Poor people spend 9% of income on lottery tickets; here's why

The Consumerist

recently had an interesting post about a study that shows that poor households, with annual take-home incomes under $13,000, on average, spend $645 a year on lottery tickets, which comes to about 9% of their yearly income.

While the study is about two years old, I doubt things have changed much since then, and it got me to thinking about how I grew up. My parents never played the lottery, but I have a grandmother who did -- and probably still does -- and I had a lot of uncles and aunts who also played. One might think that would have influenced me to play, but if anything, it probably did the opposite. After all, even when I was eight years old, I could see that my uncles and aunts, despite playing the lottery every day, weren't exactly rich. And my relatives always made it clear that they knew they were on a fool's errand.