Think of your worst problem. It can be the thing most likely to keep you from falling asleep, or that causes you the most distress on a daily basis. If you can’t choose among two such problems, that’s okay; we can deal with that. If you have three or more such horrid concerns, you have my sympathy.
Okay, got the problem(s) in mind? Great. Now answer this: could a sudden infusion of money enable you to solve this problem, or would even Bill Gates’s fortune be insufficient? If money could solve the problem, what would be the minimum you’d need?
Poll in a second, but don’t let that slow you down.
About 600 million take home from the lottery would help. No,it wouldn’t cure cancer,but I could have my ranch so that I could watch the skinny horses I’d buy get fat and glossy… I could help out a few rescues that really do rescue. I could watch the Milky Way again… And I could set up my son so he could do whatever he wanted to do.
Fancy house? Forget it. I want electricity,flush toilets,running water,a soft bed and a roof that doesn’t leak. Fancy,fast car? I’d get my old beater '88 Ford pickup running.
Cash would work, but a good job Stateside would do just fine in lieu of a cash infusion of a few hundred thousand.
We’re working on getting Mrs Iggy and Iggyette through the immigration process and that requires proof of income and/or assets in addition to all the assorted fees and moving expenses.
I chose between $100,000 an $999,999 because somewhere in that range is an amount that would be enough to forget about my most serious problem for the rest of my life.
Silly Yankee. Sure money would help with your new chosen career. If you want to, say, open your own pastry shop, $10,000,000 will let you go to school to become a pastry chef, pay the bills while rent a building in which to open the shop, and the accoutrements and supplies, and so forth, and support yourself while the business is starting out, and so forth.
My current debts could be paid off for just under $10K, including student loans. That’s the current me-only problem. Next biggest me-only would be affording weight loss surgery. That’s around $40K and not currently covered by my insurance.
This does not include the fact that I would like to relieve both myself and all of my loved ones of the grinding worry of having enough money - enough money for gas at the end of the week, enough money for a new car, enough money for a vacation, enough money to afford a home, enough money for retirement, enough money for our father’s nursing home . . . that’s a hell of a lot more money.
Take a year and get half a dozen Linux/Unix/Solaris/ITIL/Six Sigma certifications, then give some CEO $10 million and he’ll give you a job. Probably takes less than $10 million to grease the HR monkeys, but that was the amount quoted in the post you quoted.
My biggest problem is the looming sense that I’m running out of time. I guess money would help in that I could spend it to have to spend less time doing necessaries like earning enough to pay the bills, paying the bills, etc.
Do you have the requisite education and credentials? If no, then money will let you support yourself while you study to get those.
Once you have the credentials, money lets you get experience without worrying abut putting beans on the table. You can volunteer your services at a church, a charity, a political campaign–any organization that has use for your services but is short on funds. Or, for that matter, take an unpaid internship. In addition to getting free labor for companies, unpaid internships serve to keep young persons in the working class from advancing as quickly in their careers as persons in the upper classes. Bill Blueblood whose parents are paying his rent, board, and utilities can afford to take such a position at FedEx; Paula Poverty, whose parents can barely pay their own bills, is gonna have to bus tables at two different restaurants if she can’t find a job in her field.
I just got my degree, but here’s what I could do with the money - pay off all my loans and go back to school and get a master’s and have a better chance of landing a job.
I do have a few minor problems that money would help, I’m sure pretty much everyone but the super-rich have those, but considering my most serious or even all of the serious or even middling problems I have, they’re not the type of problems that can be helped by throwing money at them, like having substantial debt, needing to move, having medical issues that need treatment. Hell, they’re not even the sort of issues that a large sum of money allowing me not to need to work and working on them a lot more could help, like needing an education, needing time to work on the Great American Novel or whatever.
No, the top handful of issues are ones that wouldn’t be made any easier even if I were independently wealthy and didn’t have a job; actually, that might even make some of them worse. For instance, problems with family relationships. When there’s trust issues, having more money might just help them justify why it’s okay for them to try to take advantage of me.
That said, if we are talking just about issues that money can solve, or at least help, would be that I’d need enough money to live on for an extended period to finish some projects that are of much greater importance to me than my job, but I seldom get the time to do because I have bills to pay. And at that, I’d need to spend some money to get appropriate supplies and equipment to really make those projects happen. If that’s the case, we’re probably talking in the 10k-50k option from the OP. But, again, it’s not my most serious problem, and I’m not even really sure I’d want to take that money and not work at all to get it done.
