Assume a flat distribution from 0 to 10000 and it’s $150 a year, or about a lottery ticket and a half per week at $2 a ticket. Not too unreasonable. But on the other hand, you’ve got to figure lottery spending’s unevenly distributed, probably following something along the lines of the 80⁄20 rule, and that brings us back to a ticket a day or higher.
Seems plenty unreasonable to me. If your income is somewhere on “a flat distribution from 0 to $10000” then you are probably just barely getting by, and perpetually one minor financial difficulty away from disaster. If you were able to save $150/year, that could make a really substantial difference to your financial resilience.
(Though I don’t much like pronouncing from my quite comfortable position on how those in poverty should spend their money. It’s liable to sound like a claim of superiority, but in fact I do plenty of stupid and counterproductive things and it’s entirely possible that if I were suddenly thrown into poverty I’d manage much worse than those people; I doubt I’d be buying lottery tickets, but I’d probably be making other mistakes that they don’t.)
[EDITED to fix a bit of incredibly clunky writing style.]
It still break my formerly favourite analogy, movie tickets—I don’t think the average household making <$10k/year spends $150/year on movie tickets. (Some such households probably do, but I strongly doubt the average one does.)
$300/year (unless someone is a bored millionaire) is still shocking to me.
Assume a flat distribution from 0 to 10000 and it’s $150 a year, or about a lottery ticket and a half per week at $2 a ticket. Not too unreasonable. But on the other hand, you’ve got to figure lottery spending’s unevenly distributed, probably following something along the lines of the 80⁄20 rule, and that brings us back to a ticket a day or higher.
Seems plenty unreasonable to me. If your income is somewhere on “a flat distribution from 0 to $10000” then you are probably just barely getting by, and perpetually one minor financial difficulty away from disaster. If you were able to save $150/year, that could make a really substantial difference to your financial resilience.
(Though I don’t much like pronouncing from my quite comfortable position on how those in poverty should spend their money. It’s liable to sound like a claim of superiority, but in fact I do plenty of stupid and counterproductive things and it’s entirely possible that if I were suddenly thrown into poverty I’d manage much worse than those people; I doubt I’d be buying lottery tickets, but I’d probably be making other mistakes that they don’t.)
[EDITED to fix a bit of incredibly clunky writing style.]
It still break my formerly favourite analogy, movie tickets—I don’t think the average household making <$10k/year spends $150/year on movie tickets. (Some such households probably do, but I strongly doubt the average one does.)
But more on booze, probably, otherwise how could they bear it.
A family of four can probably blow $50 seeing one movie.