What would you do if you had $10 million and 10 years to live ?

Examining the question can be valuable financial planning tool

 

If you suddenly received $10 million dollars (after-tax) and at the same time a diagnosis that you had only 10 years to live, what would you start doing? What would you stop doing?
These are two questions I love to ask groups when I’m conducting financial-planning and financial-literacy workshops for women. My objective is to help them accurately identify their deepest values and most important life goals, independent of financial constraints and the all-too-common excuse that there’s always tomorrow. I particularly like this pair of questions because they force participants to engage with the twin concepts of limited resources and limited time. This in turn forces longstanding internal conflicts (financial, emotional or otherwise) to bubble right up to the surface.
Over the past decade I’ve asked this question of women across a wide range of demographics — age, income, education, career path, religion, ethnicity, etc. Despite the diversity of participants, the answers are remarkably similar.
Start: Most people tell me they would volunteer, be more philanthropic, travel, spend more time with family and/or pursue hobbies.
Stop: Most people also tell me they would stop working (at least full time). They’d stop worrying about money. They’d stop fretting about what other people think.
While my practice is focused on women, these responses are actually widely held across genders, according to the new Life Reimagined survey from AARP.
This begs two questions. 1) If this is what we want, what’s keeping us from having the lives we truly desire? And 2) What lessons can we learn from these remarkably consistent expressions of human hope and desire?
With regard to the first question, the biggest lesson I have taken away from participants’ responses is that it’s shockingly easy to get unintentionally trapped in a certain lifestyle. And our concept of self is painfully difficult to extract ourselves from.
Let me give you an example, from my own experience. Fresh out of college, I had joined one of the traditional investment banking analyst programs at a top firm. Less than a year into it, I realized it wasn’t the career path for me and decided to switch to asset management. I thought my employer would be furious, having invested heavily in my training and having not yet gotten back much meaningful return on its investment. Instead, a number of very senior professionals pulled me aside. Quietly and almost confessionally, they told me how “wise” I was to get out before I had a family and became accustomed to the heady incomes this career path produced. I would then be unable to ever switch gears.
This memory, nearly 24 years old now, is seared in my brain. The urgency and intensity with which this advice was given to me reinforced how very many men and women were living lives of quiet desperation while wearing incredibly expensive sui
ts and otherwise leading “the high life.”
When I ask people today what’s holding them back, the answers more often than not fall into some version of the same — that is, that the web of life is too thick to trim back or alter now. I’d argue what we can learn from this is that while it may be a common feeling, it is flawed logic to think the status quo cannot be adjusted.
Clearly, it’s vital to spend the time and effort discerning what it is you truly want from life.