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.

  • @[email protected]
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    251 year ago

    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.

    • Jay K
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      131 year ago

      It’s definitely gonna set off red flags when the cash disappears an hour later.

    • tymon
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      61 year ago

      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

      • @[email protected]
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        21 year ago

        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).