Should You Buy Stuff Or Experiences With Your Lottery Win?

Elfred Meltzenheimer of Modesto, California, plans to travel with his winning Powerball $1.4 million dollar won in February. Photo: Debbie Noda

My life view is often different to most other people on this subject, so be warned... this is an alternative viewpoint!

The question is - should you buy stuff or experiences with your win?

Should you travel a lot, or hunker down at your mansion?

Of course, if your win is tens of millions of dollars you can do both. But if it's just a million like our recent winner, then you might have to budget.

I thought about this topic as I picked up my guitar (photo) this afternoon to play.

I've fingerpicked for many decades now, and as I was trying to remember some of the 60 instrumental songs I knew a while back, the realisation struck me.…

All the time that I practised - sometimes up to 3 hours a day for many years - has been largely wasted.

The dozens of complex songs I learned in intricate detail have been lost because I didn't play them regularly.

I know only a handful today.

My memory is still fine… it's just that learning by ear means I need constant practice to retain these works. There's no notes on paper to play by.

What a waste of many years of my life. And I'll never get them back.

Another form of waste is experiences... travel, meetings, sports. Can you really remember every detail of the trip or vacation you took a decade ago?

I doubt it.

As we age, that feeling of loss will be more frequent. Photos are all we have left, and even they don't bring back the memories sometimes.

Sure it's fun and sometimes mind expanding to see other cultures, but I consider travel is really a form of personal escape.

It ends up a boring source of tales you tell your long-suffering friends and family as they sit through a night of badly taken photos of your African safari or shark cage experience.

Here's another example of wasteful experience... driving a luxury car you don't own. Once the drive is over and the car is returned to the rich sheik who lent it to you, the feeling you had while driving it is largely gone.

But if you owned the car you could experience that feeling over and over again. If you owned a safari park, you wouldn't need to travel to see elephants and lions... they would just be over the fence.

That's why I feel buying and owning stuff is more longer lasting than having experiences.

Do you agree?