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comment by goobster
goobster  ·  2124 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Ask Hubski: I just inherited $40,000 - what do I do?

I'm not going to suggest I know what you should do with your windfall.

What I am going to do is tell you about my bad choices.

When I moved back to the US from Hungary, I had about $60k from selling my property there. The day I transferred my money from my EU bank account into my American bank account, George Bush abandoned the "Strong Dollar Policy", and the dollar tanked. I lost somewhere between $10-15k in the four days it took the bank transfer to complete.

Now I had a little over $40k, and was moving from an extremely low-cost country, to mildly expensive Seattle.

What I didn't think about at the time, was that a receptionist at an office made about $40k/year. It wasn't really a lot of money.

And I wasn't working, yet.

Six months later, and I still haven't gotten a job, I ate at restaurants 2x a day, 5-6 days a week, bought a car, a motorcycle, a new laptop, set up a web site and gone through 10 or 15 different WordPress themes (at $40 a piece), and ... the account was getting dramatically low. Like, $5k left.

So yeah. That is an excellent nest egg you have there, and should be (mostly) protected. Put $5k in your regular bank account, and dip in for a couple of crazy things ... treat yourself to a couple of treats/experiences/trips/whatever turns your crank.

Put the rest into a separate savings account that you cannot access online. You need to go in to the bank, to move money out of the account. This will prevent you from doing dopey things with the money.

Eventually, the "right thing" will come along - an investment opportunity, a home, whatever - and you will still have the majority of the money in that account.

Just don't let it slip through your fingers. Make it HARD to spend the money. You can't get it back once it is gone.





user-inactivated  ·  2124 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    What I am going to do is tell you about my bad choices.

Good judgement comes from experience, experience comes from bad judgement. A story is experience without consequence.

Take my circledot.