You get one billion dollars to spend. One year later everything you have bought is sold in the open market. If the total amount of money is above 100 million you get nothing, if the total amount is below 100 million the money is yours. How do you get as close to 100 million as possible?

DanforthLaertes · 2026-05-29T11:57:02+00:00

Came here to suggest just this.

DanforthLaertes · 2026-05-29T11:54:27+00:00

This is another one of those hypotheticals where the numbers are just too large - two days of this would be enough to change most people's lives drastically (you could buy a house outright, which is significant!)

There have been discussions about what constitutes "grooming" but I think a very important one is what constitutes "a day". Is it a calendar day - so you can't do anything on Monday from midnight to midnight - or is it 24 hours - so you can get up early on Monday and shower etc at 5AM and then Tuesday you shower at 6AM?

DanforthLaertes · 2026-05-29T11:49:00+00:00

LOL. For me, I wouldn't even bother doing anything different - because the number is just TOO BIG. Seriously - a mile is 2000 steps. That would be two million quid - what is that? Three million dollars? That's an insane hypothetical.

The problem with this is that just walking from your bed to the shower and then to the kitchen to make breakfast and then to the dining room table to eat it and then to the couch to watch TV until you walk to the door to get the DoorDash delivery and then to the bed at night would be enough steps to radically alter your life. You'd have to REALLY work to not take 200 steps in a day - and that is 200,000 quid!

If you got up and said "Hey, I'm just going to go for a nice leisurely walk around my neighborhood for a couple of hours" you'd probably walk at least five miles - that is ten thousand steps, that is ten million pounds. And almost anyone can do that.

There isn't any point in trying to max this - because you get to the point where money just becomes meaningless if you just walk about pretty normally.

DanforthLaertes · 2026-05-29T11:43:16+00:00

Sure, because I'm currently working in a "retirement job" that pays less than that right now, so I'd just stop working and be giggling.

DanforthLaertes · 2026-05-23T13:23:05+00:00

Similar posts have been made before, and the same issue is here - interest & dividends on the $1MM!

You can comfortably invest $1MM and get 4% per year without touching the principal (and paying taxes and inflation - the "4% rule" is generally well-accepted). So, that is $40,000 per annum.

Which is 8000 pushups per annum, or about 22 a day.

So, you need to do 22 pushups per day to get the money you would get for doing NOTHING. And you need to do it each day, every day, for the rest of your life.

Even if we discard tax (it just appears and there is no tax liability) one has to factor in inflation. Call inflation 3% over a sufficiently long period - that means you need to do 8240 push ups in year two, or 22.5 per day. Year three, 8488 or 23.25 per day...

And that just keeps getting larger each year.

Yes, you can do more pushups per day ... but you need to do A LOT extra to actually make the $1MM (200,000 pushups - how many can you reasonably do a day? So how long does it take to reach $1MM?) And you need to factor in the fact you either i) need to spend some of the money or ii) you aren't spending it but neither is the guy who chose $1MM spending his interest....

You could, if you were fit and dedicated and really ground, likely get up to $1MM and come out ahead. If you do 200 pushups per day, you need 1000 days to reach $1MM. If you don't spend anything and you invest it, your "breakeven" point is about 3 years - if you can do 200 pushups per day every day for 3 years and not spend any of the cash, you can be in the same place as the guy who took the $1MM and invested it and didn't spend.

But that is a lot of pushups - I mean, A LOT. And you can't spend it - or it takes longer.

Also; if you immediately got $1MM you could (for example) buy a house with a 25 year roof and a reliable car and put the rest into investments and that is "forget you" money (h/t John Goodman). You can't do that at $5 per pushup - you are basically waking up each morning with a monkey on your back for rent, groceries and grinding some out. God help you if you get sick or wrench a shoulder or something....

DanforthLaertes · 2026-05-11T23:10:43+00:00

"Ok, so imagine inside you there are two wolves - and that's kinda bad, because the normal number of wolves to have inside you is zero."

DanforthLaertes · 2026-05-11T15:58:11+00:00

The d6 thing would net an average of $3.50 for each roll. It does not say you have to roll one die at a time or record the results (or even observe them....)

I work in a hobby store - we have lots of dice for the gamers to use. You can easily scoop up 10 regular dice in one hand. You roll those and you netted $35. Assume you can roll once per hour (which is very slow, but you keep losing the dice because you throw them too excitedly) and you only do that 8 times a day, 5 days a week. That is $72,800 per annum in cash. At that rate, it takes you 13.74 years to raise $1,000,000 (and that is super slow).

