Buy a Mega Millions Lottery Ticket and Safeguard Your Family’s Financial Future
By Jon Dressner, Senior Vice President of the LIFE Foundation
That’s right. If you pick the right 6 numbers, you could win $45 million today! Your family could face the future knowing that money would never be a concern again. So what are your odds of winning? About 1 in 175 million. Not very good odds, but that won’t stop millions of Americans from running to their local convenience store on Tuesdays and Fridays for a chance to become the next mega millionaire.
Now let me share with you a different set of odds. 1 in 21….5 percent of 35-year-old men won’t live to see their 50th birthday. In actual numbers, that means that around 100,000 35-year-old men won’t be around 15 years from now. What will become of the families that these 100,000 men leave behind?
Financially, their lives will take one of two paths. If dad had adequate life insurance coverage, things should be ok financially for mom and the kids. If dad didn’t have enough life insurance or didn’t have any, life will be much harder than it has to be. Maybe the family will have to move out of the town they live in and the home they love. Perhaps family members and friends will have to chip in to help support the family for a period of time. Maybe college plans will have to be put on hold for awhile or maybe forever. Not a pretty picture.
So the next time you’ve go the itch to buy a Mega Millions lottery ticket, take a moment to consider the odds.
I know….it’s not particularly pleasant to think about your mortality. “What if I were to die tomorrow? What would happen to my family?” If the answer is, “They’d be fine, I’ve got plenty of life insurance,” then by all means buy that Mega Millions ticket and let your mind wander. Your own island in the Caribbean…a brand new fire-engine-red Ferrari…a cruise around the world.
But if you don’t have a plan in place to provide for your family in the event of your premature death, then take the $4 or $5 you spend on Mega Millions tickets each week and get yourself some life insurance. Just $10 or $20 a month could buy you hundreds of thousands of dollars of coverage. But unlike the lottery ticket, the payout for your family will be guaranteed if the life insurance is in force when you die. That’s what I call good odds.