DiPrete, Americans in the middle and upper-middle classes have only about a 5 percent or 6 percent chance of increasing their earnings to over $340,000 annually.

According to Columbia University’s Thomas A. His advice is to get rich slowly, but what are the odds that you’ll amount billions in your lifetime like the Oracle of Omaha? According to Investopedia, about 1 in 785,000 Americans were billionaires in 2009 - and it’s a Sisyphean journey to the top, especially if you don’t have the benefit of already being pretty well off. (Compare that with the odds that you’d contract Ebola in Monrovia this week alone: 1 in 5,000.) That’s because the conditions (earth big, your head small) make it unrealistic that a meteorite would find and hit you - but the odds of a bigger asteroid causing enough havoc to take you and many others out is statistically more probable (about 1 in 700,000, according to astronomer Alan Harris).Įither way, that’s all more likely than you buying the winning lottery ticket.īased on the 12 reported cases of Ebola stateside last year, the odds are about 1 in 13.3 million that you’ll contract the virus this year, according to NPR. You’re actually more likely to be killed by a meteorite than hit by one, according to Discover Magazine. Here are 20 things that will almost certainly happen to you before you win the lottery. So let’s take lightning strikes off the table. It’s a game that’s largely for poor people to lose, as numerous studies have shown: Take the Indiana University report that correlated increased lottery sales with unemployment, or a MarketWatch survey that found 38 percent of low-income respondents think winning the lottery is the most practical route to wealth.

It’s time to change the conversation surrounding the lottery, a pipe dream Americans throw about $66.5 billion dollars at yearly, according to USA Today. You’ll become a human lightning rod before you die in an avalanche, contract fatal food poisoning or see the Houston Astros win the World Series in 2015 (negligible, all of them). That said, when it comes to extremely unlikely occurrences, 1 in 12,000 is practically dime-a-dozen. It’s true: You’re far more likely to be struck by lightning in your lifetime (1 in 12,000) than win the lottery (roughly 1 in 258.9 million). The comparison most often made when talking about the mammoth improbability of winning the lottery is a lightning strike.

You are my one in a million