Depending on whether the winnings are taxable the $1m would be about what our portfolio has gained in the last five years or somewhat less, so wouldn’t really be life changing.
$37m (before or after tax) would allow me to do a lot more fun things in the rest of my life than I have in the first 50 years.
But if you’d asked me 25 years ago if I would be set for life with $2m at age 50 I would have said “Of course!”. Even adjusting for inflation I’m well ahead of that, but I don’t feel set for life at all, I’m looking to work at least another ten years.
So maybe if I had $37m I’d still think that wasn’t enough!
With the addendum that $37 million is a different kind of “life changing”. The kind that would have a negative effect on my life. Stress and anxiety caused by the idea of safeguarding and keeping watch over all that money. I can probably manage $1 million; that would fit very comfortably into a smallish number of investment and saving instruments that I can manage on my own. $37 mill? That’s too much money to manage unless your full-time job is managing money, and I don’t want to be my wealth’s servant, I want wealth to be my servant.
If it was 60/70/maybe even 80% then perhaps there would be a discussion, but at 97% I’d need to be a fool to go against the odds.
If that 3% chance of losing should happen to hit then que sera, thats life and I’ll make my peace with it because I still made the right choice to begin with.
I’ll take the sure thing. There’s really nothing I want that I could buy with million 2 through 36 that I couldn’t already get with the first million. (Being older and having no children to leave a big legacy to really simplifies things.)
Thats just horribly insane logic. I get not wanting to manage a portfolio or something like that, but whats to manage about taking the money and letting it sit in a bank account?
A full time job safeguarding and keeping watch on money just sitting there being numbers on a page? Really?
Yeah, count me in with, it’s really not all that hard. Stick most of the money into financial instruments that reflect your level of risk. Use money as needed. Hell, just put it in an annuity, if you’re that worried, and just sit back and only use the money the annuity pays out to you.
Economists who study this sort of thing use the term ‘risk aversion’.
Me, I’d take the sure 1 million. I haven’t been as prudent about saving for retirement as I should (and not as prudent as many of you, it seems) so a million clams would be life-changing for me.
Without even thinking too much about it, I know the sure thing is better. A 1:37 chance happens all the time, and there’s no repeat, so expected value goes out the window. Losing $1 million is worth more than gaining $35 million, due to the monetary utility curve.
I have so many more chances to try and get that $1 million to increase. If I can get 5% return, I’m set for life. That’s not easy, of course, but since I have a lot of money I can just let ride, it seems very doable.
I’d just rather have more turns at bat than the one.
Questions like this are often asked both those ways, if it were wagering money you already have for a big gain or accepting a sure thing v good odds on a much bigger windfall, to show that people answer differently depending which way the question is asked.
But of course they are the same as you point out. The OP proposal gives you 1mil then asks if you are willing to spend that mil on a $37mil lottery ticket 97% likely to win. But if people think of it as wagering money they already have, they tend to be more reluctant.
Except, as the answers have revealed, this question has a scaling problem. Depending on a person’s situation and preferences $1mil is ‘really big’ or not. And by the same token it’s not foolish to be more reluctant to pay 1mil for the 97% likely lottery ticket if that’s all you have rather than 1 of 2mil etc.
And noting that people will implicitly present value their wages, social security etc or implicitly spread the 1mil out over time, perhaps not exactly accurately but will try to think of apples and apples, as they should. In which context 1mil really isn’t a lot. Young people with good jobs will make much more, Social Security’s present value is in the few $100k at least for most people, Medicare another few $100k (which gives insight into what a challenge it’s going to be to fulfill all those promises, but that’s another topic).
PS if anyone would really turn down 10’s of mils because ‘hard to manage’, I hope they educate themselves before it ever happens to them. One ‘all-in-one’ Vanguard fund, few 0.1%'s at most expenses, they manage the rebalancing between asset classes, then open four savings accounts with a few clicks each to have a ready $1mil at all times ($250k FDIC gtee limit per account), done. That’s going to ruin somebody’s life with stress, seriously? OTOH there is social stress to coming into lots of money by the standards of one’s social circle, if the other people find out. That I can take seriously, but not the idea it’s hard to manage $36mil.
What is its current odds of arriving safely? Because damn sure it’s already less than 100%, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that current odds were already less than 97%.
Indeed. If the question were $10 mil and $360 mil, I’d most likely go for the sure $10 mil, although it would be fun to fantasize about having stupid shitloads of money.
Thought about this one for a minute, because a sure million bucks is hard to pass up. But I like my odds at 97%, so let’s take a shot at the $36M. With the million, I’d still probably have to work another decade or so to maintain my lifestyle.
Not sure what kind of odds would make me change my mind. Probably around 80%.
If the odds of a plane flight arriving safely were less than 97%, there would be thousands of plane crashes every day. Maybe I’m not tapped into the right news sources, but I think the number of crashes per day is much, much less than “thousands”.
This isn’t a valid way to look at it without the other option provided by the OP, since it’s framed as one of two choices. I go with the 97% chance of winning $36 million because it is enormously larger than the $1 million prize. If the OP had said, “Would you take a 97% chance of winning $1.025 million, rather than a guaranteed $1 million,” I’d probably go for the guaranteed money.
So to go by your analogy - if someone said “97% chance of arriving safely but you get ten thousand dollars,” or “100% chance of arriving safely but you get no bonus money,” I’d take the 97%.
By the way, if someone said, “Your chances of dying tomorrow are 97%” vs. “Your chances of dying tomorrow are 100%,” you’d be in pretty bad shape either way.
I’m also curious how the personal wealth of Dopers affects the choices they took in the poll. Those who are already wealthy could afford to take some “risks” and go big for the $36 million…but it seems like Dopers here who are already in good financial shape are instead opting for the safe choice.
One ‘all-in-one’ Vanguard fund, few 0.1%'s at most expenses, they manage the rebalancing between asset classes, then open four savings accounts with a few clicks each to have a ready $1mil at all times ($250k FDIC gtee limit per account), done. That’s going to ruin somebody’s life with stress, seriously? OTOH there is social stress to coming into lots of money by the standards of one’s social circle, if the other people find out. That I can take seriously, but not the idea it’s hard to manage $36mil.