Sometimes I ask myself why do you so this? You know... I post all this good stuff about FF5.
I've even asked myself why did I decide to become a very knowledgeable person with regard to playing online lottery games. (I dont consider myself an "expert" so I wrote "very knowledgeable" instead) The short answer is because I'd love to know what it feels like to win a big pot of money, not to mention knowing what it feels like to spend a large amount of money on what amounts to a dream/fantasy. (Buy and renovate a cabin on a lake in the woods of New England)
People will think I'm nuts but I really don't care about winning millions of dollars. It'd be life changing if that happened but I'm not sure I want to change my life all that much. I would enjoy taking the quality of my life up a notch and winning a FF5 jackpot of for instance $190,000 which would accomplish that goal nicely. And another thing about winning millions of dollars is that I'd have a whole new set of problems on my hands. Problems that I don't have now. Everybody thinks it's easy to effectively manage millions of dollars, but I'm here to tell you because you've never done it before that it's not. It's very easy to mismanage and lose a ton of money. That's been done many times in the past. Remember The Phil Donohue Show? He had a show where he had a group of multimillion dollar lottery winners on his stage. One woman who won 6 million dollars (as an annuity paid out over twenty years of $300,000 each year before taxes) out spent that yearly payment in about one years time. She spent so wildly that she said she couldn't get any money from each years disbursement for the next 8 or 9 years. How nice. Knowing that you have an annual income of 300 grand and you cant take a nickel of it for the next nine years until you fix the problem that you created. Brilliant.
But enough of that... I do this because I like studying the numbers and seeing what my software reveals to me that is otherwise invisible. And oh yeah, with a little luck maybe I'll get that cabin in the woods. My motivation is also borne out of the fact that I was never really an "expert" on anything. I went to college, graduated with a BA and joined IBM where I spent the following 32 years. It wasn't all bad. I got to do and see a few cool things, I had a very nice house, two cars in the driveway and my three kids got to go to college. But 32 years at IBM wasn't all peaches and cream either. Corporate politics were everywhere. Because I opted out of playing politics, I paid dearly in terms of career enhancement. I also chose my family as my first priority and IBM management frowns on that. They'll tell you that they don't, but their actions speak much louder than their words. My wife had an excellent job. She had a bigger paycheck than I did so that allowed me to thumb my nose at some IBM managers that I worked for. One manager I had was annoyed at me because he knew I lived in a nicer house in a more upscale/expensive neighborhood than he did. He never met my wife and he had no idea what she did for a living so it confounded him as to why I was living better than he was. "Tough shixt on him" I always used to say, and it wasn't my fault that he bought a plain house in a neighborhood that was average at best. If he didn't know any better than to not buy where he did, whose fault is that??? I heard through the grapevine that he had once said about me "I know how much he makes and he cant afford that house in that neighborhood. I make more than he does and I cant afford to live in that neighborhood."
But ya know what? I actually was able to extract some revenge on that moron. His wife had a real estate license and she sold real estate part time. When it came time to sell our house, the market was very bad/slow. I called her and asked her if she'd list the house and she jumped on it. I knew she'd have a very hard time selling it, and if she actually did find a buyer, I wasn't going to accept one thin dime less than what it was listed for. I did that because we didn't have to sell the house, and I knew if she found a buyer she and her husband weren't going to make a gosh darn dime! She listed it for three months without having one open house and she didn't even bring one customer to show it! In her defense the market at that time was awful, so I knew she wasn't going to sell it. Of course my former manager (I didn't work for him when his wife listed our house) was drooling about what he was going to spend her commission money on. That fool actually told a few friends of mine that still worked for him what he was going to do with the money! They came running to me to tell me what that idiot had said.
Today, my wife and I are retired and living on Florida's Suncoast. We have a newly built home that we're the first owners of. It's in a great neighborhood and we absolutely love it. We're pretty happy these days. But I still wanna get that cabin in the woods. I Google everything and anything and I'm learning something new every day. These days I've been Googling the crap out of 'Private Equity' because our son just got a new job in Manhattan (NYC) at a Private Equity firm. I had no idea what Private Equity was, so to Google I went. That kid is doing well...and I mean VERY well. Google it and you'll see. G5