For some reason I was thinking about this. How much money would it take to significantly change the quality of your life permenantly or at least for a long time. I’m sure someone will say that $500 for a new computer will make their life so much better but that is not what I mean. What will it take to change your life. For me I’m thinking it is probably $400,000. Less might do it but 400k will. That will pay off the house and any other debts hanging around. It will let me live worry free on my salary. I won’t be rich but my quality of life would be greatly improved.
I have a nebulous plan to go back to college and get a degree allowing me to work as a translator and interpreter (by the way, what would that degree be called in English, does anybody know? I’d like to look at taking it in the UK). In Spain there used to be no such degree, but now there is so ooooooof course now you can’t get work as a translator unless you have the degree of play cards with the editor every week.
That would require between 50 and 100K depending on stuff like whether my grandparents are still alive and how much time I want to be able to have, to look for the new job after the new degree.
I’ve located a school in Barcelona which used to require 2 years for a Master’s and they totally freaked out when I asked about doing it in 1 year, but now they offer it in 1 as well. Given the amount of hours I’ve worked in my previous college degrees and at some of my jobs, and my having been a de facto translator and interpreter for over 20 years, the course load looks perfectly fine for 1 year.
Tough question. I don’t have a house or any other debts. 500,000 Aus would let me buy a house outright but my quality of life won’t have changed at all. I think I’d need $1,000,000, then I can buy a house and have significant money left so that I can spend on big ticket items without using my salary.
For me having around 300000 Euros would change my lifefor th comming years (if not decades). If I put that on a savings account with 5or 6% interest I can spend more than a thousand extra a month. So it would just mean increasing your salary with a thousand euros. I don’t know how much I would need to make for this not to be an amazingly useful addition to my salary, but i’m quite sure I’m not gonna be making that kind of money anytime soon.
Well lets see, if I land the contract for current Bid that’ll be 56k (US), if I finish this current contract by the end of the year [7 working days] that’ll be another 15k. Add a couple more contracts in 09’ for 20-50k and that will be pretty good in my book. So instead of money fo rthis thought experiment can I ask OG for the green light on 4 or 5 new contracts by mid-2009’? Or would that be out of the perview of this thread?
In terms of hard number, my wife and I live comfortably, so a massive increase ni cash would basically mean her biological clock would begin ticking even louder than it currently is and we’d probably be adding to the two adults, two cats list by one human being. So I’d like to hold off a little longer if that’s OK? 
I’m about $500K short of my retirement goal. As soon as I have that life changes completely in that I spend no differently than I do now, but stop working completely.
Any less than that doesn’t rally change anything; it’d just decrease the distance to go. Meantime my lifestyle & work style won’t / can’t change.
I’m still quite young and, keeping things minimal and short-term, I would say 50 thousand USD would be perfect. That would be enough to cover all of my student loan debt, with maybe a couple thousand left to pad my account (although, with my student loan debt gone, my account wouldn’t need padding, but it’d be nice). I could say enough to buy a house/car other things I don’t have but would like, but, as it is, they aren’t really necessities right now. Especially with what little I pay in rent.
I need a lot less than I thought I did. I just retired and my income is a third of what it was 6 months ago and things aren’t anywhere near as tight as we thought they would be. I’ve had to cut out some unnecessary things and get books from the library and music online, grow plants from seeds and cuttings instead of buying potted ones, stop eating out so much and I don’t buy any more clothes that I don’t need. About $350K would pay off our mortgage and let my partner retire too and we could live happily ever after on our pensions.
Sometimes I can’t believe that I’m old enough to retire and get a pension. It’s no wonder that people hate government employees because our benefits are unbelievable sometimes.
Same. 50k would cover grad-student loans, pay off credit cards, and have a nice egg left for a down payment on a home.
Given the choice though, I’d much rather opt for a job with that salary.
I got my Master of French and English Translation at the University of London in Paris (ULIP), in 2 years - or rather, the MA course took one year, but the prerequisite to enlist is to have their Certificate in X and Y translation, which takes a year.
But they do offer the Certificate and MA as correspondance courses (is that the right English term for it ? When they send you the material by mail and you only have to show up for the finals ?). Dunno if the University of London has a local department in Spain, or a Spanish department in London for that matter.
It is, however, an expensive course - British universities aren’t cheap.
That depends on how you define “change my life”. Buy a car? Buy a nicer appartment on Park Avenue. A house in the Hamptons? Quit working forever?
I’d be interested in knowing what bank has a savings account offering 5-6% interest. CDs are more like 3-5%.
100k would allow me to start up a small business that I feel would not fail. I’d be able to pay off a year or two of rent, stock the store, pay the utilities, and have a little leftover as a cushion in case of abysmal customer performance.
$611,980.50*
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- For a pay phone in case my cell conks out.
£10K would give me time, £100K would give me options, but it would take £1M to give me freedom.
I would just want my 401k back before it went to hell. maybe 200K.
$15K would pay off my car.
Another 200K in my 401K would make my retirement secure.
$400K to buy a house would be very nice.
Thus a megabuck after taxes and I am one financially happy dude. Heck, half that and I could do it.
$500,000.00 would be sufficient to get me comfortable. $100,000.00 would get me enough that I wouldn’t worry about anything short of losing my job.
I already have a very specific goal. That goal is $3,000,000.00
About 150,000 euros (combined with my savings) would let me buy a quite nice small-but-not-too-small house in the area I’m looking right now. That would probably make it so I wouldn’t have to work more than one or two days a week (I’m a self-employed software engineer, so that’s including getting new projects, doing the paperwork etc).
I’m not sure if that would actually increase the quality of my life much, unless I spend the rest of the time doing interesting other stuff. I need interesting things to do or else I tend to give in to all kinds of indulgences. On the other hand: I get lots of time to do interesting stuff.
$3,000,000 is my retire tomorrow money. I could live the rest of my life making $70,000/year after taxes from the interest. To pay of my houses, motorcycle, and assorted crap it would take $450,000, so that would work as well. The only other thing I can think of is $500,000 so that I could take three years off and go to and pay for law school. But if I came into that amount of money I would probably just pay off my debts and get a side job for law school.
All amounts are money in the bank, taxes obviously make the amount I would need more.