Life Changing

I have a brother who I talk with about money dreams. We buy lottery tickets together and enter contests to win houses from HGTV together and we like to talk about what we'd do if we won either. The homes are less money than the lottery but would still drastically alter what's possible for us and our families in our lifetime. He told me a while back that most people believe $10,000 would be a life-altering amount of money. I've been thinking about that lately.

$10,000 is a LOT of money, that's for sure. However, in my opinion, it can't set most people up for life. You can't pay off your house or take a long leave from employment or even travel for very long or very far before the money runs out. There are many educational programs it could pay for or pay a good chunk of and it's possible that could alter a life. Perhaps if you're in on some kind of entrepreneurial efforts or golden investment opportunity, that could turn out to be life changing.

I've been watching a lot of episodes of Undercover Boss. Lots of bosses have gifted people $10,000-$30,000. Most people use the money to buy reliable cars (which IS life-changing to an extent! After having unreliable cars for years, I can vouch for the value of that!) or they pay off medical bills. They take trips and pay for education. They start educational funds for their kids or pay for weddings. Those are consistent ways the money gets spent. I've had one time in my life that my husband and I each had that much money and could choose what to do with it. Our whole HVAC system in our home had to be replaced and for the most part, that's what my husband spent the money on. For my portion of the money, we spent months trying to find decent property for that price. We spent so many weekends checking out properties. Sadly, anything in the state that was under $15,000 was not really usable. It either was too remote to access or on too much of a slope to utilize or had other issues. We both loved the idea of having some property somewhere but it just never ended up being enough money to purchase property that could be used for anything practical without a significant amount of additional money being put into the pot.

In the end, I paid off a few personal accounts and got a couple smaller things for our kids that we can't normally get. I made a small investment, which is currently worth 9 times what I put in and spent the rest taking my family to New York and Canada to check seeing certain things together off my bucket list. I was careful in planning the trip and we went with a tour group and ended up also seeing some of Pennsylvania and Ohio, including a little bit of Amish country. On the way home, we got to stop in the Chicago Airport, which gave us one more state to be in for the trip. We really did get a lot of bang for our buck. I had priced it out if we had gone on our own without a tour group and it would have cost much more to see and experience all that we got to do. Being with a group saved money but had other downsides, such as we had no control whatsoever over what we saw or where we went or the timeline.

If I had the same amount of money again, what would I do with it? I don't know. I spent more than a year deciding and following through on everything the first time around and everything we did seemed like the best way to enrich and improve our lives as possible at the time. I have no regrets. Was it life-changing? I guess in some ways it was. I don't feel like we have a lot of tangible things from the money but we got to do things together that there simply was no other way to ever experience together otherwise. I could have never come up with that amount of money in my normal day-to-day life to do that. Is our life much different today than it was then because of the money? No. Our day-to-day living is still pretty much the same as it was before the money. I am indescribably grateful for the money and what it did for us. I would welcome the chance to have that kind of money again any day of the week. It's wonderful & helpful & exciting. Sometimes it just feels amazing to have some control over a little bit of what's possible in life for a while and planning how to use the funds feels like a hopeful time. My mind sometimes thinks if it was that wonderful to spend that amount of money, what would it feel like to actually win a house or the lottery? On a smaller scale though and for now, I'm interested in how other people would spend $10,000-$30,000.

It's even fun to see what other people would do with $100 extra. How does it change if it's $100 more every month? How about $1,000? Etc. My daughter said to me that she hears a lot of rich people say that money doesn't solve their problems and that they have the same amount of problems. She says she would really like to have money then, too so she could have the same amount of problems but could also have money. Ha ha ha!