How would you spend $20 million a year?
How would you spend $20 million a year?
Pretend the $20 million is guaranteed, and if anything will increase slightly over time.
What problems could be significantly improved for $20 million?
(I am dreaming of winning the $1.55 billion Powerball drawling. Then taking the lumpsum, posting taxes, investing, and spending 4% each and every year. I understand that the actual may be more, or less than the started amount.)
Start a charity foundation, but pay poor people in your community to lead it, instead of local millionaires.
Oh dang, that's a good idea!
I would get a really nice house with a big fancy kitchen and then continue being a hermit, except I'd do a lot more drugs
So just a typical lottery winner.
Sure. I never claimed to be special or anything.
If I came into an unspendable amount of cash, I would make it my full time job to research things to donate to. Charities, or any charitable organizations, medical research, housing the homeless, feeding/infrastructure/sanitation for poor countries, open source projects, etc. But I don't want to donate to just anyone. I don't want to donate to those shitty fake charities that use their donations to line the pockets of their top people. That's why I would spend a considerabe amount of time researching these groups.
The way I see it, after I buy all the things I want, a house, a fancy car, etc. I couldn't possibly spend more than $1M a year on my family. That gives me $19M a year to donate. I don't really care to keep a cent more.
You are probably spot-on. While I am able to do some things, a charity that is already doing things will likely be better at it.
$20 million is a lot, but not an infinite amount. As the cash flow is close to guaranteed, one could get into long term projects and hire staff.
Paying total compensation of $100K, one could hope ~200 people. No money left for offices though.
I would consider increasing the local standard of living by buying a few minimum wage type businesses and over paying a little, ~5%. I would hope that this causes an employee shortage and increases wages. Continue raising wages at a rate the other businesses can keep up with. My reasoning is that I can only hire so many people, but increasing the prevalent wages will benefit far more people.
I also think I could open a at-cost medical clinic. I don't know what that would cost, but I bet someone will tell me really quickly once I have the money.
I don't think I would have the money to:
- Set up a new bus system.
- Setup district heating for a town
I feel like I am playing "small ball" and not grasping the opportunities.
- UBI for people who are currently unhoused. This is proven to increase the economic prosperity of the entire region, leads to better outcomes than shelters, and is cheaper than current homelessness support systems.
- Buy medical debt. You can clear someone’s $150,000 debt for like $200.
Buy medical debt. You can clear someone’s $150,000 debt for like $200.
How do you do this?
Great idea. Some cities are doing this now. I feel once it becomes widespread, it will be gamed and prices will increase.
That’s why it’s a stepping stone to actual UBI. The U means you can’t game it. Give billionaires $10,000/yr too. Then tax the shit out of carbon to pay for it.
That is a fantastic idea. America has such a terrible health system
I'd donate a quarter for 4 years to my city to create a biking network, with some smaller portion donated after the 4 years for maintenance.
I'd almost certainly help the local schools get up to date teaching materials and try to supplement their income by literally just gifting them money. There's only around 1000 teachers in my city, so it wouldn't be too hard to do that.
Obviously myself a senator and representative.
Then idk. Get a personal chef and personal trainer?
Giving to the teachers is great. I had looked up my school system's budget and got discouraged, but a few 10's of thousands each as gifts to the teachers and staff is more affordable.
Donate to some privacy related projects like grapheneos and signal
After taking care of myself, friends and family, and what not I would start acquiring land that I would donate to my community for affordable housing and other community projects with the condition that I get to name everything built on it. All streets, schools, libraries, etc will be named by me.
Aight, but you have to give us some examples of names.
Treadful Regional Hospital
How I always imagined it was I would live a nice middle class life with no worries for bills and shit. Then with the rest of the 19.7 million or so I would run a non-profit charity for people in locations that are unable to receive potentially life saving medications or treatments. Think abortions in the US as a major one, I’d want to help women get to a state they can safely get an abortion and then help them protect that info. Abortion bans are a classist issue, rich won’t be affected and they’re the ones who generally vote for this shit. But yeah that’s my dream, eventually I’d hope to get enough funding or money to expand that to a world wide endeavor with my own hospitals setup in regions where I can offer help the best and guarantee info protection.
