A wee survey

[trixtah]

I found myself thinking yesterday, as I was walking past a newsagent trying to pimp lottery tickets, just what I would do if I unexpectedly came into millions of dollars, in terms of my own life (take for granted the part where I'd pay off everyone I know's mortgages yadda yadda).

I decided I would immediately ditch my job, go to London and study osteopathy at the BSO for 4 years, ensuring I studied cranial osteopathy. Then do a post-grad course in animal osteopathy in Wantage (near Oxford). Then I'd go home and do animal osteopathy part time.

It kind of surprised me.

Anyways, if money were no object, what would you do with your life?

Comments

[buddleia]

Buy a really nice houseboat and mooring in London; force my dad at gunpoint to get his missing teeth fixed; train around Europe; visit friends in NZ!

[trixtah]

Houseboat FTW! I'd have to buy one for my mum, or maybe just send her on one for a trip.

Yes, being able to help loved ones fix up their various parts and travel without inhibition are definite pluses. :-)

[erinkyan]

Boring things, really. Buy a house. Get surgery. Throw wild sex parties. Travel a lot.

Start a refuge for teens. Not just a place to sleep, but somewhere to help them get on their feet, go to school, get on centrelink, get into a career they want, build friendships... build a life. This is a big dream of mine I'd love to do one day.

A sex education centre and program for teens and adults.

I'd also pay people to write tv shows and films about stuff I want to see. :D

[trixtah]

All those things sound most excellent. Yes, being able to set up grants and sponsor creative endeavours would be real pluses.

[freyakitten]

Suburban homestead/housewifery. Rather not do it on my own, but it may be inevitable.

[trixtah]

I'm really keen on the idea of co-housing for reasons aligned with that. The organisational (as in people who are good at organising, not the "bosses") and handy/craftspeople keep the environment ticking over and ask the other residents to chip in with x tasks. Everyone else does whatever work they do and kick in a bit more to the co-op kitty.

[ironed_orchid]

Do a grad dip in community development and possibly ESL teaching like this one, then travel both for fun and work.

I'd probably like to travel for about 3-6 months of each year, and be home for the rest, studying things as they take my interest. Maybe even finishing that PhD thing.

Eventually come back to aus permanently and settle down in a cute house with a yard and a fence and get a couple of dogs... likely in WA.

[trixtah]

Yes, I like the idea of travelling for a few months, but having a nice home base to return to. And studying things as you see fit. :-)

[okoshun]

I'd build/find and remodel a suitable house for my poly family here in Toronto. I'd start trying to conceive and have 1-2 kids, if possible. I'd stay at home with them until they were off to school, volunteering in any spare time with the skills that I have. I'd make sure that everyone's wants were taken care of. I would have a recording studio and all the gear he wanted, S would have a writing nook and a cottage escape up in Killarney, E..not sure what she'd want, but definitely a well-outfitted kitchen with all the relevant tools. L would have his hockey barn out back with the attached workshop (to be shared with me..I want a workshop too). Then I'd look at close friends and family needs and help out there. The rest goes into an account and I live off the interest. :)

[trixtah]

Yes, it'd be nice to have a place set up with exactly the way you want it. Having a Private Income is also a bonus.

[(Anonymous)]

Tricky. It really depends on the level of money. Roughly in ascending order:

If it was simply enough to pay off current obligations and provide a boost to a chosen profession, I'd spend it hiring a salesperson to find me clients. And maybe move to the US, where suitable businesses are thicker on the ground.

If it was enough to retire comfortably, I probably would, and spend the rest of my life taking training courses and being a student of everything.

If it was enough to bring my inventions to market, I would do that.

If it was enough to help all the people I want to help as a once-off, I would do that.

If it was enough to establish some fairly major donations and foundations, I would send money to all the internet content creators whose work I have read free for decades; to scientific projects and progress boosters; to medical research; and to blogs and sites which promote reasoned thought and diversity.

If it was serious money, I'd buy and fund multiple foundations for achieving positive societal and political change in a number of ways and locations.

And a hat. A really big hat.

[trixtah]

Yes, being a student of everything sounds excellent, as is having the ability to pursue one's projects. And yeah, being able to chip in with people who have been supplying you excellent things for free via the internet would be great.

[serene]

I would keep my job, which is, after all, The Best Job Ever. I would pay off my mother's house. I would go about my life pretty much as I do now, but I would never have to worry if strawberries are too dear. I would buy whatever food struck our fancy, and never have to worry that if one of us lost our job, we'd be in deep shit. And when someone in my family got sick or needed dental work, we'd just go get it taken care of rather than waiting until there was enough money.

I love my life. I really wouldn't change much.

[trixtah]

The interesting thing is when you read about lottery winners, they often tell the doom and gloom stories about the ones who go off the rails and piss it up a tree in a matter of a few years. The majority, however, enjoy their money. And there has been more than one study that shows that the wealthier that people are, the happier they also are. Being free of the constant stress of worrying about paying for fundamentals counts for a lot.

Having said that, here's hoping healthcare reform keeps moving in a better direction for you all - it still croggles me how people have to run about to get money for life-saving medical care.

[filkferengi]

It's because the money the government extorts at gunpoint goes to bail out their corporate cronies [who're doing things like tripling interest rates and cancelling people's insurance for pre-existing conditions, like breathing], so there's none left over for healthcare. :(

Fun question, btw. We don't buy lottery tickets either, but speculations have included creating scholarships, taking friends to Worldcon, adopting local parks, & travel, including tours of all the baseball stadiums [& sampling food in same].

[firecat]

Assuming I didn't have any partners or dependents with their own ideas or restrictions on what I could do, I might:

--hire a concierge whose job it was to arrange completely comfortable travel for me, then travel to places and people I'd like to visit.

