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As soon as we signed the contract to buy our first home, I started dreaming about furnishing it. After years of drooling over pretty furniture catalogs, I finally had a place to decorate. I have also been saving money specifically to furnish our house and, as a part of that fund, I have been collecting furniture store gift cards.

This post comes from Aaron Brandt at our partner site Quizzle.com

It’s time to face facts. It is now December. It is going to snow. And you need to be prepared to dig your way out of whatever icy mayhem this winter offers. Sure, you can toil away in the elements with a shovel, or you can upgrade to a snow blower and handle feet upon feet of snow with ease. This helpful guide will have you tossing snow like a pro in no time.

The odds are astounding, really. Someone won the big Megamillions lottery jackpot of over $600 million last week. Millions of tickets were bought — No, make that hundreds of millions. Did you buy one?

Why? Why would you, or any other rational person, buy a lottery ticket? The odds of winning are incomprehensibly small. And that’s really the key, isn’t it? One in a thousand, one in a billion, what difference does it make? In fact, the perpetrators of the Megamillions lottery changed the odds recently. Previously, you had to pick the correct numbers from 1 to 56. Then they changed it to 1 to 75. How did that affect the odds?

• Before, your odds were 1 in 176 million.
• Now, your odds are 1 in 259 million.

Did you notice? Did anybody notice? Probably not. And that’s what they were counting on. What drives the sale of lottery tickets is not the odds, but the payout — or, to be more precise, the drama of the big payout.

Back in 2010, near the Great Recession’s nadir, the National Retirement Risk Index (NRRI) released a finding many regarded as troubling in the extreme.

That discovery was that even if Americans worked until age 65 and annuitized all their assets, including the proceeds from reverse mortgages on the homes in which they lived, fully 53 percent of U.S. households were at risk of being unable to maintain their pre-retirement standards of living in retirement.

The announcement got a lot of play in 2010, and fit the prevailing doom-and-gloom outlook of that day. But that was then and this is now. Right? We now have entered a new era of economic vitality, with growing consumer confidence, a more robust jobs picture and renewed hope for the future. Right? So there should be a much brighter picture of retirement readiness. Right?

Au contraire, buster.