Oh and I’d take a lesson from the fediverse and make my funding and how it’s used be free for viewing and pretty much presented first so people can trust my charity.
Id like to buy some properties and rent them out super cheap to those in need. Cheap not free so that its a bit more sustainable in the long term and the money would go back into the properties. Id also like to do a thing where once a year the tenants get to skip a month of rent or so
Really great idea. Funds don't last of marginal costs aren't covered.
Quit work and take lighter loads in school.
Buy a nice house in Maine right on the water.
Buy a supercar, and all the motorcycles I could ever want.
Go on crazy adventures like an Appalachian trail thru-hike.
All this would be less than 10% of my yearly income. The other 90% would go to charity, helping the homeless and bolstering free and open source software.
Came here to agree with charity to FOSS
Pay off my debt, buy a modest home, go back to school, never work a shit job for minimum wage ever again.
But I don't need anywhere near 20,000,000 dollars a year to do that.
After some large donations to communist organizations, I'd put the remaining few million per year into buying commercial slots on every major TV network in the US. Then I'd create Jury Nullification PSAs and blast them over the airways continuously until the message sinks in universally that juries are under no obligation at all to respect the laws currently grinding marginalized people into dust.
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That's such a great idea that I'm sure anyone who did this would end up charged with some type of fraud, unfortunately
I was gonna say, take my boyfriend to fine dining restaurants and fun shows every week, but even assuming we took a $400 each way flight and stayed at a $500 hotel and paid $200 a plate and $75 a show, that still comes out to just $150,000 a year.
Those are def rookie numbers for the flights, hotels, dinners, and shows. X20 those and you’re in millionaire spending territory.
I would identify people in need that are renting a home and taking good care of it. Then I would buy the home and sell it to them for $1.
I know this is pie in the sky, but look into how habitat for humanity does this. You would be causing a lot of trouble for those families.
Tax burdens for the purchase, because you're essentially giving them a lot of money. Kind of like how the people Opera gave cars to couldn't always afford the taxes and ended up having to sell the car.
Also, predatory lenders look for people in that situation and trick them into getting loans on the house to get "free" cash from the equity and then the people just immediately lose their house and end up in the same place.
There are ways to protect them from all of the above, just need a little more than just "give house to good people"
Yeah it's probably smarter to purchase the homes under a trust and then rent them to low-income people for the cost of owning the home.
The stuff you can't escape.
The property taxes. The insurance. Things like that.
Throw in a maintenance fund, broken down into a group fund average with a company on retainer and the salary of three people to manage and maintain all of the properties, collect the minimal rent, manage tenants paperwork and tax reporting and maintenance requests, all the hassle work so that you don't have to.
Depending on where you are even 5 million a year worth of homes could be anywhere between 10 and 50 houses every single year added to the group.
And depending where you are and how that works out that would mean home rental prices somewhere in the $400 to $900 a month price, well below the market average, and well below what these poor people would have to spend to maintain the housing and the associated taxes and insurance fees anyway.
No surprise $15,000 roof jobs. No surprise $5,000 HVAC jobs. No surprise $800 dishwasher replacements.
You could probably also work out a deal with a maintenance company or a contractor who is on board with doing this kind of work for charities sake and pass the savings on to your renters.
All of that maintained and optimized by a fairly simple payment, and the only downside to that is that it would not directly boost the renters wealth via property value increase.
If you then put say like a 5-year cap on how long somebody could rent your property at cost (extending that optionally until their youngest kid turns 21), then that should givethe renters plenty enough time to sort out their financial situations and to accumulate wealth to purchase their own homes or to get themselves into a better position in life, and then you could pass that savings onto the next person.