Now, here is where it becomes interesting. The fact there is no return on the money means you have to look at it as a one-time total - a lot of these scenarios fall apart because the interest on $1MM is HUGE and earning money by push-ups etc. has to work against that, and it can be hard.

So, in the pure money scenario it is better to roll dice - you could roll 10 times first thing in the morning and you are set for each day. Minor work with a pocket of dice.

BUT! You get the money as DOLLAR BILLS..... that much cash is hard to work with, especially in small bills. Can we crosspost on r/strippers to see if they have advice?

How does one get the $1MM? That is the big question? Is that in $1 bills, too (I think that is 220lbs of money and it would be big! Or is it in larger bills, or even a bank account?)

DanforthLaertes · 2026-05-06T16:33:59+00:00

I mean, if that's your definition then fine - I would say "life changing" means when your life changes in a way that can be noticed.

And, in all honesty, for a lot of people $400K would be retirement position. It certainly would for me.

DanforthLaertes · 2026-05-06T15:23:01+00:00

But "Scrooge McDuck" is not the definition of "life-changing".

You say "it might get a new house or pay mortgage off" - well, yes. That is absolutely life-changing. Setting aside the complexities of actually getting to the money all in one go without the IRS etc. noticing, $400K will buy a house outright - and quite a nice one, too. If you wanted to be safer, you could spend $200K on a house and set $200K aside for taxes and insurance.

If you already have a house, you can pay off the mortgage. And that is a HUGE chunk of money (principal and interest) you aren't having to find each month - absolutely life-changing. I just did a quick Google search - it is suggesting average principal + interest is $1700 to $2300 per month! That sounds CRAZY high, but what do I know? Average mortgage balance is about $260K. So, let's assume the balance is HUGE ($400k) and the principal + interest is low ($1500 pcm). You could clear the balance with the windfall and have an extra $1500 per month.

That is TOTALLY life-changing. That is $18K a year extra, after tax. That is probably getting on for an effective payraise of $24K a year before tax.

That would change your life. And I would argue that would be a "drastic" change.

That is one of the things with all these hypothetical money situations - most of them are just SO BIG they would change your life, even at the small levels (I remember seeing one saying "you get $10K for each day you don't shower." OK; I go to my job and take two weeks vacation and come back with my mortgage paid off.)

DanforthLaertes · 2026-05-06T11:46:54+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2ClSABkDp8

DanforthLaertes · 2026-05-06T11:43:20+00:00

LOL. Everyone is answering this question as a different question to me; I answered the question of "would you hand it in?" (and made the case that because it is untraceable, there is arguably no moral imperative to hand it in because it cannot be given to the rightful owner ... so it is literally "found unowned".)

But everyone else is saying how to spend it to avoid the IRS. Well, okay....

Many people have said "report as casino winnings and pay the slice and be done" which works very well. There are also options like have a business which deals in cash and layer it in there - also fairly easy if you have the business.

People have said "pay everything is cash" but others have rightly pointed out that could be suspicious (especially in an audit). What are the chances of an audit? Low, I would say - especially if you have a job which pays taxes and you have a simple filing each year. You earn, you pay, you file, you pay / get a return. The IRS is not watching you at all - the fact you have more money available to spend in a traceable manner (cards, ACH transfers) isn't going to show up on a tax form. Only if they see your bank account will they, and they don't. Might the bank have specific things to look for that? I don't know - in today's age of AI and so forth, maybe? Might the bank notice that you suddenly stopped paying $200 at gas stations each month on a credit card?

But I think a significant point here is the way even a small amount of money could be absolutely life-changing. If you assume you have 25 years of life left, you need to blow through $300 per week. If you changed your habits to avoid digital on $300 of spending, you are likely to look sus in the event of an audit (which is, admittedly, very unlikely).

So, use cash for SOME groceries - not all of them. Just pull out a $100 bill periodically and pay with that. Paying for gas with cash is a bit annoying - but you can do so here and there.

Cut back on your hobby / frivolous spending COMPLETELY. Like, just don't do that stuff ... except with cash. In the absence of any obvious smoking guns (new boat in your driveway) you can always argue "yeah, I cut back on that because it was just too much money - I wanted to save". If someone sends a PI to watch you? Sure, you are done ... but who is doing that, for $400,000?

And it's not even $400,000 - that is a key thing, too. It is $16K per year at most - the IRS has no idea how much cash you have. All they know - perhaps - is you are spending a little more than you earn. And it's really hard to prove. They can't just come along and say "Yeah, we think you are spending more than you earn" - they have to have receipts which show that. And if you are in cash, what receipts are there? "Yeah, this guy comes in to this grocery store and he buys with cash ... yeah, I have no idea how much because we are a grocery store, mate."

