Opening my mind to money

Tread pointed out something that’s going on over at Millionaire Mommy Next Door. MMND said:

“For the next 30 days, I’ll open my mind to receive increasingly more money. On day one, I’ll decide how I’d like to spend $100. On day two, I’ll double that amount to $200. Day three, double again and I’ll have $400. And so on, doubling every day for the next 30 days. I’ll list how I’d like to spend every penny, with no repeating of items during my month-long spending spree.”

I decided to do a modified version of this exercise because, well, I’m both behind already and impatient. I decided to do the listing of things all at once, and then think about them each day instead.

The most challenging part for me was the “no repeating of items”. I like to repeat items! But not doing so forced me to think about other possibilities. I had the hardest time deciding on what to do with the mid-range amounts ($6 million to $838 million). The lower end amounts followed my pre-existing plans (for the most part) and the higher amounts were easy to think of things that I could help with.

Overall, I enjoyed the idea that each coming day I would have even more money to spend. I’d done a similar exercise before (what would I do if I knew I would receive $40,000,000 every single year) but that made it too easy to avoid the specifics. This was more interesting.

Here is my list:

$100 – groceries
$200 – new clothes & shoes for my son
$400 – massages for the three of us + a really big tip
$800 – the next 8 stocks on my list
$1600 – visit pyramids in Mexico with my husband
$3200 – some kind of flat screen TV thingy for my husband (but still no reception :P), with an entertainment center to make it & the other electronics look uncluttered & nice
$6400 – media server (so that we can get rid of our CDs)
$12,800 – treasury bonds & tax liens
$25,600 – trip for all three of us to Antarctica
$51,200 – college fund for son
$102,400 – pay off house with money to spare
$204,800 – trip wandering around with world for a year (at most)
$409,600 – to retirement funds (accompanied by us retiring)
$819,200 – to family, via them winning a mysterious “prize”
$1,638,400 – property + a small house somewhere more sustainable (probably in Pennsylvania)
$3,276,800 – vacation home in Kauai
$6,553,600 – dramatically exceed savings goal #1
$13,107,200 – for male birth control research
$26,214,400 – to Big Brothers, Big Sisters
$52,428,800 – to state-funded animal shelters
$104,857,600 – for diabetes research
$209,715,200 – to Peace Corps
$419,430,400 – directly to individual residents who are still struggling in New Orleans
$838,860,800 – for kidney cancer research
$1,677,721,600 – to Hospice of the Valley
$3,355,443,200 – to a non-profit called Aliamos
$6,710,886,400 – to endow scholarships for students who are struggling to pay for college even though their parents make over the limits for financial aid
$13,421,772,800 – to pay off 1/8 a percent of the U.S. national debt
$26,843,545,600 – to develop alternative, renewable energy sources
$53,687,091,200 – lobbying to eliminating lobbying from the U.S. political process (yes, irony abounds)