If you wanted to help these people build their wealth then you could also do something like sell the houses when they move out and give them the value increase after taxes that the house accumulated, or considering that we're in a bit of a housing bubble right now you could also tack on an extra $100 or $200 a month to their rental payments and then refund that money plus any interests that it generated along with any maintenance fee overages that their payments have accumulated during their stay.
The former is a little more risky but could result in a larger payout for your tenants, and the latter costs more for your tenants but how many people get to leave a 5-year rental agreement with a bonus $10,000 to put towards their own house?
I'd go to universities all over the world and ask teachers and students to show me their projects and ideas to help society. There are some incredibly smart people out there that could change the world if we helped them.
Well, since I don’t need a lot in life, I‘d keep a mil to invest and mostly live off the dividends. Maybe two if everything sucks.
The rest goes to educating youth. It’s literally the key to curing cancer, colonizing mars and eradicating inequality and fascism.
Have a good day.
All mine and my family debts paid. Immediate and extended. Friends too. Then a life of leisure followed by paying the debts of the strangers I meet along the way.
That first parts is the best way to get harassed to hell and back. You don't really want to give money to everyone, they'll come back to beg some more, and get angry/violent/dangerous when you won't anymore.
There's the magic of not giving a shit after. But good point, it's entirely possible to do this to some extent as an anonymous benefactor. And at $20mil annually guaranteed income I could always hire someone to do it for me.
Also, I'd be buying remote wilderness and building a self sustaining off grid homestead and not telling most people how to find me. I don't like visitors.
Quit my job
Pay off and renovate my house.
Buy a new car, something nice but not over the top.
Set up services for my neighborhood to drag the people round me out of poverty and ensure every kid gets the chance to get a good education.
Ensure all housing in my neighborhood is up to code and in good shape/safe to be lived in.
Pay off the debt of every person in my neighborhood, prioritizing medical and student debt.
Buy the people I love the things they need, set up trusts for their kids, pay off their debt, help them financially without enabling them into their bad habits.
Feels like that should probably reach $20m fairly quickly.
Become a landlord that makes housing actually accessible driving down prices and providing safe places for people in my neighborhood to live.
Whilst I am very anti landlord, that last point is interesting.
Say, if someone had enough money to buy out thousands of houses and made them cheapest around, undercutting everyone, then sold them to the occupants if they wanted to buy... Would that somehow fix the renting crisis we're in today?
I’m also anti-landlord, because of how the system is built. But if someone was independently wealthy and approached it as a philanthropic endeavor it could be different and solve the housing crisis for at least some. I wouldn’t be in it to make money, I’d be in it to give people that need somewhere to live a place that they can afford. And yes, eventually buy if they want to, though not everyone with limited income can afford the up front costs associated with owning (like when an appliance breaks, or there’s another problem with the building) so I understand why some wouldn’t want to. But if I had the means to take a loss on it, and did, it feels very different than the capitalist landlord squeezing tenants to make their salary.
$19,999,950 worth of cocaine
Two $25 sex workers
Where are you finding $25 sex workers in this economy? If you could supply names and phone numbers, it would help.
Davenport, Iowa. And the $25 ones are considered high class.
OP's mom
$24.95 for OP's mom, $0.05 for your mom
I’ve daydreamed about that Powerball jackpot as well. I’d spend as much time traveling the world. There’s so much out there to see, and I’ve only ever really spent time in a small part of my own country. And I’m not talking about a few days here and there in new places. I’m talking about spending weeks at a time experiencing other cultures.
I'd give most of it away to charity and use the rest to keep my family comfortable for the foreseeable future.
Probably live on a million- maybe 2- and spend most of my time giving the rest away.
Bloody helfire. If I had $1,000,000 I would never have to work or worry about money again. I can't even comprehend 20 million.
So I guess I'd take 1 million, and then stuff the rest in some charity trust thing that could help my local community.
Probably give milion to someone that really needs it in person and to see how they react.
Money is just such an overrated thing to pursue. Sure you can try to drown your worries in it, try to escape but the happiness is always inside
I would pay off my mortgage, and buy a car that isn't it electrical hazard on wheels.
