Would You Rather Get Paid $4000 Per Month For The Rest Of Your Life Or Get Paid $1,000,000 Right Now?
My own answer to this is clear. But I would like to hear your reasons to choose one or the other of the options. I can explain my reasoning in the comments after I've got some answers first.
0
0
0.000
I can live very, very comfortably on $4,000 per month. I could easily make that work far better than a straight million right away.
What about inflation? Are you old enough for your life expectancy to only allow you to use a small fraction of a million when given $4000 a month? Wouldn't you be able to invest the million well enough to at least offset inflation?
Oh, with $4,000 right now, I'd pay my bills and then invest the rest to build up a nest egg for when inflation surpasses the guaranteed income. Take advantage of a Roth IRA, invest in Hive, get some stonks that pay dividends with some semblance of regularity, stuff like that.
If you can only invest a portion of that $4000 at a time, your time-on-market will be much shorter than if you invested all of the one million right now or by dollar cost averaging it over the next few years. Towards the end of your life, inflation will have diminished the purchasing power of the monthly $4000 installments quite substantially.
Objectively speaking, opting for $4000 a month as opposed to a million right now is a losing proposition particularly if you're old or even middle-aged.