This is my first time writing here “post-acquisition”.  I have more than $2M in cash.  That won’t last long as the tax man hasn’t had his day and I will start to split the money into different buckets (largest of which is a new house purchase).

Lets go back a couple of years before we move to the present.  I took this screenshot in Nov. 2013 and I titled the image “The Definition of Broke” :

At this time I was married and my wife was pregnant with our second kid.  She works part-time, and gets very sick with pregnancies and wasn’t able to work much that year. My startup salary was stable actually, but was not covering our expenses on its own. As you can see, we had to live off of credit cards here for a little while.  I believe right after this we had some paychecks come in and also I started literally selling some larger ticket items to make ends meet, but this was a low point for us financially.  We were in the process of prepping our house for sell, and finally did get it on the market in April of the next year and sold it for a nice profit.  So we bounced back.  I don’t want to over-dramatize it, I mean we had investments in 401K and IRA’s and also we have families that would have gladly loaned us money temporarily if we would have asked (did NOT want to) but it was still very stressful being this close to the edge.

Fast-forward to my most recent bank statement :

Emotion : Nothing?

My company stock has become partially liquid at the closing.  This post is about how I feel about officially being rich.  First, I did have some back-and-forth about whether this amount of money makes me rich.  I’ve decided that yes, I am definitely rich.  Sure, there are levels of rich that go way beyond this, but I think it would be unfair to the many billions of humans on the planet with substantially less to NOT call me rich.  Many Americans are rich actually by world standards, but in my case I think even in America I’m in the top brackets of almost every metric or chart you will find (especially age-adjusted). Anyway, so on the day this money arrived I would say my first feeling was… almost nothing.  I was almost surprised at how little emotion I felt about it.  I was very tired and the acquirer had people fly over to do meetings with us and go to celebration dinner etc.  So I really didn’t have time to digest it at first.  I thought “well, it just looks like a big number on a screen” and I went along with business-as-usual.

A Bit of Healthy Fear

My next emotion was light fear.  Not terrified or anything, but just a fear that this was somehow not real or would be gone somehow.  It was irrational, but  I did move money into different accounts just because the FDIC insurance limit is $250,000 per account.

Relax!

After a week or so of realizing that 1) life would go on and 2) the money was not likely to vanish I started to relax.  This is where I’m at right now.  Relaxed.  I haven’t prioritized things like my business wardrobe as a startup guy, so I spent about $1,000 on updating my clothes.  $1,000 can actually buy quite a bit of nice clothes if you don’t go overboard on luxury.  I just went online and bought J Crew, Banana Republic and Express clothes.  I could have spent $1,000 on clothes before selling my company.  Anytime in the last two years I could have done this.  However, I wouldn’t have been able to do it GUILT-FREE.  I would have felt irresponsible and selfish.  What about my kids college?  What about our retirement?  It’s just not necessary spending.  So the difference is, now I spent $1,000 updating my wardrobe and I felt zero guilt.  None at all.  It was actually fantastic.  We also paid off my wife’s car loan which also felt great.  We are house shopping in a new city, so we’ve taken a few weekend trips there and NOT stayed at the cheapest hotel.  We have gone twice to a resort hotel with heated pools for the kids and great views.  Again, not over-doing it, but $200/night instead of $100-$120 actually gets you quite a lot in the off-season.  In summary, I haven’t changed all that much in that I still look for value when shopping for anything I am buying.  However, I’m able to look at the next level up in value with a fresh lens and get a bit more guilt-free.  It’s been great.

Tracking the Numbers

I have a much larger personal financial spreadsheet than I had previously (more to track) and I am actively investing money and making sure our lifestyle inflation is held in check.  Our first month with all the travel and new shopping we spent $7,500 in “living” which is outside of mortgage, tax and charitable giving.  We normally spend about $5,000.  So I’m looking to move this down to about $6,000 and I think we will be at homeostasis for now. We have pulled the trigger on several investments.  Realtymogul, Lendingclub and Wealthfront all have some of our money working away already.  I invested $5,000 in a startup through Angel.co and I am likely to put $25,000 into a  small tech company I know personally that is fund-raising.

The Big One

After much debate we have a house under contract for $1.35M.  I feel great about it.  We didn’t buy a 9,000 sq. foot mansion but we also didn’t buy a 3,000 square foot builder grade house.  It’s a custom-built 5,200 sq. foot house in a great neighborhood.  I can see us staying there for a really long time, but who knows?  Life changes.  We plan to have about 60% down on it so that our monthly requirements would allow me to quit this big salary job if required and go back to startup land pretty easily.

Final thought, so far being rich is absolutely great.  I highly recommend it.  It’s way better than being poor (see 2013 above).  My wife and I have not yet had a fight about the money. I’m so lucky to have a partner that is closely aligned with me in thinking about almost everything.  We have openly communicated about our goals and poured over the spreadsheet together.  Two heads are better than one.  She’s the best!