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Mega Millions Lottery by the numbers

Every Tuesday and Friday there are millions at stake. What could you do with that cash if your numbers are called?

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By

Angus Kidman

Updated

Fact checked

The Mega Millions jackpot grows to unfathomable amounts of cash, sometimes reaching over $500 million. Let’s explain that huge number with more numbers.

How likely are you to win the Mega Millions?

The odds of hitting the jackpot are 1 in 258,890,850. That means the whole population of France, Germany, England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Spain would all have to play the lottery to generate just one jackpot winner.

Or to look at it another way: if you played the lottery every day of your life from birth, you would have to live to be 709,290 years old to have one statistical chance of winning.

How big does the Mega Millions prize get?

The largest jackpot so far tallied in at $1.537 billion. A jackpot of over $540 million, which has happened twice in the last decade, is larger than the gross domestic product of 8 countries: Micronesia, Tonga, São Tomé and Príncipe, Palau, the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Dominica and Tuvalu.

What could you spend the Mega Millions prize on?

Winning a jackpot of over $540 million would be enough to purchase 1,859 new houses in the United States based on the current median house sale price of $290,400, or 5 Playboy Mansions.

If you won, you could purchase a 2016 Model S Tesla ($90,000), a Submariner Rolex watch ($19,000) and a houseboat ($459,000) for every one of the 394 athletes in the 2016 US Olympics team – and still have about $316 million in spare cash.

So what if you don’t win the Mega Millions?

In reality, you’re 217 times more likely to be struck by lightning in a given year than you are to win the lottery. Buying a ticket can be fun, but coming up with a savings and investment plan is a much more certain path to riches. so saving and investing your money is a much better financial plan.

Start with the basics: set a budget, create an automatic savings plan where some of your money is automatically transferred to your savings account at your chosen frequency, and set yourself a clear goal, like buying your own place within a decade. We can help you work out how much you’ll need to earn to achieve that goal.

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