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.
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.
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
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.
Donate to some privacy related projects like grapheneos and signal
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.
$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.
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?
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.
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.
Probably live on a million- maybe 2- and spend most of my time giving the rest away.
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.