Topic Magazine (via Kottke):
Winning the lottery. Having a long-lost relative put you in their will. Selling your TV show. For our Money issue, we interviewed 15 people—and asked writer Ijeoma Oluo to contribute an essay—on the subject of windfalls. How they got their money, and what they did with it, was both as intensely personal, and shaped by cultural expectations, as anything else.
A fascinating set of stories, full of variety.
A few tastes:
There are different tiers to writing television shows: you start as a staff writer, and each time you move up the ladder—to story editor, executive story editor, coproducer, producer, supervision producer, executive producer—you get a minimum payment from the Writers Guild.
When I moved up from staff writer to story editor for Maniac, I got my first script fee, which was around $27,000. For most of my adult life, this was equivalent to an annual salary.
And:
My coach, Erik Seidel, is a legend, and one of the first things he taught me was that if I was going to do this right, I should approach it the way any professional poker player would. The number one rule is good bankroll management: Don’t play in any events that are above what you can afford to lose, and always have a lot of money in advance.
The first time I went out to Las Vegas, Erik wouldn’t let me play in any event that was more than $60, so the first game I won was a daily tournament at Planet Hollywood. I won close to a thousand dollars, and I was absolutely ecstatic.
The way Erik and I approached the project was my winnings would be put back into poker—that would now be my poker bankroll.
These are just tiny bits of much longer stories. The whole thing is a fascinating read.
How much is a life changing amount of money for you? Is it $1,000? $100,000? $1 million? If you got it, what would you do with it?
At this stage in my life, “life changing” would mean I could retire (or at least semi-retire) early and be able to take several trips a year. These wouldn’t need to be extravagant trips; many of them would be spent wilderness backpacking.
Suzie Orman puts the “retire early” number at around $4-5 million. While that’s generated some controversy, that seems about right. So my life changing number is a bit less than that after subtracting what I’ve saved towards retirement already.
At various other stages in my life, my number would have been significantly lower or higher. As a teen or 20-something, $100,000 would be life changing. Ask me on a different day, and I would have dreamed of houses and cars and other extravagances, so tens of millions. Now, though, life changing would be the ability to live more or less the lifestyle I have no, with more leisure and without being dependent on a regular income.
“Life-changing” would be freedom from worry about housing, food, and medical expenses, as it always has been. That’s whatever amount it now takes to invest conservatively, provide a modestly livable income, support good causes, and pay taxes each year without depleting towards zero.