The Powerball lottery has reached ten digits once again, which begs the question of who wants to become a billionaire.
If you like to daydream about what you’d do with a billion-dollar payday, big lotteries are giving you more chances than ever.
John Hagerty, a spokesperson for Virginia Lottery said the jackpot numbers are becoming more common.
“It’s not your imagination there have been more jackpots getting into the billion-dollar range and even over a billion dollars,” Hagerty said.
Those giant jackpots are no accident. They’re a product of several factors: changes to lottery gameplay, interest rates and a little human psychology.
“Maybe you go into a grocery store or convenience store and you see that really high noteworthy number and that’s when more people who might normally play decide, ‘hey’ it’s time to get in the game,” Hagerty said.
Interest rates affect the advertised jackpot amounts because those amounts are actually based on annuities or how much money you’d make from the jackpot over a given period. If you win the lottery, you can receive your winnings in a lump sum or an annuity, consisting of 30 payments over 29 years.
Since the jackpot grows as more people buy tickets, there’s a sort of virtuous cycle of increasing ticket sales and jackpots. Even when your odds of winning something (if not the jackpot) increase, they’re still overwhelmingly slanted toward you losing.