Buying lottery tickets is completely rational.

Buying a lottery ticket gives you licence to dream. If you don't buy one then you're stuck in your respective rut (family, work, financial, geographical, etc). But if you do buy one then you can dream about "what I would do if I won!"

It doesn't matter if the chances are one in a trillion, because winning is only a small part of the "value."

There are two distinct types of lottery tickets, each with different kinds of value: instant gratification (e.g. scratch offs) where the exciting aspect is higher but the time to dwell is lower, or the delayed gratification (e.g. weekly draws) where excitement is lower/delayed but the dwelling time is higher.

But in general every time I read someone bash lottery ticket buyers because "don't they know the odds!!!" I just have to roll my eyes. Because these people couldn't have missed the point more.

    Buying a lottery ticket gives you licence to dream. 

> Movie at the theater: $12 (average)

> Popcorn and a drink: $13

> Or, Netflix/Amazon Prime, RedBox and spend $3 or $4 on the experience, plus whatever’s in the fridge.

Sure, if you have a room that is functionally a movie theater. And if the movie you want is on one of those services.

> People tell me all the time that they can’t afford something. But then I’ll watch their Twitter feed, or Facebook, or Instagram, and I’ll see the reason why not.

What they're saying is that they can't afford both thing A and thing B at the same time, and that they would rather have thing A.

Maybe they would rather have Starbucks in the morning than whatever thing they were discussing with you.

I've always thought that the more important and interesting choice to ruminate about in this vein is "I don't have time."

You do have time, it's just that you're filling it with something else you find more important. Every time I tell someone "I don't have time" I try to envision myself telling them "I have more important things to do with my time" instead. It's usually an unnecessarily harsh thing to say out loud, which is why I typically don't vocalize it, but it's an interesting thought exercise that can help to keep you honest about your priorities and visualize the perspectives of other people that come asking for your time.

Also, just like there are people that really can't afford certain things, there are some justifications that I think most people would consider perfectly reasonable for really, actually not having time. But in many cases, both time and money are choices.

Wealth is not revenue, it is income that comes about in abundance. To increase income either increase revenue or decrease expenses. It turns out that decreasing expenses is nearly risk free and is easier. Hence the Millionaires Next Door are good at that strategy. Not sure why this book is having a resurgence, but the other big point it made was the value of owning your own business versus working for someone else.

A close corrollary of the expense thing is to evaluate debt as an investment with a guaranteed return equal to the interest you're paying. Once you see it like that, it's very hard to argue against paying off all of your debt as quickly as possible. Those returns are hard to come by on the revenue side.

OP doesn't seem to understand the ideas he's trying to communicate. Speaking as someone who loves advice, there are few things that annoy me more than bad advice.

Your spending is a choice, yes. But since the benefit of a purchase (the profit) isn't included in the cost numbers, advice like OP's must always be wrong.

Imagine someone who drinks 20 lattes from starbucks a month alone while reading (spending $1200/year), and would be happier reading spending his time and money reading in the park and getting a $100 massage once a month. For him changing what he's spending on would make him happier.

Now imagine someone who has avoided spending money on an office, and so holds business meetings at starbucks around 20 times a month. Is this a bad purchase? What about someone who drives late at night to save time by avoiding traffic, and who sometimes keeps himself awake by buying coffee from starbucks. I think these cases are much harder to call "wrong".

OP should focus on what's true: if you analyze how you're spending your resources (time, money, attention, and energy), you can often find awesome ways to improve your life. Instead we have an article about how going to the movies and buying starbucks is a waste of money... which is to say we have an article that is a waste of time to read.

Not to mention this gem:

> I have this thing about lottery tickets. Why do people invest in a gamble? (You might try and reply that everything is a gamble, and to that, I’d be polite and say nothing.)

There is a big difference between negative EV betting (lotteries), and positive EV betting. Let's take as an example hiring someone who might not work out, but probably will. If you don't think that hiring is a gamble, you haven't played the hiring game long enough. People's partners get accepted to their dream job across the country, and the strain of the separation causes them to move as well. Their college friends found a company and poach them. Even the most vetted candidates don't always work out.

Which is to say that everything is a gamble. If someone tells you otherwise, they haven't been in business long enough.

</rant>

I started tracking my finances much better about 3/4 months ago, it was fairly eye opening, I found I was spending: £40 a month on a cup of coffee each morning, £48 buying lunch rather than taking it in, £25ish on magazines to read on the train, and a whole host of random little buys that I never needed adding up to £300 a month. I decided I couldn't afford it anymore, dropped them, don't miss them.

I've also gone down the route of Netflix & Spotify, we have no TV subscription (cut-the-cord of that particular beast). It makes life much easier, and my house has never been less cluttered.

(I do like a lottery ticket though, I've won some trivial amount off them ~£30-40, mostly because it's £2 a week and it's a bit of fun)

Didn't really understand the title, should it be:

"I can't afford it" is a choice

The rational thing to do is to spend money in a way that maximizes happiness. My favorite paper on the topic (actionable and based on science): http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dtg/DUNN%20GILBERT%20&%20WIL...

Pardon my french, but the linked blog post is just a pile of santimonious bullplop. There are many, many people in the U.S. and outside of it for whom "I can't afford it" is not a choice.

There are plenty of people who cannot afford to live in a safe, or even reasonably safe neighborhood. There are people who cannot afford life-saving medicine or medical care. There are people who cannot afford to send their children to college, or even before that to buy them the iDevices and computers that would give them an edge in their education. There are plenty of families who have not bought new clothes in years because they simply can't afford it after the necessities have been paid for.

This is happening in the U.S.: in the East Bay, just a few miles from SV; in south-central LA, in most of San Bernardino and Riverside counties, in Detroit, in Cleveland, in south-west Chicago, in New York, in New Orleans...

Blog posts like this just reinforce the common perception outside of SV that Silicon Valley is now populated by a bunch of wealthy, out-of-touch individuals who have no understanding of how hard life is for people who didn't hit the jackpot in terms of family, upbringing, or education.

> Now imagine someone who...holds business meetings at starbucks...[or] drives late at night...and...keeps himself awake by buying coffee from starbucks

These examples are unusual. The typical case imagined by the OP is that the value of movies and Starbucks is smaller than the price paid for them, and for a consumer in that typical case, it's possible to arbitrage by reallocating budget away from them.

From the article:

> I try to hold off or not buy at all, when it’s just a "want" without any real obvious value beyond the purchase.

It's pretty clear that he's saying to avoid purchases where cost >> long_term_value (where ">>" means "much greater than"). He is taking the benefits into account, but largely restricting his attention to cases where the benefit is minimal -- at least from a long-term view.

> There is a big difference between negative EV betting (lotteries), and positive EV betting.

You're definitely right to criticize the author on that aspect -- his stated reason for avoiding lottery tickets doesn't give a favorable impression of his understanding of probability.