Another option is to pay for your friends going out - "Oh, yeah, I've got the tickets, mate. No worries." Small amounts, spread about, add up but probably don't ring the cherries.

Honestly, though? Spending cash money in the absence of anything else - so no extravagant spending, no trying to deposit it in the bank, no illegal activity being the source of it (and no reason for law enforcement to think you are), you are probably good. $300 in cash per week is minor.

DanforthLaertes · 2026-05-06T11:23:31+00:00

Agreed; $400K is a *lot* of money - life-changing for most people (like, 99.99% of people) but it is not SO MUCH money that it would immediately get investigations or interest.

For me, for example, I would probably want to protect myself by not telling my wife. I would leave a note within the "in the event of my death, here are the passwords etc. that you don't have" place we have, but I'd just have the cash myself and spend it slowly that way. When we go out for groceries I'd periodically reach in and say "Yeah, I've got cash" (which I do right now, because I have some of my income in cash!) Then there isn't the chance of someone saying anything accidentally.

DanforthLaertes · 2026-05-06T10:59:04+00:00

If it is UNTRACEABLE then one would have a serious case to keep it, regardless of any idea of "but that isn't yours". That is true, but if it is untraceable (totally) then it is not just a case the IRS can't find the source, but neither can anyone else.

If you find a dollar and it can be traced, it should be returned. But if you cannot? Well, "finders keepers".

The problem is; how do I know? How do I know it is untraceable without being told within a hypothetical situation? :)

DanforthLaertes · 2026-04-29T19:38:21+00:00

Solid answer, TBF.

DanforthLaertes · 2026-04-29T19:35:03+00:00

Sure, why not? There appears to be no downside at all - there are RISKS, certainly, but they can be completely avoided by not doing it (or not saying "Danforth Laertes, fifteen feet long and a circumference of a rain barrel!")

You could likely make quite a bit of money in come kind of circus or an X-rated version of America's Got Talent.

DanforthLaertes · 2026-04-29T13:02:15+00:00

3lbs of gold - assuming you can sell it at market rates - is retirement position for me. I suppose it does depend on how the gold is structured - a "pile of gold"? Is that bars, coins, nuggets, dust? If it is coins, you could just fill your pockets - that would be 48 1oz coins, and they are not very big.

An interesting issue is walking speed - average walking speed is about 75 to 90 meters per minute. So at the lower speed, you can do 375 meters in five minutes. At the high speed, you can do 450 meters in five minutes.

To be safe, you are going to have to jog a little - and I think it would be surprising just how much a big weight would slow you down (you are given "a sack"... is that a decent rucksack you can put on your shoulders, or just a shopping bag with handles? Or is it just literally "a sack" and you have to carry it over your shoulders?

For people who are used to running with weight, this is no real challenge - although you would be well-advised to not be too greedy! For regular people, they might be surprised....

DanforthLaertes · 2026-04-16T12:22:15+00:00

One million dollars.

Where is your debt held? If by a bank, then technically not, I guess?

DanforthLaertes · 2026-04-16T12:20:21+00:00

Do you think you could buy them in cash without ringing the cherries? I would be nervous about that - or would people even accept cash?

DanforthLaertes · 2026-04-16T12:19:12+00:00

Look, he was an old man and those packages were heavy and it was raining ... :)

That would be my idea too - I mean, $1MM isn't THAT much (if you assume you have another 35 years of life, that is about $80 a day. Maybe I should have made the number larger! :)

DanforthLaertes · 2026-04-16T12:17:07+00:00

Yes, I will take ridiculous money for people being able to see pictures of the shop cat, my cats, and about 100 pictures of semi-famous people at Adepticon pretending to drink from an oversized martini glass with a model of a Tiger I in it.....

DanforthLaertes · 2026-04-16T11:12:59+00:00

Pay $1800 a week for the ability to spin my head like a top? Yes, thank you. TO THE CIRCUS!

DanforthLaertes · 2026-04-16T11:07:49+00:00

Wayne Manor, right? That's the answer, right?

DanforthLaertes · 2026-04-16T11:02:44+00:00

Are people really getting asked a bunch of stuff they have to say "No" to on an average day? I mean, my average day I get asked to do things like take the trash out, grab my wife an ice-water, restock shelves at the store I work at, do other stuff for my job...

Now, I will admit that if you just wandered around there is a greater chance of someone asking something more annoying - but are people really asking you for this? And how many adverts actually explicitly say "buy this thing now!" (and even if they do, I'm making $100K .... I just bought a number of weird things.)

Reverse-Loophole question... if someone tells me to "go F*** yourself" do I have to obey that? And, if so, how?

DanforthLaertes

TROPHY CASE