Americans spend about $80 billion on lottery tickets every year. That’s over $600 per household! Instead of throwing money away on a chance to win the jackpot, use it for an emergency fund or pay off credit card debt. The truth is that winning the lottery takes work, knowledge of probability, and a lot of persistence. The odds of winning aren’t as low as you think. Here are some tips to increase your chances of success.

Lottery has a long history of being used for public goods, including building church buildings, roads, canals and universities. During the American Revolution, the colonial legislatures held a number of lotteries to raise money for the colonies’ defenses. Some of the most prestigious colleges in America owe their origin to lotteries, including Columbia and Princeton.

Lotteries have a number of overhead costs, including paying employees and running the system behind the scenes. So even if you don’t win, a small portion of each ticket purchase goes towards those workers and the system itself. And that’s why interest rates are a big factor in the advertised jackpot amounts. Those jackpots are actually based on annuities, or how much you’d receive each month for 29 years if you won the lottery. So when interest rates go up, the advertised jackpots go up, too. And because the annuities don’t change, people are likely to buy more tickets as a result of those higher jackpots. That’s a classic example of how the law of demand works.