The Finance Blogger

In our last post we talked about guidelines for lottery group play and some of the problems that can arise if you do not document things properly and follow some well understood guidelines. Lawsuits and all kinds of nasty things can occur. None of us really want to have to deal with these problems. Especially when we have won a lot of money on one of the lotteries as part of a group. It should be time to celebrate. Not have to deal with expensive lawyers in court to determine who is part of the group and who is not part of the group. Bottom line, document everything . Get people to sign off as part of Lottery Group Subscriptions.

In this post we are going to discuss lottery subscriptions. At least one lottery in Ontario, Canada offers this feature and it seems to work well and that is why I thought I would write this post. We have not won anything big yet, and we have been at this for the past 15 years or so. Talk about perseverance. No one wants to quit in case the following week is the big winner!  Loto649 offers this subscription service along with forms you can use to document who belongs to the group.  This is a good plan to follow if you are an administrator of a group or group play captain as defined by loto649!

Lottery Group Subscriptions – Play

Basically the way it works is that you first have a form signed by all members who are part of the group, giving their names, their phone numbers, their address and their email id’s. This documents who is in the group and provides all of the contact information. For a group like ours this is really important since we have been at this for so long. Most of us have moved, changed jobs etc, but email and phone numbers seem to be constant.

Once you have collected the money you will then fill in a loto subscription form, sign it as the group captain and send it in.  We renew our subscription of 6 months at a time and pay the corresponding amount for two draws per week. We fax the form to the lottery commission, with the visa number for the group captain. He just charges it to his visa card and uses the money collected to repay his visa account.

Lottery Group Subscriptions – Subscription Renewal

The lottery commission renews  the subscription and then sends out a confirmation form showing the numbers we have selected and the time frame for the draws. The group captain then scans this form and sends the scanned copy out to all of the participants so they have their own copy. This is a great way to do it since everyone has copies and everything is documented.

Winning Numbers

Every time we win something, a check is sent to the group captain in trust and he then sends an email to all members advising them of the win. If it is a small amount we just hold it for the next renewal, however it is a large amount, we distribute the shares to each member. Unfortunately in all of this time we have yet to do any distributions.

This approach has worked well for us. Sometimes we have trouble collecting the money for the next renewal, not because people do not want to pay, but because they are away traveling or just forget to send checks in and they need to be reminded.

That’s basically how we operate. If you have suggestions for group play on the lotteries or if your lottery does something different, let us know by leaving a comments for us.

An update to this post is being made to indicate that we no longer are using the subscription method because the lottery discontinued the service. Now it takes a great deal more work and the organizer, me, was not  willing to take on the extra effort. So we have disbanded our lottery group after about 15 years with no major wins. Too bad but that is the way life is.

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