I once spent $143,000,000.00 Of your tax dollars in one fell swoop. It was a carefully researched, bonded and insured, compliantly competed, and duly diligenced swoop, I promise you.
I could tell you what I bought, but then I’d have to . . .
I was, for a time, the sole programmer and support person for a Mutual Funds pricing system, though which flowed about $7 billion dollars every day. Of course, that doesn’t mean I had anything to do with the money, just the program that calculated the prices and statistics based on other inputs.
As an Armored Courier, my partner and I had $3-4 million in cash in our truck on a regular basis after stops at a processing center for a major national bank. I once picked up about the same amount of cash at an Indian Casino. On another occasion, I had $110 million in county property tax checks in a box I had to walk for some distance and then deliver to the bank.
But I’ve never managed a corporate budget.
My horror story:
I was working at a film studio and they were cutting a check for an investor, but unsure of who to write out the check to so they left the name off it. I am not sure the exact amount now but I think it was about $4 million. They wanted a photocopy of the check for their records, so I made the copy and gave it to the head attorney.
About half an hour later, I jump up from my desk in a panic - I had left that blank check on the photocopy machine!
I don’t think I have ever run so fast in an office in my life (a large office with at least 100 people just in that department!) and got to the photocopy machine - and there was the check, still sitting there. I almost passed out with joy - and still get the heebie-jeebies when thinking how I would have had to explain losing that blank check.
Granted, I am sure they could have stopped payment, but I think that most certainly would have been my last day at that job. Plus, imagine if I hadn’t remembered leaving the check on the photocopy machine until later that night when I was home…oh the horror…
I have managed a 1 million dollar budget. That included salaries, software libraries and test equipment. Of the bunch, salaries for my team took the largest chunk.
In cash, around a million if you count change bags. I worked in the cash cage of a casino in Vegas. When we were robbed (which was…interesting…) the theives took just bills, missed a full cash drawer and small drawer that was set up next to me and my small drawer full of large bills, and still walked out with about $100K. If they had bothered to check the second drawer, and if they had hit both small drawers (each containing about $100K on their own) they’d have quadrupled that.
(I wasn’t meant to let them in the cage, but they had a gun on my floor staff, and it wasn’t my money, so I let them in and let them take it.)
When I worked as a lowly temp in Australia, I once had responsibility for dealing with two related bank transactions on behalf of a client, totalling $110million (AUD).
What was particularly odd about this was that it was organised at extremely short notice; I had only about a forty minute window of time to get it all done, including all the paperwork and getting the relevant authorisations!
Have you thought about spending it on me? 
The most I’ve ever been responsible for that wasn’t mine was about $35,000 in cash that I had to deposit years ago. I was shitting bricks.
$10,000. I know, chickfeed, but it was a check I found which should have been given to my boss months before I found it. I didn’t forget to give it to him, someone else did. Also I was working late so no boss around to run to with it. I had to hide it someplace and hope it would still be there in the morning.
I don’t remember the dollar amount, but when my mother died, I was the executor of her estate.
I managed a $30 million grant fund in Afghanistan and have been the second in authority for aid programs around $300 million.
Great story, DMark.
I would have been tickled if I had found that check. In fact, I think I would have put it back, pulled up a chair and just sat by the photocopy machine waiting to see what would happen.
I have delivered playing cheques to tables where people were wagering $10,000-$30,000 per hand at baccarat. The highest value of racks of casino chips I delivered at one time is $2.5 million. And it all fit in one little box.
I also have been in charge of guarding the large mobile cage on wheels in which the deposit boxes from the slot machines are placed when they’re switched out with fresh, empty boxes. There are hundreds and hundreds of deposit boxes on that cage, but I don’t know how much money was inside. Probably close to a million, but I could be off by a lot.
At the moment it’s for two government agencies with a budget of about AUD1.5 B/year (about USD1.6 B/year at current prices), but for a given value of “control”. I’m not responsible for hands-on managing of the cash, I’m the guy who works for the department that works out how much cash that guy’s able to dole out, in what areas it gets doled and what hoops they need to jump through to get the money to manage.
If you’re after the largest project I’ve had to pass a yes/no on up to the people who are elected to sign things, it’s only around $220 M, and even that had a few gatekeepers before it got to me.
Probably $30-$50M in construction money. But I suck at budgets, so I had two financial analysts to work the numbers.
I drive my friend’s MclarenSLR on occasion.
It’s not as relaxing and fun as you’d think.
I am a purchase card holder for a federal agency. I order whatever I’m told to order, and I can spend up to $20K per month. It always amazes me to hear news of the horrible purchase card abuses perpetrated by some federal employees, e.g. people making personal mortgage payments, buying clothes/food/travel, sometimes for years on end before being discovered. Our program is so tightly managed and involves so many people that I’d be discovered within days of making a purchase that wasn’t preauthorized by the appropriate paperwork/signatures.
Forgot: The widow of a Nigerian Prince is going to have me manage 200Million, 10% of which I get to keep. All I have to do is provide my account information so she can transfer the money
I’ve been responsible for the collections of A/R totalling about $30mm. As far as personally, my mother’s estate ended with about $250K in an IRA that I’m responsible for managing and doling out to my siblings over 5 years.
StG
I’m a muni court magistrate and probably have several million dollars worth of cases come before me every year, although I never actually have my mitts on the cash, of course. The biggest single case I decided was re: almost $3 million in various bank accounts which a creditor was trying to seize from a Sikh doctor and his wife. I heard some interesting testimony on Sikh marriages and who controls the household finances…
Oh, yeah - I have all of his books!
I hope that works out better for you than it did for me. The bitch.
In highschool I worked over Christmas break at a local bookstore. The Saturday before Christmas I worked the closing shift. We had been busting ass all day and were glad to sit down and count the till. After counting we had $64,000 in cash. I have no idea how much we had in checks and charge card receipts, I just remember the cash. And it was my job to walk it across the mall parking lot and deposit it at the bank.
I wasn’t yet old enough to buy a copy of Playboy, but I was old enough to haul 64 grand in a canvas satchel across a deserted parking lot in the dark?
Since then I’ve spent my career dispensing medications, including exotic narcotics, to nursing home and hospital patients. Once, while working graveyard, I got bored and used a bit of googling and the narcotic log to figure out the street value of the drugs I had locked in the room next to me. Result: about $100,000, give or take a lot because I have no idea how accurate the Google info was. But they were just pills. We dispensed thousands a day.
I will never forget that $64,000 in cash. Almost all of it $10 and $20 bills. Quite a bagfull.