1.4 million cash. What do I do?
For now, park it in a mix of cash and short term bond funds like the Vanguard Short Term Investment Grade fund. The short term fund will help with the inflation issue. Make sure the cash positions are FDIC insured. Then either educate yourself about investing or start interviewing potential advisors. Look for referrals, and stay away from people peddling annuities or people who will not fully disclose how they get paid. Your goal should be to have a long-term plan within 6-12 months. You can get an investment manager through firms like Fidelity or E*Trade to manage your account. It won't be someone dedicated exclusively to you, but you're in the range where they'd take you as a managed account customer. Another option would be to get a financial planner (CFP or something) help you to identify your needs and figure out what your investments portfolio should look like. This is not a whole lot of money, but is definitely enough to have an early retirement if managed and invested properly. "I'm still recommending that you go to a professional. However, I'm going to talk about what you should probably expect the professional to be telling you. These are generalities. It sounds like you're going to keep working for a while. (If nothing else, it'll stave off boredom.) If that's the case, and you don't touch that $1.4 million otherwise, you're pretty much set for retirement and never need to save another penny, and you can afford to treat your girl to a nice dinner on the rest of your income.  If you're going to buy expensive things, though - like California real estate and boats and fancy cars and college educations and small businesses - you can dip into that money but things will get trickier. If not, then it's a question of ""how do I structure my savings?"". A typical structure: Anywho. If you can research general principles in advance, you'll be better prepared." First--congratulations!  I certainly wish I could create something worth buying for $1.4 million.  In addition to what @duffbeer703 recommended, consider putting some of the money in Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS).  I second the advice on staying away from annuities as well.  @littleadv is right about certified financial planners.  A good one will put those funds in a mix of investments that minimize your potential tax exposure.  They will also look at whether you're properly insured.    Research what is FDIC-insured (and what isn't) here. Since you're still making a six-figure income in your salaried job, be sure not to neglect things like contributing to your 401(k)--especially if it's a matching one.  At your salary level, I think you're still eligible to contribute to a Roth IRA (taxable income goes in, so withdrawals are tax-free).  A good adviser will know which options are best. At 1.4 Million, you can definately afford a professional advisor who would give you the best advice taking into account all your goals and risk appetite. Have you considered investing in real estate? Property is cheap now and you have enough money for several properties. The income from tenants could be very helpful. If you find it's not for you, you can also sell your property and recover your initial investment, assuming house prices go up in the next few years. "For what it's worth, the distribution I'm currently using is roughly ... with about 2/3 of the money sitting in my 401(k). I should note that this is actually considered a moderately aggressive position. I need to phone my advisor (NOT a broker, so they aren't biased toward things which are more profitable for them) and check whether I've gotten close enough to retirement that I should readjust those numbers. Could I do better? Maybe, at higher risk and higher fees that would be likely to eat most of the improved returns. Or by spending far more time micromanaging my money than I have any interest in. I've validated this distribution using the various stochastic models and it seems to work well enough that I'm generally content with it. (As I noted in a comment elsewhere, many of us will want to get up into this range before we retire -- I figure that if I hit $1.8M I can probably sustain my lifestyle solely on the income, despite expected inflation, and thus be safely covered for life -- so this isn't all that huge a chunk of cash by today's standards. Cue Daffy Duck: ""I'm rich! I'm wealthy! I'm comfortably well off!"" -- $2M, these days, is ""comfortably well off."")" you should invest in a range of stock market indexes. Ex : Dow jones, S&P500, Nasdaq and keep it there until you are ready to retire. I'm invested half in SLYV and SLYG (S&P600 small cap value and S&P600 small cap growth; Respectively). It brings on average between 8-13% a year (since 1971). This is not investment advice. Talk to your broker before doing this.
Is my understanding correct? It's actually higher than that - he exercised options for 94,564 shares at $204.16 and sold them for $252.17 for a gain of about $4.5 Million.  There's another transaction that's not in your screenshot where he sold the other 7,954 shares for another $2 Million. What do executive directors usually do with such profit?  It's part of his compensation - it's anyone's guess what he decided to do with it. Is it understood that such trade profits should be re-invested back to the company? No - that is purely compensation for his position (I'm assuming the stock options were compensation rather then him buying options in the open market).  There generally is no expectation that trading profits need to go back into the company.  If the company wanted the profits reinvested they wouldn't have distributed the compensation in the first place. "I utopia, once issues are discovered, politicians put politics aside and work together to fix the issues as soon as possible.  In reality, politicians would rather people and doctors suffer, only that their own way and only their way (party way) will be the way.  So, sorry, but Trump need to ""motivate"" politicians to do something.   And with a million percents certainty, this ""motivation"" method is not what Trump prefers.  Actually, he said it himself: ""ObamaCare will fail on its own without me doing anything.""  &gt; ""repeal now, replace later""   This is not what Trump wants or said.   But I think this is not a bad idea. If it get repealed (easy to do, in 5 minutes, if most vote for it) then it will motivate the politicians to work on a replacement, and work fast on that, with a pressure to prove that the new plan is better.  &gt; agenda which would have an immediate and dramatic impact on the well being of millions  Those millions are chronically sick and are drain on the system.   Many more millions have to pay much more than before, and more than it will cost them out-of-pocket.  As an Israeli, and Israel as one of the best National Healthcare system in the world, I can tell you that with National Health Care, not everything is covered and some of chronically ill people do not get any and all the treatments they need.   