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wingedweasel · 3 years ago

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Would you rather...

Sorry for the super long post, but...

So my eyes were i a hostage situation with Twitter earlier, and I noticed a bunch of people posting things like ‘would you rather have $X or $Y?’ where x is an extremely huge amount and Y is a comically smaller amount. One was along the lines of ‘would you rather have one billion dollars all at once or 15 cents every day?’ The point of these is to bring up the idea of passive income and how it’s better to have steady income over large lump sums.

However, when it’s these comically small amounts, it would be better to have the lump sum. There was one that offered one million vs one dollar every day. Ummm, the million...? Every time. I’d choose the lump sum. Sure if it’s something like one million vs 10,000 every month, then okay, yeah, the parsed out payments would be better. I mean, yeah, it would take 10 years to get the same amount, but you would be getting more in the long run. Also, in these hypotheticals, there is no end date, so taking the monthly payment would be better since you could assume that you would keep getting the payments until you die.

But - and this is the thing that got me questioning if I was missing something - why would anyone take the super small amount? If it was $1 a day, rounding all months to have 30 days, then you’d only be getting 360 a year, 3600 in 10 years. Why would anyone want that compared to having the lump sum of 1 million?

What could you even do in that situation anyway? We’ve all seen those commercials “With $1 a day, you could save the life of a child/animal” uh...but I wouldn’t be spending $1 a day. I’d have to pay a large amount, that yes, technically comes out to $1 a day, but I wouldn’t be getting a daily charge of $1. Getting $1 a day wouldn’t help anyone. As I said before, that’s less than 1000 a year. Even if it was somehow able to pass along to your descendants, it would take 2-3 of your descendants’ lifetimes to get to 1 million. And this is all assuming that you never touch any of that money in all of these lifetimes.

I’m sorry, but no. That’s not gonna work for me. Especially if it’s something stupid like 15 cents a day. No, gimme the lump sum and I’d show you that I could make more with that lump sum than any low daily amount.

This piggy backs off my belief of ‘sort yourself out before trying to sort other people out.’ This stems from having to grow up watching the people around me run themselves ragged trying to help others out of financial binds while they didn’t have the funds to do. I’d usually get the shaft because of that, and any financial decisions I had to make - when I was actually able to make them - had to go through this kind of tiered system and rank what I wanted to do over the wants (not needs) of other people. It sucked, still does since I’m still stuck in this system because of the decisions of other people’s past mistakes and temper tantrums. But yeah, that’s why I believe that a person should help themselves before they help others. I get that this comes off as selfish or egocentric, very ‘me first’ Americanism, and on one hand it is, but it doesn’t mean I (and the hypothetical others) don’t give to the poor or help others when they need it. It just means that I don’t think it’s good for you when you are guilted (or tricked depending on how you look at it) into opening a credit card to a tire shop when you don’t even have a license so that your sister can get her car fixed even though she has a very well paid job, but for some reason can’t afford to pay her bills and continues to not learn from her past mistakes by spending all her money as soon as she gets paid, constantly going on trips to Vegas, and seems to be always doing some money spending activity every weekend.

Why are you asking if this was something that happened to me? What ever gave you that idea?

Anyway, getting back on tract of proving the lump sum is better: First, obviously, I’d pay off my debts. For me, I’m fortunate enough that it isn’t a massive amount, still a lot, but not hundreds of thousands. I won’t have to worry about a huge amount that I have to pay every month and not have to decide which bill gets the late fee this time. School loans, credit cards, not so much debits but a few people have gifted me various amounts to help pay my tuition, so I’d want to pay them back. I don’t have to because they were gifts, but I feel guilty that I had to ask them for money.

Next, I would sort out my living situation. I would move to a better neighborhood in which I would buy a house there. I would also take the time to learn to drive and buy a car. I would have to outfit my new home, and while that can take a good chunk of money, second hand stores, Craigslist and the castaways from friends would help with a lot of that. I’d need to outfit almost everything because I would not be living with anyone else except my fur babies. In this fantasy, I’m saying fuck everyone else, I’m moving far far away from my family of leeches and never seeing seeing them again. I might send birthday/holiday cards/gifts to the ones I kinda get on with like my nieces and the one uncle that is actually a decent person, but everyone else can piss right the fuck off. They took advantage of me whenever I had money - more often when I didn’t have money and somehow managed to squeeze everything out of me then - so why should I help them when I have money now? Harsh? Absolutely. Petty? As fuck.

After that, I’d invest. Obviously. If the point of the would you rather was to teach about the benefits of sustained constant income, then investing is the best way to do that. Investing in companies that have a history of doing well. Having a diverse portfolio is something that I’ve heard wealthy people talk about, so if one investment doesn’t pan out, I wouldn’t lose everything. Sounds...sound. I’d also take the time to invest in me. I’d finally be able to afford the hobbies and skills that I couldn’t before. I’d take back up with music and be able to afford lessons. I do better when someone is beside me telling me what I’m doing wrong and showing me how to do it correctly. Ex, I tried learning Japanese outside of a class setting and just couldn’t wrap my head around the basic sentence structure: XはYです. For some reason, my brain couldn’t figure out that x and y were nouns and it basically translates to X is Y. My brain freaked out, and I just couldn’t. However, day 1 of class, the figurative lightbulb went off and went “oh.” and laughed for a solid 10 minuets as soon as I got home. Musical instruments are the same way. I’ve tried to lear guitar and violin several times, but all without an instructor. Can’t do it. Hiring a personal trainer would be helpful as well. Getting someone to kick me in the butt about my fitness would go a long way in helping me reach my goals. Language tutors as well. I’ve maxed out my ability to learn at the community collage I take classes at, even though it’s been over 10 years since I took those classes, but I passed them so they’ve said screw you. While technically I could do all these things for free - there are various websites, YT tutorials, and Duolingo - like I said, I need that live teacher/student interaction for it to click.

Finally, as I said above, help yourself before you help others, so now that I’ve helped myself, I can now start helping others. Not my family. Fuck them. However, there are friends that have helped me so much over the years, and now that there is money that I can actually use - remember those investments? They’d have started to see returns by now - I can now start ‘paying’ them back for all that they did. It may not always be money that they would give, just being a shoulder to cry on meant more than anything at times so they’d deserve something as compensation for putting up with my issues. However, because I would now be in a good place. I could literally afford to go ‘here, here is a little something to show how much you mean to me and as a small step in saying thank you for all that you did.’ I could also now go, ‘I see you are struggling, so here is something that you can use to help get out of the bad situation.’ This was - and still is - something that made me feel so guilty that I couldn’t do when I was younger. I’d see a friend need something - or even just really want, we were kids after all - but I sometimes couldn’t even spare a dollar to help them. Helping others also means gifting to charity. I have always wanted to be able to donate to charities, to give money to panhandlers - I don’t care some of them use the money for drugs or alcohol, the small amount who do do that shouldn’t cause you to not give to those who don’t - remember those commercials from before? Even if some of the charities suck major ass, there are some really good ones that I would love to be a donor. I could afford to be a Patron member for certain YTers, I could donate to small Twitch streamers. Kickstarters and GoFundMes would see my name on the donor list. Animal shelters and children’s hospitals; after school programs and community centers; friends and neighbors. I could do so much.

But it certainly wouldn’t happen if I received $1 a day.

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