Let’s say that among the many lurkers on the Dope is an eccentric billionaire. Inspired by your eloquence in one post or other, the billionaire decides to give you a gift: he’s setting up a $5,000,000 trust which you can use to buy yourself a new residence and furnish it. You can purchase an existing domicile already on the market; you can buy a newly-built house in which you’d be the first-ever resident; you can choose have a house built from pre-existing blueprints; even hire an architect, buy a plot of land, and do the whole thing from scrratch. High-rise apartments & condos are allowed.
There’s a few drawbacks. You must complete the project within 1 year. You must move into the new residence immediately after completing the project. You must agree to live in the new residence for at least 2 years. And you don’t get to keep any monies left over. Once everything is paid for, the billionaire’s clever attorneys and accoutants will make sure that you have enough cash left to pay for two year’s upkeep and property taxes, and to handle the enormous hit this gift will surely cause on your federal, state, & local income taxes (as applicable) for the first year. That cash gift will come either from the money you didn’t spend on the purchase & furnishings, or, if nothing is from the original $5,000,000, from the billionaire’s deep pockets. But you’re not going to get living expenses; you can’t buy a food, cable or satellite service, a car, etc., out of the trust. But you can put a swing set in the yard, and whatnot.
I’d buy a really nice regular existing house for about $1M, which I could afford to maintain down the road. Then I would proceed to fill it with art and antiques, about $3.5M. I’d use the remainder for the contingencies outlined in the OP. After two years, I start selling off the art and antiques.
I’d spend it on a ten acre plot with room for radio antennas and a wind farm. The house itself would have an open layout. There would be a kick-ass kitchen, walk-in freezer and massive bathrooms and closets. I’d have a ten seat theater too. I’d build a detached ham radio shack, the garage would hold four cars and have a mechanic, wood-working, welding shop attached. I’d prolly have a panic room/fallout shelter built beneath the house proper.
This includes land? Because that’s the first thing I’d get. A vast tract up north in the Beautiful Land. One million dollars would get a ridiculous amount of land near Bancroft, for example. I’m not going to say it would be measured in square kilometres, but it would be close.
Does this include outbuildings and things like roads? With the techniques my friends and I know, the remaining four million dollars would suffice to build a village, not just one house. But one house? It would look more like a college campus, all interconnected buildings, than a ‘house’.
If I didn’t explicitly say land was included in the OP, I certainly mean to imply it. Likewise outbuildings.
I didn’t think of roads & such because it didn’t occur to me. I’m inclined to say “it shouldn’t have included roads & such, but as I didn’t rule it out and cannot think of a justification for doing so now, roads & such are in like flynn.”
I saw this renoed bathroom on a design show once and almost died it was so wonderful. It was really large, with the usual double sink, soaking tub, big shower, and then a dressing room on one side, with closet and drawer space built in along the whole wall.
In the middle of the large room was a front-loading washer and dryer with countertop installed across the top of them. You could pull your laundry out of the dryer, fold it on top of the counter, turn around and put it in the closet/drawers. It was the most wonderful thing I’ve ever seen.
So it would be like the Kohler commercial: Build a home around this.
I would build a 2500 sqft house using state-of-the art building techniques. It would be as close to zero-energy as is possible today in the northeast US. I would not be able to spend the whole $5 million. I could do it for under $1 million plus the cost of the land it will sit on.
Same idea as UncleRojelio above. I’d spend $3 million of it on land, $500,000 on the actual house, $500,000 on furnishings, and $1 million on the wind farm and solar panels which would supply power for the house.
I’d build a reasonably modest home in a decent neighborhood, convenient to everything I need. Then, underneath it I’d build a ginormous, secret underground lair. I would swear the architects to secrecy under penalty of death.
My secret underground lair would have everything I need to survive the zombie apocalypse, including several decades’ worth of non-perishable food stores, a huge cache of weapons, and top notch security.
If you agree to this today, you have until 24 February 2010 to finish the project. After that date you no longer have access to the trust fund monies, except as is necessary to pay the addtional income tax this gift will obligate you to, and that payment will be handled by the lawyers. In short, no, you can’t.
I think An Arky’s suggestion of buying art & antiques to sell after the first year is a good one, if you’re confident enough of your judgment of the markets for those things to risk it. It’s much better than my own idea of buying an estate with a guest house to rent out. And, since homeowner’s insurance is surely a legitimate expense, the insurance on them will be covered by the trust (subject to the 5 mil limit).
I would spend a month traipsing about the blue marble, find several places that I would like to travel to regularly and buy a modest place in as many of them as the cash could afford. I would rent the ones I wasn’t using to pay for the upkeep and maintenance and stay at one regularly.
Never, ever works. You have to either design the underground lair yourself and have your robots build it (and that gonna cost you way over $5 million just for the 'bots) or kill the architects AND all the workmen involved in the project. Besides, you don’t need a secret underground lair for a zombie apocalypse: just a very well provisioned, armed, & armored one. And, of course, a septic tank.
