So you think you have a lot of patience?

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February 23rd, 2010

This 97 year old man just won the lottery

A poverty-stricken 97-year-old man in Vietnam almost $400,000 in a lottery, a report said on Tuesday, sparking a frenzy among relatives eager to get a piece of his newfound wealth. Thanh Nien newspaper said that one of his neighbors in southern Ho Chi Minh City, together with local officials, had to step in to stop the elderly man from giving away the windfall to people who had swarmed to his home. What was left of the money has gone into a bank account, the newspaper reported.

Lucky money

Nguyen Van Het bagged the prize after spending 100,000 dong on lottery tickets from “lucky money” he received ahead of the Lunar New Year, Thanh Nien said. Small packets of “lucky money” are a traditional Tet gift.

Massive prize

Thanh Nien reported Het’s winnings at 7.6-billion dong, or $400,000, a massive sum in a country where the annual per capita income is about $1,000. “We only know he won billions of dong,” an official from the Fatherland Front, which implements government social programs, told AFP. The official, who declined to be named, said local authorities had to intervene and restore order around the man’s home because so many relatives or people claiming to be relatives had turned up asking for money.

Before the win

Het and his sick wife had been receiving special financial support from authorities because they lived below the poverty line, the Fatherland Front official said. “We will wait for a few more weeks so that he can calm down before asking him what he wants to do with the money,” he said.

The trouble with the lottery

The main problem with the lottery is that it is expensive to buy a ticket. And then having done so, you only get one chance at a win. In addition, the odds are enormous. In a 6/40 Lotto, meaning that you have to correctly choose 6 numbers out of 49, your chance of winning is 1 in about 14 million, very, very slim. That’s the bad news. The good news is that someone wins, so why shouldn’t it be you? Everyone has the same chance. Of course, if you have 20 lines of numbers you have 20 times the chance of winning over the guy who has only 1 line.

We used to buy

Over the years we bought tickets regularly. Then we slowly weaned ourselves off the addiction and these days we buy when there is a little extra money, or on an occasion such as a birthday.

What you get

I discovered that what we were actually buying every week was a little dream. We would walk back from the Lotto kiosk and say things like, “how much should we give each of the children?” or “What about the grandchildren? We have to give then something?” or “What about the neighbors? Them too?” It was nice to dream but very expensive.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 10:47 am and is filed under Finance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

So you think you have a lot of patience?

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