Suppose I gave you a million dollars, right now, in US funds.
You’re allowed to spend the money any way you wish so as long as you spend it. Any/Every time you need to pay for something, it would come out of that million.
That means you’re not allowed to invest it in any way that would make you more money or that would save it. Like I said above, you’d use that million every time you had to pay for something, until it’s gone.
How long do you think it would it last you?
And as a bonus inquiry: What’s the fastest time you’d be able to spend it in, you think?
Well retirement conventional wisdom is a 4% withdrawal rate would give you $40,000 a year for 25 years, so if you could live off $40k then 25 years I would say! So unless I am doing my math wrong (and it is 5 am here and I haven’t had a cup of coffee yet!) then 25 years or so. I could adjust to living off that I think if I had to. But the reality is that doesn’t take into account inflation, and not going to figure that math out, so let’s say 20 years at roughly $40k with the last years having inflation added in.
Fastest time. 4 years, I think I could easily spend $250k a year no problem.
To make it last as long as possible without giving up my current house - about 23 years.
To maintain a version of my current lifestyle - 13 years.
As fast as I could? About a week but only because I would want to be sure of the house I chose. maybe longer for closing.
Go about my usual daily life, but instead of using my bank account to pay for things, I use your million clams – I’d guess about 16 years at my current rate of consumption.
B) Here’s a million bucks – spend it. I could lose that in about a day and a half if I put my mind to it.
Right now, it would last a very long time. I could quit my job, my wife could use her salary to pay for rent / mortgage and car payments, etc, and invest the rest of HER money. I could pay for everything else with the million. Hell, it’d last forever.
If I paid for EVERYTHING moving forward, and she invested every penny of her salary, I’d estimate, right now, we could budget a very comfortable $60,000 a year for expenses out of the million, so about 14 years.
If we moved from San Fran, it’d last longer.
If I were single, I could very easily never work again. I’d rent the cheapest studio apartment, have a good car, but pay it off, and use it mainly for grocery shopping, and spend maybe $150 a month on internet / TV / Phone. Easily a thousand months. Say 60 years, just to be conservative, at $1388 per month. I’ll be 97 then, and likely dead.
As fast as possible? Pay off all bills and buy a house. So as long as it takes for the checks to clear.
I could buy my friend’s really huge, lovely house for $165,000 and spend twice what I spend a year now, and the money would last over twenty years. And I’ll be 75 then.
At my current rate of expenditure, and budgeting for moderate but not terrible emergencies, it would last over 25 years.
However, I’m pregnant, so I expect that rate of expenditure to rise exponentially over the next 20 years, and while I am hoping/planning to raise this child pretty inexpensively, if I had a big pile of money and was piling up more money by saving my salary, I’d probably chose to provide more luxuries–like lessons, and trips, and college tuition–for my child. So the money would probably go quite a bit more quickly than that.
This is all assuming no inflation, of course. Even 1-2% inflation would have a pretty significant impact on the value of a big old pile of money after ten or fifteen years.
I’d say it would last 10-15 years if I’m living extremely comfortably. 20-25 if I’m being conservative for any reason.
I live in LA, so if I wanted to spend it as quickly as possible, I’d go buy a house near the beach or in the hills somewhere. It’d be gone just like that.
There are several investments that can and will return a safe 10% With that in mind that is $100,000.00 a year a little more than twice my yearly salary so Living as I do now (maybe a little better) I would bank an additional $50,000 a year. Reinvesting this I would say It will last the remainder of my life
Living my normal life: 12-15 years
Spending it like it was going out of style: Depends how many times I can go from Boston to Minneapolis. (Mall of America)
I’m assuming you mean that I quit my job and have no other income. Quick, back o’ the napkin calculations:
My monthly operating budget is about $1750. Assuming I use $125K of the 1 mil right away to pay off my mortgage, my monthly outflows would drop to about $850.
So unless I went on a shopping spree or suddenly got a Fabergé egg habit, I could make $875K last about 85 years. Since I only expect to live about 50 more years at most, I’d have to come up with excuses to overspend (new house, vacations, etc).
What are the parameters regarding, say, taking out an auto loan? Would we use the money for a down payment and monthly payments, or would we need to pay cash for the car?
What about money we currently save for retirement? Can we exclude that from the picture?
Assuming our current net take-home pay (after retirement / taxes) remains the same, and that we normally spend all of that every month, and our spending level remains the same:
If we paid off the mortgage up front, it’d be 6ish years til the million was gone.
If we did NOT pay off the mortgage, it’d be 8ish years til the million was gone.
Note that the next 8 years, for us, will be unusually expensive: we’ll have kids in college from 2012 through 2019.
Egad, this is rather depressing!!!
If we did prepay the mortgage, however, we’re looking at substantially decreased spending after 2019.
Just for shits’n’giggles I did a spreadsheet. If we bump the money up to 2 million, with paying off the mortgage we run out of cash in the 19th year. With no prepayment of the mortgage, we run out in the 17th year.