My next door neighbors won $100,000 last year. That was pretty cool. They just used it to fix up their house a little, did all the work at once instead of slowly doing it.
I only throw my dollar into the game when the jackpots start hitting $100 million or more. For those really big jackpots, I splurged and spent $5 on tickets. I don't get very excited by gambling because I pretty much never win. I think the sum total of my gambling winnings in my life has been $157, and I've spent more than that to win it. I had one good day in a casino and came home with about $150 after spending only about $5. There was a dice game with 50:1 odds for a particular roll, so I figured, what the heck, just put down $1. It came up, so I walked away for a bit and came back and decided to try the other extreme (it was something like rolling 3- 1's or 3 -6's), and I hit it again. So, I took my money and walked away for the night. My step-brother was with me, and we had one more silver dollar left from when we got some change for bills and decided to toss it into the last slot machine on the way out and we won another $50. So, we stopped on the way home and had a nice dinner.
For my lottery winnings, I had a good day playing instant tickets when I was a kid (well, Dad was buying, I was scratching off numbers...we used to buy one ticket each time we went out on Sunday to buy the newspaper)...we got a whole series of tickets that won us two free tickets, and the last one finally won us $2...so we made a $1 in the end, and a morning of entertainment scratching off tickets for me.
Since then, I once matched up enough numbers to win $7 or $10 on Powerball...I can't even remember now. That wasn't nearly as exciting as all those scratch-off free tickets.
I figure, if I ever won $1 million, it's such a small amount that I'd probably just pay off the mortgage to save myself the interest, do the remodeling I'd like to do, and put whatever paltry amount is left into a retirement fund. It would just mean my regular paycheck will take me that much further. Heck, maybe I'd even break down and get cable internet access
