Seeing the “wife won 4.5b in divorce” thread made me wonder–could you spend a billion dollars if you wanted to?
Not talking about “investing” a billion dollars into capital assets, or donating a billion dollars. That’s a different story.
But if somebody dropped a briefcase with a cool $1b in it, what would you do? Do you think you’d ever spend the whole thing?
As for me–I’m 34 years old. I figure I have 50 (maybe 60, if I’m lucky) years left in me. Even if I live to be 100, and assuming that my billion dollars earns zero interest, that would still be $15m per year. I don’t know what I’d do with it.
You could just move into the Royal Penthouse Suite at the Hotel President Wilson Hotel in Geneva. At the published nightly rate, that will cost you nearly $24MM per year. Money gone in a little under 42 years.
But what is not a capital asset? Any physical thing has some depreciating terminal value. If I buy diamond jewelry, that holds it value better than airplanes. Is that a capital asset? So perhaps the question is what can you buy, in addition to non-physical things like services, such that the maturity value is zero. In that case, the question is not just whether you can spend the money, but whether you can obliterate everything you own such that it is completely worthless.
When I said “you can’t buy capital assets”, what I meant was you can’t just put the $1b into US treasuries and collect 2% on it, and just spend the $20m per year, or you can’t buy a hotel/business/stock or something that produces more money.
And you also can’t give it away to charity or to friends or something. That is, you can’t just give $950m of it to the local hospital or school, and you can’t buy your buddy his own Malibu palace and private yacht. (But buying your own is okay.)
If we include these two things, it would be easy to spend a billion dollars. But if you exclude them, I think it would be pretty difficult to burn through a billion dollars in a lifetime.
I don’t think it’s that hard. You spend $100mm on a ridiculous house. You spend $300-400mm on a ridiculous yacht. You spend another $100mm on an exotic car collection and a private jet. Let’s say that’s $500-600mm. Then you blow the rest on expensive women and high class parties. Don’t think so? I’m pretty sure I could find a way to spend $5-10 for a party several times a year.
^ In that case, it really wouldn’t be all that hard to spend if you wanted to. Nice places to crash in the world’s major cities (with full domestic staff, of course) would eat up a lot of it right off the bat. Throw in the planes, cars, jewelry, entertainment, etc. and $1B is gone pretty fast.