What do I want to do with all this money?

People ask what I would do if I won toto. Crazy, I don’t even buy toto, how to win? But I must admit it’s a fun question but a useless one because it disconnects from reality entirely.

A more useful question is what I would actually do if I hit my number. Not lottery money. My FIRE number. $2.5M or $5M, built slowly over years of saving and investing. What then?

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The pot of gold isn’t really about the money

The pot of gold is about what it represents. Passive income that clears the mental stress and anxiety that no other medication can quite fix. A number in an account that says: you don’t have to answer to anyone ever again.

That’s what I’m actually building toward. Not a lifestyle upgrade. Not a bigger house or a flashier car. Just the permanent, quiet removal of financial anxiety from my daily life. The freedom to wake up and not have the background hum of “what if” running constantly underneath everything.

The money stays invested. It doesn’t get spent, it generates income, and the income funds the life. That’s the design. The pot of gold is a tool, not a destination.

But. If you told me I had to die with zero — that I had to spend it all — then I ponder a little deeper. I have a rough sense of what I will do with it.

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The adventure fund

I think Ferraris and Lambos are nice to look at but useless on our roads, not worth the buy. You cannot go fast in traffic and you risk your car getting stolen if you drive into JB.

Instead, I’d buy a 4WD and convert it into a motorhome. Drive across Asia. Or spend three months living in Europe, properly living — not tourist-living, but slow, settled, figuring out what life feels like somewhere else. Or go hiking in South America, somewhere that requires actual effort to get to. Buy experiences, not things. These things will pay you memory dividends as you age.

These aren’t retirement fantasies. They’re things I think about now, and things I believe shouldn’t wait for a perfect number to materialise. I’ll be more risk-averse at 50 than I am now. I won’t have the same energy to climb a mountain. The version of me that wants to sleep in a converted 4WD in the middle of nowhere is a younger version, and that version has a shelf life.

So the goal isn’t to wait. The goal is to quickly hit financial security first. Because without that foundation, adventures feel irresponsible rather than earned. But once the foundation is solid, some things shouldn’t wait.

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An irrational purchase I’d make anyway

An EV with a front massage chair function. A new one. I know it’s a bad money decision — cars depreciate, COEs are absurd, the rational thing is to not even think about it. But I’m a sucker for a new car and I’m comfortable admitting that. Some things are just irrational and that’s fine.

Obviously the house or investment property comes first. The car comes later when things are more secure. But it’s on the list, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. It’s ok to indulge sometimes right?

(We’ll do a whole separate post on the buy-a-new-car decision at some point. The numbers deserve proper interrogation.)

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On giving — the ambition I haven’t figured out yet

I want to contribute to something bigger than myself. That part is clear.

What’s less clear is how. My instincts run toward big, ambitious things — fight cancer, stopping shark finning, going after animal poachers, fighting human trafficking, reducing the harm humans do to this planet and each other. These feel important in a way I can’t quite articulate beyond just knowing they’re wrong and someone should do something. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we had solutions to these problems?

But I don’t know what that something is yet. I haven’t thought it through enough to turn the feeling into action. So for now I’ll leave it here as an honest admission: I want to do good with whatever I build, and I don’t know exactly how yet. That’s something to figure out as I go.

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The $20 book problem

Here’s the thing I didn’t expect to find when I started thinking about this question. The answer to “what would you do with the money” isn’t always the big stuff.

Sometimes it’s buying a book because I want to read it, not because I’ve justified it. Sometimes it’s a new pair of football boots because I like the colour. Or a box of lego because I’m bored and I want to build things. Small, stupid, completely affordable purchases that I still second-guess — not because I can’t afford them, but because spending on something small always feels like I’m giving something else up.

And here’s what I’ve noticed: this doesn’t get better as income grows. As I’ve earned more, I still find myself scrimping on these small things. More money hasn’t solved the guilt. If anything, the ceiling just rises — there’s always something more, always a reason why this isn’t quite enough yet.

I don’t think that’s just me. I think it’s the effect of living inside a system that constantly tells you that what you have isn’t sufficient, that consumption is both the problem and the solution. The treadmill speeds up as you earn more, and you have to actively decide to step off it.

That’s partly why I’m trying to build something that produces rather than just consumes.

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So what do I actually want to do with the money?

Keep most of it invested, generating income that removes anxiety permanently. Use some of it to fund adventures that shouldn’t wait for the perfect moment. Buy an EV at some point because I’m human. Give to causes I haven’t fully figured out yet. And buy a $20 book without thinking twice about it.

In that order of importance. More or less.

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Next: What success looks like