--buy some land (and if necessary, politicians/officials) in Half Moon Bay and start an animal shelter.

--start some kind of art school (film? writing? music?) with lots of funding for people who don't traditionally get to go to art school.

If you add "time is no object" into the fantasy, then the list gets way, way longer.

[trixtah]

Heh, I was thinking about one of the advantages of uber-amounts of dosh would be the ability to hire local guides for just about anywhere you'd want to go. I find not knowing even a smattering of the local language incredibly stressful, so there are plenty of places I'd be keener to go to if I had someone trustworthy to translate.

And I like the idea of funding scholarships and education in interesting areas.

[(Anonymous)]

I have deeply ambivalent feelings about questions like this, mainly because exactly 50% of me says, ooh, travel! all over the world! for months on end! And the other exactly 50% says, ooh! buy house with land! and have lots of animals! and big gardens!

And the two are sort of mutually exclusive -- having someone else care for the land, etc., is not what I want.

So it's probably just as well I don't buy lottery tickets [sigh].

[trixtah]

Heh, I'd say both, actually - travel for a month or two at a time, then spend the next 6 months at home with the land, gardens and animals. :-)

And no, I don't buy lottery tickets either, so this is all even more pie in the sky, heh.

[maize]

okoshun actually plays the lottery, so we muse about this every so often. There are a number of layers of it, depending on how much money we won.

The first layer is to buy a house, as in, outright buy-and-own. Our mortgage is our only debt right now, but furthermore, one of our major short-term life goals is to move from our condo into a house. The thing is, we want this house to be able to accomodate not just the current occupancy of okoshun, myself and our cats. but also to be able to accomodate elwoodontario, clawfoot and eeyorerin if she chose to come live with us. So.. a large house. At the same time, we don't want to leave Toronto. The combination of "large house" and "in Toronto" automatically puts you into the "ridiculously expensive" price bracket, and some of our other needs for the place push that further. We're currently hoping to find something in the $750K range, but a lot of the places we've found that most struck us as ideal were between $1 million and $2.5 million. So, if we won enough to buy a house outright, then that would be step one.

If we won more, then step two would be to help our friends and family pay off any of their outstanding mortgages that we could.

But I realize that I've forgotten part of the plan. The steps above were actually for if we won *LOTS* of money. If we won a small amount, say half a million or a million or whatever, we'd peel off a *small* amount for fun spending right away, say $5K each, and then take the rest and invest it in something to provide a continual income such that we could work part-time or not work as we wanted and pursue other things. I wouldn't mind dropping for a three-day work week, for example. If I could afford to not work at all at my current job, I'd totally be up for throwing myself at music full-time. I'm not sure that okoshun would be happy with dropping her career, as she's very invested in it, but I think she'd change how she worked substantially.

But yeah, the buying of houses and such comes if we win enough that we can cover that kind of income boosting project and still have enough to buy a house above that.

I think if we won some surreal amount of money such that we could make ourselves very work-flexible, could buy our house, could pay off our friends' mortgages and still had a lot left over, I'd want to launch some sort of charity foundation.

[trixtah]

I like the idea of working part-time as a major aim of that kind of exercise, particularly if you have your living area set up. And having some left over for charity is also a good thing.

[jekni]

After investing the funds to allow for income stream I'd like to do the house thingy (John wants a 'proper' kitchen) and the travel. But one of my fondest dreams has been to find out if I'm any good as a potter and then set up a pottery workshop so people could learn as well - there isn't one on the southside, only in Watson.

[trixtah]

Potting sounds like fun! One of my exes was a potter, and she did pretty well with it. It'd be nice to have the freedom to see if any of these "I wonder ifs" would pan out.

[radicalyffe]

Hmm...

I would design my own house and have it built for me. I'd go on a bit of a shopping spree for furniture, and nice clothes, and tech, and shiny toys.

Then I would set up a grant system for people like Erinkyan to hold amazing creative/sex events.

Then when I got bored, I would start a national Gender Rights advocacy organisation, and it would be AMAZING.

[trixtah]

I'd personally get an architect to design my house, but from elements I supply. The best ones get you to make drawings and scrapbooks of what you like, and then work with you from there to make the perfect house for YOU. Of course, if you have a firm idea of what you want, you've already got a big chunk of it done.

Grants are good. And a proper advocacy org with full-time, paid and experienced staff would be even BETTER. :-)

[kk1raven]

I'd invest most of the money. Whatever income it produced beyond what I needed to live on I'd use for traveling and for buying land that ought to be preserved from development. I'd also use some of the money to buy a house outright. I like the work I do (solving computer problems) so I'd probably keep working too.

[trixtah]

Yes, definitely get the roof over the head sorted, and then have the rest for a nest egg. While I'm good at techie work, I don't love it, which is why I'd personally try something else. But if you're already in the ideal line of work, why change? :-)

[kk1raven]

I like solving puzzles and I find helping people to be very satisfying, so fixing their computer problems is pretty close to being ideal for me. I don't think I'd find in anywhere near as satisfying to do techie work for a large company instead of being self-employed. If I could do anything at all for work, what I'd really like to do is spend my time doing nature tours, but that's just not a reliable way to make a living.

[(Anonymous)]

I would buy a really nice property within an hour or two of the city. It'd be about 50 acres, really nicely fenced with post and rail (I have a hardon for NICE fences). It'd have an indoor and an outdoor arena, stables and a round yard. I'd like another horse S could ride. Enough money for regular lessons. I'd like it if we could afford to not have S work if she didn't want to.

The house would be simple, warm and practical. I'd have a killer cat run and a spa. Lots of double glazed windows and a deck. And a great towing car and float.

I'd love to be able to rescue some horses and help get them better or just to let them retire in comfort.

-Tanya