How to Spend It?

I'm glad that baseball is back. I love the consistency of having the daily news and watching what goes on. I pretty much hibernated all winter and didn't pay any attention to the hot-stove league. I was surprised to find that Barry Zito signed with the Giants for $126M over 7 years. The fact that he signed with the Giants doesn't surprise me because it makes sense that he would want to keep his ties in the Bay Area. What surprises me is that the Giants were willing to give him that much security.

We're taking a class at church called "Beyond Budgeting". One of the tenets is that you pick a standard of living and stay there. As you are blessed with more material wealth you can use that to serve God. Given that, I tried to imagine what I would do with that much money. His salary comes out to $18M/year. Very conservatively, I would imagine that he will clear at least $12M after taxes.

I currently make less than $100k/year. But if I were to round way up to $100k/year that still leaves me with $11.9M to think about (now this is just for one year). Off the top of my head, I could:

• Pay off our mortgage
• Make sure that Lily and "Sweet Pea" do not have to worry about paying for college
• Pay off the debt at our church
• Increase the funding we give to the college missionaries we support
• Fund our friends in Hungary
• Fund some more children through World Vision
• Significantly fund my seminary

I think I could do all of those things with just a year's salary. I'd still have $72M more to think about how to spend for the rest of the time of the contract. And I also realize that I'm thinking just small potatoes here. It seems like that would be enough money to start some kind of foundation to do even more good things.

The point is that it is an overwhelming amount of money. I wonder what Barry Zito will do with it?