A few million isn’t the kind of money where you can hire a ton of people to do stuff for you, but it will give you enough to really see what you yourself can do with total financial security to take risks and enough to hire the advice or buy the tools you need. So it’s an interesting challenge.

I don’t really know what I would do. There are a few crazy/risky nonprofit ideas I have that I might take a shot at if I had more money, but I might decide they were still impractical. I vaguely dream about career changes, but I suspect I’d decide that was a grass is greener thing. I might just make a happier version of me—my current general type of work, but arrange to telecommute from my favorite place to live, etc.

I know quite a number of academics who wouldn’t change a thing if they won the lottery. Really successful, driven academics are pretty happy with themselves and their lives.

There’s no mysterious point at which a sum of money becomes “enough to do something substantial with” – you may have more options with more money, but scale effects with returns on investment (financial or otherwise) are still continuous.

But although I agree with the point on the dif between 500k and 3.2m in relation to starting a business I take the point of the original post to be that 3.2m is enough for the more risk aversive person to throw say 500 000 into something. The dif between 3.2 and 500 is not for the business but for the individual, and an individual’s sense of their own safety net makes a huge difference to what they think they can pull off.

If I have a slightly depreciatory tone it is to highlight what I have perceived to be the vainglorious character of some of the replies here. Of course I should be nicer…

But ultimately, I’m not sure we’d disagree on these specific points. I think your primary purpose here is just to make fun of people who you think imply, through their comments, that a middle income lifestyle would not qualify as sufficient freedom for them to abandon paying work they don’t find otherwise rewarding. In which case you should just say so and not be so snide about it.

1) 3.2 “is not enough money to have any real impact in a business sense.” I assure you that lots of businesses & initiatives have been started and have had enormous impacts for far less. Maybe 3.2 is not enough to guarantee success in the face of utter incompetence, but apparently no amount of money can do that (I am sure the same example that comes to my mind comes to yours as well). The reason that most of the people that end up with 3.2 plus after 15 years of work do not make a difference with that kind of money is because they do not want to and not because it is nearly impossible to do so.

2) My posts are not inconsistent; you are just not reading them carefully. I said that I sometimes use the win the lottery fantasy as a mental tool in working towards getting to a place in my life where I would change very little. A kind of motivator/reality check tool (i.e. you don’t really need millions of dollars to achieve the things you want to achieve so stop making excuses). I also never claimed that I would aim for an average care free life in suburbia if I won the lotto. I was rejecting the claim by another poster that 3.2 million was not even enough to ensure a decent life + freedom to do what you want.

3) If anyone has won a prize it is you with your comment ‘I find it kind of cute that Maria seems to be under the impression.’ I seriously doubt you would have chosen the same phrasing if the post had been written by a male (although I am sure you will make the claim). Step back for a second and think about what your phrasing is suggesting and how it is received in the ears of others.

If you thought 3.2M was enough to make a real difference, let me point out that you could easily make this kind of money in the right profession. So if you really thought there was important charity work to be done on this basis, the right thing to do would be to go work in finance, busting your butt for 15 years, and then retire and go on to do great work with your 3.2. But it doesn’t work that way. 3.2 is enough to live, but not enough to make a big difference. Might as well just do a job you believe in and not sacrifice the 15 years.

Amazing!

I think 3.2M Euro is really just the breaking point where I might think about doing more than just putting it into an investment account and slightly upgrading my lifestyle.

I actually really like my job since I don’t have too work too much. But there are a lot of other things I would also like to do that are incompatible with working full time.

Well then I’d quit my job, move to Italy and never do a lick of work again.

I’d spend all my time and energy making my life a work of art—decorating my home, collecting beautiful furniture, reading, learning languages, playing the piano, writing, painting, doing needlework, woodwork and crafts of every sort, visiting beautiful churches and getting stoned. I’d hire a secretary to take care of all the practical business of life and spend my time consuming and, to the extent that I was able, producing art.

I would be completely unproductive and never do a damn thing for anyone.

Playing the game of capital accumulation as it’s laid out requires a ruthlessness and a sense of natural entitlement that goes way past wishful thinking or daydream, where most of us spend our millions.
People get rich by zeroing in on making money and keeping it.

Changes take place all along that path, but most successful accumulators of wealth are like successful athletes, total focus on the goal to the exclusion of all else. Their descendants are another story. Though privilege generally, when it isn’t inculcating guilt makes the privileged feel deserving, and provides them ready proof.
Whereas the rest of us may truly feel deserving, but have to accommodate the lack of material evidence for it.

The reasons for not having money are obviously way more scattered and indistinct than the reasons for having it. So out here in havenotville you’re going to see wider responses to wealth and how to disburse it than in the dens and lofts of big money.

What people actually do with lottery winnings…well the idea behind the lottery is anyone can win, if they play. So the bulk of those stats are from a group prone to playing, with commonality of a partial grasp of economic and mathematical realities and whatever’s made them hungry enough to play.

Whereas here the group is prone to cerebral exercise and status determined by intellectual and academic success. The overlap’s pretty small I reckon.

Still guessing but I’d wager the bulk of this readership would skew more generous than the average lottery winner or fortunate heir.