How much $ would be life-altering for you?

[creditcardfree]

The lottery winner I referred to is doing well and definitely not squandering money. In fact, he has waited a whole year, just to see about taxes, before he does much of anything spending wise. His nephew asked this man to drive their car from Nebraska to another state and even offered to pay for his airfare back. The lottery winner accepted the offer. I think it is great that the nephew didn't assume that he could pay his own way just because of the winnings.

[Ima saver]

Sounds like a pretty smart guy to me.

[TBH]

Interesting thread. My coworkers and I have this conversation all the time.

Let's see.

If I received anything less than $200K I'd probably do the rest of the work my house needs ($10,000 should do the trick), set aside a little nest egg to fund our next vacation, maybe set aside another little nest egg to replace our car when the time comes, and pay down the mortgage (total balance $49,000). But first I'd save at least half of whatever the windfall was.

All this would be nice, but my life still wouldn't really change drastically.

If it was more, say $200K, $300K, half a million, etc--that would start to have some serious impact. I'm not really sure what I'd do. But any one of these ideas would be life-altering:

1. Buy a house with a bigger yard and keep my current one for a rental?
2. Move to another city where we have more family but where COL is higher?
3. Have another child? But then I'd have to really examine if it's only money that's holding me back. It's not really just about the money.
4. Buy some time for my partner and I to take a break from having day jobs so we could both work on other things? (we both write) We'd take turns, of course--one of us has to have a dayjob for the health insurance.

I'd say anything over $200K would allow me to pay off the mortgage, invest maybe $100K, and then use the remaining $50K to buy writing time for each of us. So I'd say anything over $200K would be life altering.

But when it came right down to it I'm not sure I'd be able to spend very much of such a big windfall. It's easy for me to piss money away in restaurants and vacations, but it's harder for me to decide to spend large sums.