The odds are ... bad

When lottery jackpots are offering hundreds of millions of dollars — or even when they only offer a few million — it can be tempting to buy some tickets. But it's worth learning more about the odds of winning before you do so.

The odds of winning a Powerball jackpot are 1 in 292,201,338, while a Mega Millions jackpot's odds are 1 in 302,575,350. It can be hard to wrap your head around such big numbers, so consider this: There are close to 333 million people in America. The odds of being one person in America picked at random are not that far off from those jackpot odds.

Here's some more food for thought: You are far more likely to be killed by an object from outer space (1 in 700,000), to be struck by lightning in a given year (1 in 1,222,000), to die on a commercial flight due to an accident or crash (1 in 29,400,000) or to be made a saint by the pope (1 in 20,000,000) than you are to win one of those jackpots.

If you think you're tripling your odds of winning the Powerball jackpot by buying three tickets instead of one, you're right — but odds of 3 in 292 million instead of 1 in 292 million are still very close to zero. Even if you bought a million tickets, your odds would be down to 1 in 292 — still unlikely.

Remember, too, that if you spend any significant sum on lottery tickets, you're likely to lose most or all of that money, while it could have made you a lot of money had you invested it in the stock market (which tends to produce long-term gains despite occasional downturns).

If you still want to buy a ticket or two now and then for fun, just think of it more as entertainment than as a possible path to wealth. As Fran Lebowitz reportedly quipped, “I figure you have the same chance of winning the lottery whether you play or not.”