Triumphs Great And Non-Existent

In a rare fit of megalomania, I went googling about the other day and came across Life As We Knew It vocabulary lessons.

I want you to know I knew the meaning of every single word, although I'd say 98% of them are not in everyday use around here.

Sadly though, I stank at the Life As We Knew It vocabulary games. My timing at Scatter was a world's worst, and I couldn't even master the rules of Space Race. But then again, I was never good at fill in the blanks. Give me an essay question and I could breeze through to an A (my handwriting was a lot better in those days, which also helped). I always had a 50/50 chance at True/False, and I could generally outguess the test maker in multiple choices. But when I was actually supposed to know something...well, the odds were I didn't.

But who needs vocabulary when one is a brilliant financier (one of seven words that violates the I before E rule, and I can name all of them, should you ever ask), such as I (before or after E).

Yes, at long last, I have found my true calling. I am a financial whiz kid (okay, a very elderly kid, but a whiz none the less and whiz senior doesn't have quite the same ring to it).

You want proof? Well, don't expect visuals, because I forgot to take pictures. But here's what happened.

Towards the very very very end of 2012, I got my last and thankfully smallest royalty check. It was for $7.11.

Now what does one do with a check for $7.11? One cashes  it and, and buys 7 scratch off lottery tickets (pocketing the 11 cents as a commission).

I wanted to buy the 7 lottery tickets at a 7/Eleven, only it turned out the one we had around here had gone out of business when I wasn't looking. So I bought them as a gas station/convenience store instead. Seven bucks, seven tickets.

I scratched off one a night for a week. And three of the seven were winning tickets.

Yes, out of the initial $7.00 investment, I made $9.00. I know this for an absolute fact, since I went back to that very gas station yesterday and cashed those suckers in.

According to my calculator, this gave me a 29% rate of return on my investment, assuming dividing 2 by 7 is the way to figure these things out.

Given that I'm getting 0% interest on money in the bank, and my bond funds aren't doing much better, and the stock market goes up and down with dizzying regularity, I think it's safe to say my lottery ticket purchases were the best investment I made all year (and maybe in my entire life, except for that once when I bought a dollar ticket for one of those multi-million lotteries and I got four of the numbers right and won $23.00, but that was a once in a lifetime sort of thing, unlike this shrewd scratch off investment). So I am now planning to take all the money I have in the bank and all my bond funds and all my stocks and buy scratch off lottery tickets from that very same gas station and live off the proceeds for my much anticipated extremely long life.

And because I hate to be selfish, I'm offering you the exact same chance at a 29% rate of return. Yes, send me all your money, and I'll buy scratch off lottery tickets for you as well.

Send your checks or money orders or even better, cash to:

Susan Pfeffer
@ Bernard Madoff
Butner Federal Correctional Institution
Federal Bureau of Prisons
North Carolina, USA

Don't hesitate a single moment. Who knows how long that gas station is going to have winning tickets!