One word, people: WHORES!
Challenge Ken Lay to a round of “Who’s got more real money?”
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Pay off debts. Mine, my family’s, my friends’, anyone else I thought might need it.
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Invest. $39M is an awful lot. Even after paying off debts, I’d have plenty to invest. Keep that money working for my great-great grandchildren.
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Like **zyada, ** a Dopefest. On a scale like no other Fest. Ooooooooh my Goddess. The biggest, baddest Fest in Fest History. On my dime.
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Charitable contributions. I have a few causes I like, but currently don’t donate to, because I just don’t have it to donate.
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Mudane stuff, like a new house, a car, yadda yadda.
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Like that_darn_cat I would hire an accountant - I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to manage that much money.
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Pay off all my debts. I don’t have many at the moment - just a fairly mild credit card bill, but I expect that I’ll have accumulated a few more by the time I finish uni.
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Buy a nice house fairly close to Cambridge.
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Build a library extension for that house.
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Make a lot of book stores very very happy.
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Presents for friends and family.
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Hire someone to drive me around - I can’t drive yet and don’t really want to learn (I don’t trust myself behind the wheel of a car).
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Invest the rest. I would continue to have a job, but as my ideal job is fairly low income anyway the extra cash would be very welcome.
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Retire
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Pay off my mortgage and those of my brothers (and maybe my sister’s
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Give a respectable chunk to some of my friends and a number of charities, as well as my old high school and college.
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Travel to all the places my wife and I ever wanted to (Ireland, for one).
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Buy a retirement home with a staff and room for all the books I already have and all the books I’m going to buy.
Keep on teaching until it was all gone…
Step 1) Quit job
Step 2) Contact yacht designers, start design process for large custom yacht, perhaps 75’. Steel hull, expedition class, suitable for remote, high-latitude extended cruises
Step 3) Outfit said yacht
Step 4) Cast lines
Did I mention ‘quit job’?
Jim
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Quit my job. I’d never darken the door of that hellhole again.
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Buy a house. Nothing fancy.
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Buy a car. Nothing fancy.
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Set up my parents and grandparents nicely.
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Go on some AWESOME vacations with Mrs. RickJay.
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Buy some nice things for the house.
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Go back to school so I can do the job I actually want to do.
Buy an ex-Navy oil tanker.
Personal stuff: Help out various family members; sock away some education money for the hypothetical future children; do a LOT of traveling, with an eye to figuring out where I want to settle down, since I could probably live anywhere on that kind of money.
Charitable stuff: Start and administer a foundation for improving education about geography and world cultures in American schools. (Partly lobbying school districts to treat geography and foreign languages as serious subjects instead of afterthoughts, partly fun stuff – scholarships for study abroad and such. And yeah, I realize this might exhaust $39 mil rather quickly, but hey, there’s always fundraising.)
1.0 Visit an investment banker.
2.0 Set up household / living expenses account with power of attorney to banker for that account only.
3.0 Tell Marcie that she could resign, if she wanted to.
4.0 Buy hearing aid I’ll need due to Marcie’s screams of glee.
5.0 Book a year long cruise with lay-over privledges and take a vacation from real life.
6.0 Shower Marcie with everything she has ever wanted and had to do without.
Well, looking after that amount of money profitably is going to be a full-time job - even just maintaining oversight of those you employ to do it.
So, with the time off from doing that, I’d quit my job, pay off the mortgage, buy a decent estate, learn to fly (PPL, IFR, twin, jet), then go visit friends anywhere, any time. And if I had that sort of money, it would probably be a ME-262 from www.stormbirds.com, purely because they’re cool.
Not move, not quit. I love my house and I like my job.
Pay off the mortgage, figure out what to do with the significant tax burden.
Go buy a ‘small’ warehouse to house the extra cars I’d need.
Allow my parents to retire the way they WANT, not he way they’re currently needing to.
Make sure my kids don’t see any of it until they’re well-balanced.
Buy back the house we used to live in, in Hermosa Beach.
Hire myself out as a free-lance writer and paralegal
Buy a full membership at Bally’s
Take an Amtrak tour, nationwide
Buy a Dodger season ticket
Get my car fixed once and for all 
Get my teeth fixed
Quit my job. Immediately.
Pay off all my debts, and those of my immediate family.
Set up my parents in a cushy retirement.
After that… I’m not sure. Try to invest it wisely, give to charities, maybe buy a new sofa.
Gundy, you didn’t seem like the whorin’ type. Or were you calling everyone in the thread a whore?
He’s a California software engineer, right? $39 million?
He could place a down payment on a house in Palo Alto.
A million smackeroos a year, eh? I wonder if that would even impress a denizen of 2023 that much? I guess to make sure I was still rich then I would need to consult with some financial experts now. Most of my money would go toward things like my daughter’s college plan, my retirement plan, taxes, various investments, and the like. Still, I would no doubt have some money left over. Among the things I would buy or increase my spending on in the next couple years:
[ul]
[li]A certain medical procedure that the Poor College Student Health Plan does not cover.[/li][li]Some minor dental work.[/li][li]A Harley.[/li][li]Porn, but not too much.[/li][li]Alcohol and stuff, but not too much.[/li][li]A carpet shampooer–or maybe just a shampooing–for my stinky back hall carpet (thanks a lot, Pugsley).[/li][li]More books.[/li][li]More CDs.[/li][li]More movies.[/li][li]More food.[/li][li]Some help for some causes/charities near and dear to my heart.[/li][/ul]
Pretty mundane stuff, really. I guess I’m lucky. Apart from true long term financial security, it appears that I already have most of the stuff I really want.
Tug McGraw’s famous line comes to mind. On getting a raise, a writer asked what he was going to do with the money. Tug says “90% of it I’ll probably spend on women and booze. The other 10% I’ll just waste.”
I’ve already thought about this, since my friends and I have fantasized about what we’d do if we won the lottery.
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Pay off my student loans, and the loans of the 4 people who have been my friends through thick and thin. I reckon those people wouldn’t have to work anymore, if they didn’t want to.
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Buy my father whatever he wanted.
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Pay for my brother’s wedding. He and his fiancee wouldn’t have to work either.
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Have an enormous, beautiful house near Ithaca, NY, equipped with a theatre, a functional pot shop, art studio, printing press, and dark room. Invite friends to live there for free, with the only requirement being that they work on creative projects that they wished they could be paid to do.
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Give money to charities I currently support, like the libraries, animal shelters, endangered species protection.
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Set up a scholarship fund for kids whose dads have reneged on their child support payments so these kids can’t afford to go to college.
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Travel.