If I gave you $250,000

[ctrl+alt+del]

Which is why the house always wins. I'm with ya, though. I love the wheel.

 

[pulque]

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[wolfman]

Id put $50K into a college fund for my daghter, $100K pay off the mortgage and other debt. Invest $100K in a low risk fund. I really like the idea of being debt free including a mortgage. If I didnt have a mortgage payment every month I could work at McDonalds if I fell on hard times and still get by.

 

[SAChick]

Pay off student loans, put away money for kids college so they don't have to do school loans and I guess pay mortgage or get into a little bigger house.

 

[Summerof79]

ps- If you ahd your mortgage paid off you could allocate more dollars into IRA, 401k or other income reducing options that would benefit you in the future without any tax ramifications

 

[Statalyzer]

I'm not in debt so I'd invest a lot of it, either for a future house buying or future kids' education or both. My parents would get some of it as a repayment for how much they spent on me for the first 22 years of my life. The rest I'd give away - I'm not quite sure how. Probably a combination of donating to charities, tithing, anonymously helping out friends or friends of friends who are in need, and maybe anonymously helping someone I don't know kind of like the random-gift-card deal...I'm not sure about that one. But the part I give away would be the largest chunk, most likely, I really don't need 250k

 

[Smurfette]

I think I'd put 150K of it down on a house, then pay for myself to go to school to be a midwife. Then I'd make sure there's enough left that I could stay home and not work for a couple years after LHF68 and I have kids.

 

[Napoleon]

Buy a house on a beach where there are good waves. Then buy a bunch of different surfboards & wetsuits. This would probably happen in a 2nd-3rd world country like Mexico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, maybe the South Pacific...

Then I would hopefully get 2 girls at once, just because of the pad.

And I would also have friends come down anytime they wanted and we could surf whenever and then have fish tacos & Pacifico afterwards.

 

[hornimal]

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[Macanudo]

Well, greed is good.

 

[LongIslandIceSIP]

I would take a sabbatical from work for a year, and use the money to jump start a company, hire a few programmers in India, and a ton of hot girls to advertise my "product" in the US.

 

[RoundhouseKick]

Well, I would invest half of it in mutual funds and give the rest
of it to my friend, Saheib, in Securities.....

 

[Bernard]

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[Beau Vine]

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[Bernard]

Bond interest is taxable. That eats up a lot of the difference. Also, you don't really get to deduct all the interest. You're only net benefit is the interest that exceeds the standard deduction. There's not a lot of juice, even in your example.

As I said in an earlier post, investments have risk. Even AAA bonds can defualt. Even if the bonds don't default, they can lose value if interest rates rise or the credit rating changes. Boat loads of bond investors lost their shirts on AAA MBS and CMBS bonds in the last 18 months.

Separately, if your income is high enough, you can't deduct your mortgage interest.

I'm not discouraging anyone from investing instead of paying off a mortgage. I'm just saying I don't want to take that risk with my own money. Peace of mind can be a valuable asset too.

Bernard

 

[Gone To Texas]

Start my own business, maybe a restaurant (yes, despite the 90% failure rate). I've had several ideas over the years, but never had the time, $, or guts to pursue any of them.

 

[HornsOverIthaca]

Invest/save most of it for the future when I'll need it, but in the short term I'd probably get spinner rims. That'd be sweeeeeet.