If I gave you $1 million in cash to spend in 1 hour, after which the money will disappear, what would you buy?

I have asked this question to countless people (mostly in hair salons) as an alternative to small talk, and it always yields interesting results.

Rules:

You get the money right now, right where you are. If it's 10pm and you're in the middle of nowhere, your money will still go poof at 11pm.
As a result of the above, tell us what time it is and roughly where you are (big city, desert, small town, ...)
You must spend the money. You cannot give it to someone to hold on to it for you for a while.
Normal world rules apply, e.g. you cannot buy a $250k car at a dealership in 1h in cash, and you cannot buy a house in 1h either.
Remember that getting from where you are to the place you need to go takes time. Factor that in!

Edit: I'm glad you guys had fun with this one. Feel free to post similar hypothetical questions. I kinda like these.

Edit edit: Free advertising 😅 --> I run and maintain an open source push notification service called ntfy, which let's you send notifications to your phone via PUT/POST, like curl -d "backup successful" ntfy.sh/mytopic. Go check it out.

You're viewing a single thread.

163 comments

I would immediately pay off all of my debts in my online banking/credit cards/student loan/utility accounts, send my Landlord my rent early via Zelle, login to my parent's mortgage and credit card accounts and pay them all off, pay off all of my wife's student loans and credit cards and business loans via her online accounts, and spend the rest on ebay gift cards.
- It's cash though, how do you pay all those things off with cash in only 1 hour? If you walk into a bank with 1 million cash and ask to deposit it, that might set off some red flags.
  
  It's definitely gonna set off red flags when the cash disappears an hour later.
  
  Damn. I read "cash" as "liquid assets." and not necessarily, like, physical benjamins.
  I guess I'd hustle over to the midtown and buy every single Rolex and Omega I could get my hands on at Watches of Switzerland, Bucherer, and Wempe. Probably would hit the half-million mark real fast and would then re-sell them at leisure
  
  Even better than the "Refund later" idea, since some of those watches have a higher value on the grey market.
  Waitlist be damned, if a customer walks in with 1MM in cash I'll sell him everything I can. Think of the sales guy's commission, that's nothing to sneeze at either (and won't disappear later).
- How can you do all of that with cash?
  
  my mistake

163 comments