Once that is done that I think I would set myself up as one of those prefab home manufacturing companies. They're pretty good houses albeit architecturally uninteresting, and they solve the housing shortage problem relatively cheaply.
Also I'm going to steal my next door neighbor's motorcycle and drive it into a lake, in order to stop him and his terrible midlife crisis habit of starting his engine at 4:00 in the morning and leaving it idling for 4 hours. Of course I could do that now, but if I wait until I'm rich then it'll hardly even be a crime.
Lol at the hardly a crime, very true but with that kind of money, you just pay someone else to do it.
First of all, you're right to take the lump sum, definitely take the lump sum.
Then... There are some things I'd definitely want to spend on up front, like housing in particular. In the long run, the money would pay my property taxes, fund my clothing hobby, support parties with my friends, etc. I'd probably get a private chef to cook good, nutritious meals for me regularly. A personal trainer and a private gym in my home. And I'd travel more.
This advice is important:
I feel like the lottery tends to end badly for people because they are stupid about it. Why would you go around bragging to people that you won and flashing your cash? And if you have a shitty relationship with people you know, it really isn't a great idea to stick around them if you've suddenly found yourself flushed with cash. And the people who end up bankrupted from gambling and wild spending episodes afterward are probably among the stupidest. Winning the lottery isn't a curse. It's just that people are dumbasses.
Yeah, invest in yourself first. Pay off all your loans/debts and buy yourself a nice house in cash. You don't need to live in a crazy mega mansion, but just having a modest house in your name that is fully paid off is invaluable. Get yourself squared away and then start worrying about others.
Even better, put the money into a trust and pay yourself a salary and make it so that if any other money is to be distributed from the trust it has to go through your financial advisor first.
And your financial advisor is attached to a company with deep pockets like Chase Manhattan, with fiduciary responsibility to maintain your income.
That would make it really hard for you to hand out more than you know a handful of thousand dollars to anybody that asks for money.
And you could still hand out quite a bit but you know if you limit yourself to a reasonable amount of money every year, say like $600,000 after taxes or $50,000 a month, then it's going to be really hard for you to fuck up your nest egg while still living the kind of life that very few people ever even get to imagine.
If there's some kind of giant purchase you want, (lambos for the fam, bro!) you can either finance it or put in a request to your trust to pay for it, first set your trust to have a two-week cooling off period before it grants any additional disbursement.
And also, aside from drugs, lawsuits, and gambling, the number one way that lottery winners go broke is by giving it all away to friends and family and worthwhile charitable causes.
Setting the two week cool down in place is a good way to prevent yourself from doing that. You should also inform your trust of what percentage you want to max out at giving away to charitable causes over the lifetime of the trust.
Say if you set a reasonable 25% of the total when you hit that 25% Mark however long it takes then the only way for you to give more money to a charitable cause is for the total value of the trust to increase due to interest accrual.
That should help prevent you or your immediate descendants from frittering all of the money away and having nothing to show for it in a what could be an astonishingly short amount of time.
Tell nobody. Enjoy the security of having options.
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Oh, man, so much.
Free/pay what you can kitchen, for starters. Subsidized rental properties, all sorts of community projects.
Buy some congress people and get them to vote for things like public transport, universal Healthcare, etc.
US-centric, obviously
First, I would find out who I need to pay to find people for jobs I need done. I hate dealing with people. Also, I suck at knowing who to call.
Then, I would get someone to rebuild my house, better, stronger, faster. My house is nice, but it has some major issues. Mold problems I can't fix. Lousy insulation. Floors that let us hear everything going on between levels. A ridiculously small master bathroom.
More importantly, I would pay for a better education for my kids. I homeschool for various reasons (via videos and on a curriculum), and while their education is solid enough, my daughter could use someone better than myself for subjects where she struggles.
Once everything is set up with a lawyer, I would set aside money for close family members.
Oh, and I would hire a maid and a chef for my house. I like cooking, but I also like not needing to cook. And who enjoys cleaning?
