If you're like me, you can only dream about what it's like to win a huge jackpot playing the lottery.
When Mega Millions was sitting at $980 million late last week, I couldn't help but think of my largest lottery win ever… I think it was $20. And, no, I didn't even win dollar one Friday night with Mega Millions.
So I write this with a little bit of jealousy: a couple in Ocean County just won a lottery jackpot of over $1 million for the second time in about seven months.
The odds of pulling that off? About one in two trillion.
According to officials with the New Jersey Lottery, an unidentified couple with two children and a third on the way, just cashed in a winning Jackpot Millions scratch-off ticket — good for $3 million — that they recently bought at the Fischer Bay Exxon on Fischer Blvd. in Toms River.
The odds of winning that big jackpot with that game are about one in two million. That's mere child's play for these two, apparently.
But here's the mind-blowing part of this story: it was back on April 1st that the same couple won $1 million with the lottery's $1,000,000 Ultimate Spectacular game.
The odds of winning the top prize in that $30 game are more than one in 1 million.
New Jersey Lottery officials crunched the numbers, and they say the combined odds of winning the top jackpots in both of those games are about 1 in two trillion.
In real-world terms, they say you are 1.2 million times more likely to be hit by a meteorite than to accomplish what they've done this year.
The winning husband seems to think their kids are behind their luck. He told lottery officials that with two children, they don't get out much. At the beginning of the month, they buy a bunch of scratch-off tickets, and when the kids go to bed, he and his wife go to work on those tickets.
Their work paid off again, now to the tune of $4 million in about seven months.
That makes my $20 big win look even more pathetic……..
Gallery Credit: New Jersey 101.5
Gallery Credit: New Jersey 101.5