What to Do with Entirely Too Much Money

Have you ever noticed that rich people rarely do anything genuinely inventive with their fortunes? I mean, what is the point to owning six houses? You can only live in one house at a time. Today's lottery prizes just keep getting bigger and bigger. Or suppose you marry a billionaire and tragedy strikes, leaving you the sole heir. After a certain point, the numbers become laughable; no less desirable, but certainly more money than any one reasonable person needs in order to live. So the question becomes, what would you do if you had way more than enough money to meet your needs? Well, I've had this discussion several times with a variety of inventive friends, and here are some of the ideas we've come up with ...

1. Buy a rainforest. Make sure you get a chunk as large as possible, preferably larger than at least one of the surrounding countries. Hire the indigenous people to help you watch for poachers and biopirates. Tell them that if anyone bothers them, you will take care of the problem. Leave a cellular phone with one of the techno-hungry adolescents for this purpose. Meanwhile, buy several relevant politicians in the country where your rainforest sits, so that if trouble comes knocking you can send them to fix it. Pay them about twice what the bad guys could afford.
2. Walk into a bookstore, make a grand gesture, and say, "I'll take this section right here. Please wrap it to go." (For added pleasure, donate the proceeds to a local adult-literacy program.)
3. Select a wildlife reserve with a major poaching problem because the local farmers are competing with the endangered species. Contact the local farmers and offer a bounty to anyone offering information that leads to the conviction of a poacher. Make the bounty equivalent to one year's pay for the average local. Arrange suitable bribes to ensure that guilty poachers are not simply released to continue their crimes.
4. Found an intentional community. Make the buildings environmentally-friendly. Launch a few small businesses so that people don't have to commute a long way to work if they don't want to. Populate the place with decent people.
5. Renovate a section of inner city. Invite the locals to help you make the place nice to live in. Launch a few small businesses and hire only local workers. Choose things the locals will really enjoy, such as movie houses, ethnic grocery stores, or an after-school recreation center.
6. Start a small press. Publish books and other materials that have been rejected by other publishers for being too adventurous. Hold a genre-invention contest.
7. Volunteer to be a bell-ringer for the Salvation Army during the Christmas season. Secretly fill the bucket (keep your eyes closed, too) with one-ounce gold bars and return it. Then insist that you did not see anyone putting the gold into the bucket.
8. Walk into any reasonably-good college and ask for the financial aid office. Tell the person in charge that you would like to see college applications for the top five applicants who are incredibly well qualified academically but can't afford tuition and don't qualify for aid. Offer to pay their tuition.
9. Enjoy a shopping spree at a toy store. Ask the employees to help you pick out some of the season's must-have items. Then dress up as Santa Claus (or Mrs. Claus) and distribute the toys at a children's hospital.
10. Pick your favorite endangered species. Offer a huge cash prize to the first scientific team who succeeds in cloning one of these animals.
11. Fund a private space-exploration venture. For added fun, turn this into a money-making venture by offering cargo space to scientists who are researching possible economic benefits of zero-gravity manufacture, or the like.
12. Contribute the maximum allowable amount to ethical political candidates from your under-represented group of choice.
13. Visit your favorite zoo. Wander around and look at all the exhibits. Find someone in charge and spend half an hour enthusing about how the zoo would be perfect if only they had an outdoor gorilla (lion, polar bear, elephant, whatever they're missing) exhibit. Then donate enough money for them to build a really spectacular one.
14. Charter a ship and host a cruisecon. Invite a few hundred of your closest friends on an all-expenses-paid trip complete with catered meals and the whole nine yards. Also rent or buy a top-quality underwater speaker system. Announce a contest to attempt first contact with any cetaceans who show up around the ship. Play whatever music, speeches, or other audio efforts the contestants come up with. Offer a huge prize should anyone actually manage to engage a cetacean in an actual conversation of recognizable type.
15. Call your local public television channel during a pledge drive and donate a million dollars. Then tell them that you will match all additional pledges by other viewers up to a second million -- on the condition that they air all the episodes, in order, of your favorite obscure program.
16. Patronize the arts. Establish a grant for artists whose work has been censored or denied funding because of its controversial nature. Issue large sums of money to those whose work you personally find titillating, outrageous, mind-bending, bizarre, or otherwise noteworthy. When you have sponsored enough such works, rent a gallery and host an anti-censorship show. Hire a top-notch caterer to provide hors d'oeuvres of cheese, pastry, and tropical fruit cut into provocative shapes.

"What to Do with Entirely Too Much Money" copyright 1998 Elizabeth Barrette.

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The URL for this page is http://www.worthlink.net/~ysabet/misc/money.html and it was last updated on October 31, 1998.