Cash 4 Life, a new multi-state lottery game , will offer pretty much what the name of the game says it will offer — cash, every day, for the rest of your life. If, that is, you are lucky enough to hit the Cash 4 Life jackpot, which will carry odds of almost 22 million to one.
Still, those odds are better than some other lottery games that offer potential multi-million dollar jackpots.
The Cash 4 Life game will start in New York and New Jersey with its first drawing on June 13. In New York, Cash 4 Life will replace the soon-to-be defunct Sweet Million lottery game. The Sweet Million game was advertised as offering the “best chance to win $1 million,” at odds of 3,838,380 to one.
But with the massive jackpots offered by other lottery games such as Mega Millions and Powerball , it appears that even with the relatively short — for a lottery game — odds, a top prize of a million bucks wasn’t enough to entice New York lottery gamers.
“Sweet Million was underperforming and Cash 4 Life is a multi-state game that appears to be doing well and New York wanted to take part in it,” said Lee Park, spokesperson for the state gaming commission.
Actually, Cash 4 Life will be an entirely new game. Park was likely referring to a similar game played in Massachusetts and other New England states, Lucky For Life, which also offers a $1,000-per-day top jackpot prize.
But while the odds of winning Lucky For Life are about one in 41.4 million, the new game offers a chance of winning almost twice as good. The Cash 4 Life odds will be about one in 22 million.
So how much money could a jackpot winner actually pocket from winning Cash 4 Life? Look at it this way. Current average life expectancy in the United States is just under 79 years — that’s only 26th in the world, by the way. But if an average 30 year old person wins the Cash 4 Life jackpot, he or she can expect to live somewhere between 17,000 and 18,000 more days.
In other words, it seems unlikely that Cash 4 Life jackpots will top the $17 million to $18 million range. On the other hand, the security of knowing that you have a $7,000 per week — $365,000 per year — income that never ends as long as you’re still walking the Earth, seems like it should be attractive to lottery players.
New York state officials estimate that the Cash 4 Life game will put $9 million more into the state’s education coffers than the $16.6 million contributed in 2013 from the Sweet Million game.
If Cash 4 Life is successful in New York and New Jersey, Virgina and Ohio may be the next states to join the multi-state game.
[Image: Guryanov Andrey / Shutterstock ]
