things that are cheap. I want to go out on the town and have dinner at a place that does not offer any sort of chicken tender, be it barbecue, coconut, or just traditional, fried chicken hunks. I would like to buy nice clothing (a top hat, leopard-skin suit, you know, the normal stuff) instead of checking clearance racks at Target. I would like to, as those rappers often say, “make it rain.”

That’s why I’ve devised a fool-proof plan to get rich.

I will simply win the lottery.

Currently, the Powerball jackpot is $310 million. After taxes, a person is set to walk away with a cool $130 million. That is a lot of money. With that, I could pay off my wife’s massive student loan debt, get that new car I desperately need, and still have enough to buy a piece of a major sports franchise or 100,000 of those leopard-skin suits.

Sure, it is a major gamble. The odds of winning the Powerball jackpot is 1 in 195,249,054. It is significantly more likely to die in a car wreck on the way to the Powerball ticket store than to win the jackpot. You’re more likely to be attacked by a bear while in a major metropolis area. You might find yourself being hit by a falling satellite before you find yourself winning the lottery. With the odds so far against me, it probably seems silly to pin all of my hopes and dreams on the lottery.

That’s why I plan on fixing the odds.

My first step is to meet a very rich person. That person must be a sketchy millionaire who has no issues with investing in a lottery scheme.

This step is, by far, the most important step. Without this, I’m just another one of those chumps spending my own money on tickets, losing week after week after week. I can’t afford that. I have much more important things to spend that money on like rent or a Roomba to clean the home that I am renting (I hate vacuuming).

Once I have met and befriended this rich person, I offer them an excellent investment opportunity. For only $40,000,000, I can give them offer them a chance to get double that amount back. By spending that money on tickets, I have lowered my odds to 1 in 10. That’s not near as unlikely. Sure, I would only get $50 million back, but I think I could live with that.

The next step is to keep other people from winning the lottery. Somehow, I have to get an influential person to declare the lottery the worst idea ever. For the sake of argument, we’ll say Oprah is willing to do it. Oprah has over 6,000,000 fans on Facebook alone. By declaring a hatred of the lottery system, I can guess that the number of people buying tickets will be cut in half, making my odds 1 in 5.

With odds like that, there is a fairly decent chance I can become a millionaire.

Sure, I’m a little worried about losing. I could end up owing $40,000,000 to a millionaire who, no doubt, has ties to the mafia. I like my kneecaps a great deal and would prefer they were not broken. Plus, the whole Oprah thing seems like quite a long shot. She is usually busy shouting at her studio audience or hanging out with Stedman, so she might not have the time to have a meeting with me.

Besides those worries, though, this is the perfect plan. Einstein himself couldn’t come up with a better way to become a millionaire.

I’m putting in my reservations for a very expensive restaurant right now. Soon, I’ll find myself dining there frequently. Farewell, middle class. I’m on my way up.

Oh, on a side note, if any of you know Oprah, I could really use a hook up. Don’t worry. I’ll make it worth your while.

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