5 Megabucks

El Gee asks what would you do with $5 million? I'll leave the math there on his blog. Straight out - let's say I won the lottery and took the lump sum, after taxes I ended up with $5M. What to do? I'm in a very different place in life than El Gee is, so my ideas will be quite different.

• Set up college financing for all our nieces and nephews, plus our own child(ren). That's 5 nieces & nephews, plus our own kids, let's guess high and say 3 of them. 8 kids total, I'll budget $150K per for college (figuring that a 529 account will earn money, etc. that should cover most stuff). That's $1.2M.
• Pay off all of our debt other than the mortgage. Under $100K.
• Pay extra into the mortgage. Negligible, really.
• Massive home improvement. Rewire the whole house, improve insulation, radiant floor heating in the master suite, fix up the plumbing, new roof, landscape the backyard. $100K or so.
• Replace our cars. Gotta treat yourself. Won't go crazy with luxury cars, just some nice hardware. We're talking about a couple practical cars for daily use, a 1-ton Diesel pickup for home improvement supplies & dragging around a boat or travel trailer,and maybe a "fun" vehicle too. Under $200K.
• Boat and travel trailer. Under $150K

Less than $2M has been spent out of the $5M so far. Yikes! I must be a bad consumer. I'd probably keep working. With most of the nasty bills taken care of, salary wouldn't be super-important, and most could be socked away in savings and used for nice vacations and other travel.

The $3M that's left would get invested for the most part. Split it between some aggressive investments and government-issued bonds & bills in a ladder setup. Somewhat low yield, yes, but quite safe. The aggressive investments would be the real moneymakers.

I think, with some careful yet aggressive investing, it would work out pretty well.

However, for any of this to even be remotely worth considering, I'd have to play the lottery in the first place, which I don't.