Complex Numbers

If I Had A Million Dollars

PROMPT November 16th

If you had to spend one million dollars in one day, what would you spend it on?

Shares of publicly-traded companies.

Usually I lead with the joke answer, but no, that's my actual answer.

So, what if stocks aren't a legitimate answer? Well, I'd also answer "bonds" or "real estate." Maybe even "fine art" or "coin collections."

But okay. I think the spirit of the prompt is about blowing through the money, not investing it in assets that have some chance of appreciating in value.

Can't resist embedding this video.



It's harder than you might think to spend a million dollars, especially in a limited period of time. The median annual income of US residents is somewhere in the neighborhood of $50,000 a year (it's actually less than that, but I can't be arsed to look it up, and $50K is a nice round number.) Assuming you live hand-to-mouth on a $50K annual income, it will take you 20 years to spend a million dollars.

On the other hand, a million ain't what it used to be. Retirement counselors often quote a "4% rule," which can get a little more complicated, but basically once you're retired you should live on 4% of your net worth per year. 4% of a million is $40K, also close to the median annual income for the US, but hardly "fuck off" money.

I like to work with the concept of "effective net worth," which is something I came up with, but someone else probably already has because I always seem late to these things. Basically, using the 4% rule, what is your effective net worth considering all your other income (salary, bonuses, royalty checks from those sweet publishing gigs, etc.)? It's not hard, just work backwards: if your income is $40K then your effective net worth is $1M; if it's $80K, then your effective net worth is $2M, etc. This gives you an idea of how much you'd need to have saved for retirement if you want to continue your current lifestyle. Of course, there are other considerations.

Shit, I could write about this sort of thing all day. Back to the actual topic.

If we leave out assets like houses and such, I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a way to blow through a million dollars in one day. Give me a couple of hours on Amazon and I could probably do it, though. Or, more likely, I'd find some experience to spend it on. Rich people go on these round-the-world cruises, I've found, and they get expensive. The cruises last for months, but you have to give them a deposit; I'd imagine they wouldn't say no to getting the whole price up front.

Or, it'd be tempting to sign up for one of those space tourism services. For something on the order of a million dollars, you can reserve a spot on a suborbital flight that technically takes you past the imaginary line separating atmosphere from space. The flight lasts maybe an hour, though, and all you really get to show for it is bragging rights. "I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth!" "Yeah? I've been scuba diving at the Great Barrier Reef."

I should note here that I'm also deliberately leaving out any variation on "giving it to charity." That's not spending it, by my definition, and usually all you're doing is enriching the charity itself, and its organizers. I'm not suggesting we shouldn't give to charities, but I am explicitly leaving them out of this particular discussion.

And then, of course, there's the old standbys. I wrote the following around this time last year, so it's appropriate I trot it back out now. If I had to spend a million dollars in one day, I'd spend most of it on...

Alcohol, Hookers, and Blow  (18+) A Thanksgiving thanks giving #2175291 by Robert Waltz

The rest, I'd probably waste.