I was at my local convenience store on the weekend. The lady behind the counter was telling me of all the different winning tickets that were bought from her store (winning amounts various including some quite large amounts). She was very proud and thought her store must be bringing good luck to a lot of her customers.

I wondered how much people annually spend on such tickets of chance like Lotto tickets and so I looked up some statistics on the internet.

Here’s an updated link from 2016 showing some statistics for lotto sales in Canada from 2016:

Sales of lotteries in Canada in 2016

And another link showing how we get pulled into gambling:

Why Canadian governments are spending millions to have you gamble more

One friend I discussed this with said she spends about $200/month on the different tickets. Her husband questioned what she planned on doing with the money when she wins. She said she wanted to go on a nice vacation. I calculated that she spent about $4,800 per year on these tickets. My husband and I went on a really nice vacation (cruise) for 8 days for the same amount of money she spends per year on the tickets. She could have her dream vacation every year for the money she spends on the lotto-type tickets.

Now before we completely judge her, she told me she doesn’t smoke or drink or do other money consuming devices. She does have lots of time spent at work so she doesn’t have a lot of time to spend on money consuming hobbies. Buying lotto tickets is her hobby.

What habits/hobbies do you spend your money on and when you see how much you are spending/year on them are they still worth the expense? (CalendarBudget makes it easy to see how much you spend monthly on any given category. You can then add the monthly totals together to have your total yearly expense for that category.)