My wife would surely either pay for landscaping for our yard, or she would buy a boatload of plants and do it herself. Probably somewhere in between; we've got a rocky yard that no amount of personal labor will make manageable, but I think she enjoys the planting.
I’d first spend it on lawyers. Someone wanna copy paste that reddit post here so we can link lemmy going forward on this question in the future
I think the first thing I would do would be to rent an RV and just go driving around the country and up into Canada and see all the different states and all the different sites and things to see and get used to what it's going to be like to travel constantly and not be nailed down anywhere.
I feel like if I spent 6 months doing that before I made any dramatic decisions about what else to do that would help get my head into the right spot.
Of course I would first pay off all of my debts and I would probably reach out to all of my friends and family and give them a nice little surprise cash, something like $500,000.
I think I would make them sign a notarized contract that says that they agree that if there is any past grievance they have against me they consider that debt paid and forgiven with the $500,000 and agree that any future grievances will be handled by binding arbitration. The number one cause of unhappiness for lottery winners is family members suing them for money.
I don't think I've done anything to anyone that they would want to sue me for but at the same time it probably wouldn't hurt just to cover my bases.
It's not like they can't get a successful lawsuit against me with binding arbitration, all that would do is prevent an emotional jury from handing out crazy multi hundred million dollar verdicts against me because I didn't show up to the family christmas or something thinking that I can afford it since I won over a billion dollars in the lottery.
But aside from that yeah, 6 months in an RV with nothing to do but to go and see the Grand canyon and to travel to all the different cities that I want to travel to and seeing the sites and partaking in the local foods and events and just buying anything I want to buy as long as I can carry it around with me in the RV.
Oh yeah I'd probably call up my insurance agency and get a $10 million umbrella policy just in case.
Well first year I’d finally get a RTX 4090, new car, temporary new home and quite a lot to family and friends. Year 2-4 would be saving up / buying connecting property towards my dream home, and then year 5-10 would be saving up towards a sailing yacht. After that probably some of the fancy coffee equipment that James Hoffman uses.
Keep 5 for myself (probably don't even need that much), and pick one person a year to change their lives with the remaining 15.
One thing I'd love to do is eat out more, and tip just absurd amounts. $40 burgers and fries, and great service? Here's a $40k cash tip.
Yeah, one thing I'd love to do is throw cash around at the service industry.
Sounds like u won i would sugest send 10mill and see what i can manage
BlakeClass guide to lottery winnings His second comment is what to do that first is the warning.
That one is a classic.
After buying my fortress of solitude, and making sure my family is set for generations, I think it would be fun to donate money to random people who are struggling.
Tell no one. Start some form of charitable institution anonymously to divert the majority to. Try not to become an idle leech or get murdered.
Throw as much money as possible into the best institutes for cancer research in the world, until cancer is cured.
Then, for myself, commission the best architects and contractors to have an absolutely exact replica of the Spencer Mansion built for me.
- Quit my job
- Buy a Porsche
- Give the rest to Cory Doctorow
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Sooo... you're going to be jobless, with an expensive car and none of the actual money.
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Finance low rent co-op housing, this actually has a very low risk profile because the tenants have a direct stake in the building payment and being below market rent they will stay at 100% occupancy, all while having a strong social impact by giving families stable places to live at lower rates. Depending on renters eights laws, some.places you could give preference in applications to teachers, social workers, firepeople, and other public employees. You can make a decent interest rate still and build out a big portfolio over time to keep rolling more and more into the investment. This would make a big difference in pushing market rental rate down in towns and small cities over time, like it has in cities like Vienna, Austria.
Living the dream. A house, no need to work, time and resources to do hobbies.
Jesus Christ.
Don't understand why you're getting downvoted when this was literally the first thought I had when reading the post title. I'd genuinely be stressed if I randomly got that kind of money
The huge jackpot is one reason not to play. People get crazy for $1,000. A billion is "goodbye whatever life you had" money, regardless of you want to or not.
The concept of having $20MM in my lifetime, never mind actually spending that much annually, is insane.