So, if you had enough money that you didn’t have to worry about earning a living, what would you do? Not ‘what would you buy with all that cash’, but what would you fill your days with?? Would you still go to a regular job or not?
Myself, I probably wouldn’t still go to an office job. I’d devote a lot more time to my writing, and probably do more travelling. As well as more reading, and probably watch more movies/television than I do these days, which isn’t that much.
And I might try learning something completely new, like how to fly. Is it still completely cliche for a trust fund baby to be taking pilot lessons?
I would still teach, because I love it, but I would hire out a LOT of domestic help: work would be pure joy if I came home to a clean house with a stocked shelves and my clothes all pressed in my closet and no errands to run.
Remember domestic help involves both loss of privacy and issues of trust. There is good reason why Kate and William have decided to forgo domestic help. (And kudos to them!)
Nothing is as easy as it seems on the surface, I know a ‘trust fund baby’ who is now a grown man, never held a job, etc. Not especially happy, lives actually quite frugally.
I also shared rooms, at uni, with a girl who was a trust fund baby, standing to inherit a true fortune at 21yrs. Interestingly she was part of a large blended family where only half the children were trust funders.
I’m just saying, things are rarely as they seem from the outside. I see my friend struggle to find his ‘value’, harder than you think, if you’re not contributing to society by holding down a job.
I’ve always thought I’d become a full time volunteer at the Science Museum - or maybe the Art Institute - taking groups of school kids through - once I don’t “have” to work any longer.
I’d do something. It wouldn’t be a corporate desk job.
So somehow the me that I am today is suddenly graced with millions of extra dollars?
I would travel, spend more time (and clearly money) on photography and volunteer.
I’m very good at organizing and managing people and while I would be eternally grateful to not have to work after a couple of years of traveling I would need to get back to doing something on a semi regular basis. If I was staying in Toronto (not bloody likely) I would probably choose Sick Kids or Princess Margaret Hospital Foundations but since I would end up somewhere warm and beautiful I would have to find an appropriate health related charity in Hawaii
Yes, I guess I was thinking of a windfall inheritance, not a retroactive change in your family’s fortunes.
And I forgot one thing that I’d been meaning to put on mine - I’d probably keep working on programming projects in a less corporate way - possibly even try to hook up with a business/sales manager who could direct me to interesting looking freelance projects, or help brainstorm for programs or website ideas that I could work on that would be saleable.
I’d do what I do right now, because I love it. But it would free my mind to so many things. I wouldn’t have to worry about paying my student loans, about caring for my elders… I wouldn’t have so much budgeting with travelling… It also means getting or setting up the job I want, in the future, without having to stress that much about paychecks and salary negotiations. I’d be able to take a lower-paying job because I like it, instead of getting a higher-paying job because I need it.
No, I definitely wouldn’t work a regular job. I’d become a full time philanthropist and use the bulk of the money to start my own charities. With what I keep for myself, I’d spend my time travelling the world and writing.
I think I’d have to have a period of transistion from the “have to work” to the “don’t have to work” where I figure that out. My mind’s too tied up and beaten down by The Man to be clear on it. I’d do some worthwhile things, I’m sure, but it wouldn’t be work as I know it now.
Well firstly I would quit my day job. Don’t get me wrong I love my job, but I also have a side career as a theatrical set designer. Without my day job I could focus more time on that. My husband and I talk of winning millions and opening a small summer theatre on one of the Gulf Islands. Probably Saltspring. I would have my own art studio facing the ocean and spend my summers working in my theatre and my winters painting, working on my photography, hanging with my kids, and traveling.
I think I would be fine without a steady job as long as I had my theatre and design work to keep the creative juices flowing.
Travel a lot, start my own publishing company for literary writers, and buy a farm and adopt lots of animals, especially dogs. Have a large wine collection and invite friends to my farm for big parties. Write a lot.
I have a friend who got rich (order of $100 million) as one of the founders of a well-known company. He was a professor. He went back to being a professor. He even taught a beginner’s class with 200 students although he could have avoided that with a salary reduction. When he turned 55 he retired, the youngest age at which he could become emeritus. He started another business, almost a hobby business since I doubt it has ever or ever will make money. Meantime he does research and answers dumb questions from me (and sometimes asks me questions too). Except for the 200 student classes, it’s what I’d have done too.
My friends and I make short films, and we struggle for funds for that endeavour, the compromises sometimes crippling them into disappointing efforts. I would support that hobby for them and me as much as possible. Filmmaking, visual effects, and writing are my main hobbies, and that’s what I’d do with most of my time.
Of course, if I had been such a person from early on in my life, I would have different friends, so perhaps my situation wouldn’t have evolved the same way.
If he’d allow me, I’d invest in my boss’s business. Hire someone to do what I do now, hire someone else to lighten his load significantly, but stay on in a supervisory role. It wouldn’t be a 9-5, M-F for me anymore, but I’d want to be there enough to make sure all is going well, since it’d be my $ invested too. However, if I’d have been born a trust fund baby, I probably never would have worked for my boss, so who knows?
With the extra time, I’d travel more, especially during baseball season. It’d be cool to see 75 games a year. I’d spend more time with my family, who are spread all over, especially my neice and nephews.
And I’d read a lot more. I’d like to read every Pulitzer prize novel eventually, and put a sizable dent into the*1001 books you should read before you die *list.
I’d go to college for as long as I could, get a couple of Master’s, PhD’s, etc. Then I’d probably stay in school as a professor. I wish I had the wherewithal to go back to school.
I am one although I have very limited control over it right now. It is basically an insurance policy for me to try to do what I want and get bailed out if I fail. I needed a new car a few months ago so I just picked one out and it was paid for but that is about the full extent of it right now. I can have more if I ask but it is mainly set aside so that I can retire when I am 50 or so. I am 37 and I have a good job and can afford anything reasonable on my own.
This only came about in the last few years. I wasn’t raised that way so it is all new to me. I haven’t really done anything differently except an extremely nice vacation at the 5 star Broadmoor Hotel with my daughters in Colorado. My father offers to by me and my brothers a massive vacation property anywhere in the world but we all live thousands of miles apart and and have jobs and families. We basically do the same thing we always did. There will be much more money to come but I don’t know if it will be enough to get used to a certain lifestyle and be able to afford it if I live to be 100. Getting back in the workforce at 75 if I run out of money would not be good so I just plug away and I don’t need much else.
The answer in my case is to do what I have always done and not think about it to much. It is great to have an insurance policy like that but I know myself well enough to know that a life of self-direction and leisure would probably lead to a national news story or early death.
My only wish list is being able to travel more with my kids but that gets screwed up because of my job. You can’t negotiate or buy yourself into more time in some positions and I have one of those. It is a huge deal if I take even one day off let alone several weeks a year and I have to figure out how to change that.