And I have no moral issues about it." All value given to products is subjective and is different from person to person.  It can also vary for the same person from year to year, month to month, day to day, or even hour to hour as a person analyzes different products and prices to determine which imparts the most value to him or her at a given point in time. In regards to losing money in your investment accounts.  This reminds of a book I read on Jesse Livermore.  Jesse was a famous stock broker who made millions (in the 1920's so he would be a billionaire in today's money) in the stock market multiple times.  Jesse felt like  you - he felt like after a while the losses on paper did not seem to concern him as much as he thought it should.  He thought it was due to the investment accounts being simply being numbers on papers and not cold, hard cash. So what did Jesse do to remove the abstract nature of investment accounts?   From here: Livermore always sold out all his positions at the end of every year   and had the cash deposited in his account at the Chase Manhattan Bank.   Then he would arrange with the bank to have the money, in cash, in the   bank’s vault in chests. “There was a desk, a chair, a cot and an easy   chair in the middle of the cash.” On the occasion described in 1923,   there was $50 million in cash.  In the corner was a fridge with food,   enough for a few days. There was lighting installed. Then, like   Scrooge McDuck, Livermore would have himself locked in the vault with   his cash. He would stay a couple of days and “review his year from   every aspect.”  After his stay was over, he would fill his pockets with cash and go on   a shopping spree.   He would also take  a vacation and not re-enter   the market until February. But unlike Scrooge McDuck, this was not the act of a miser, explains   Smitten.  Livermore lived a world of paper transactions all year long.   He believed that “by the end of the year he had lost his perception of   what the paper slips really represented, cash money and ultimately   power.”  He “needed to touch the money and feel the power of cash.” It   made him re-appraise his stock and commodity positions. Imagine the $60,000 from your investment account sitting on your kitchen table.  Imagine seeing $1,000 dumped into the trash can one day.  I know I would appreciate the money much more seeing that happen. "&gt; Honestly this all scans with the same naivety as the communists saying WELL IT HASN'T BEEN TRIED PROPERLY YET.   No, it has the intellectual rigor of saying that if you want to claim something then you have to prove it, not parrot some propaganda that has been repeated endlessly without any proof.  &gt; Why not the east india company for example - got a royal charter to literally do whatever the hell it wanted. Doesn't get more free market than that.  Royal charter. Free market. You can only have one. This is the kind of nonsense I'm talking about. You can't attack the market for a fucking government-granted problem. No, that is not free market. And even if it were, it wouldn't come close to the deaths caused by states. Again, you bear the burden of proof here, not me.  &gt; Ultimately i find this philosophy unnecessarily reductionist, it lacks the nuance and resource flexibility to deal with shocks to the system such as external invasion or environmental catastrophe  In what way? People don't suddenly cease to have resources to deal with these things just because their resources are not forcibly centralized. That doesn't follow.  &gt; what protection do you have from these private courts if someone is polluting your water supply? Your air? What defines 'your air' and 'your water'?  The protection would be upholding private property rights, which is what would determine what ""your air"" and ""your water"" are. You resolve it by showing that they are polluting and that you have damages. The general population isn't going to respect a biased court that doesn't support the rights of private property against pollution. It's akin to asking what we'd do if a murderer went to his brother who supports a right to murder: you wouldn't use that court. Again, people overwhelmingly want protections against pollution and murder so there would be a market demand for courts that protect against these things.  &gt; I mean these are all hypothetical worst case scenarios  Then compare them to the real life worst case scenarios of governments. It won't do to use some fictitious, worst-case example that isn't based upon reason and evidence against the not-so-bad examples of government. Make an apples-to-apples comparison and tell me what evidence or reason you have to believe that hundreds of millions of people would have died in a century without governments.  “Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.  In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.” - Robert Higgs" "Let me summarize your question for you: ""I do not have the down payment that the lender requires for a mortgage. How can I still acquire the mortgage?"" Short answer: Find another lender or find more cash. Don't overly complicate the scenario. The correct answer is that the lender is free to do what they want. They deem it too risky to lend you $1.1M against this $1.8M property, unless they have $700k up front. You want their money, so you must accept their terms. If other lenders have the same outlook, consider that you cannot afford this house. Find a cheaper house." Pay cash for the house but negotiate at least a 4% discount. You already made your money without having to deal with long term unknowns. I don't get why people would want invest with risk when the alternative are immediate realized gains. "This is a very trivial scam. Flow is like this: Send money to Mr. X (you, in this case). Call Mr. X and ask for the money back, because mistake. Usually they ask for a wire transfer/cash/gift cards/prepaid cards or something else irreversible/untraceable. Mr. X initiates transfer back to Scammer. Accept the transfer from Mr. X Dispute the original transfer or otherwise cancel it through the netbank Mr. X cannot dispute his transfer to the Scammer, since it was genuinely and intentionally initiated by Mr. X. End up with twice the money, at the expense of Mr. X In other countries this is usually done with forged checks, but transfers can work just as well. As long as the transfer can be retroactively canceled or reversed - the scam works. You mentioned money laundering - this is definitely a possibility as well. They transfer dirty money to you from unidentified sources, and you send a ""gift"" to them with a clear paper trail. When the audit comes - the only proof is that you actually sent them the gift, and no-one will believe your story. You'll have to explain why the Mr. Z who's now in jail sent you a $1K of his drug money. However, in this case I think it is more likely a scam, and the scammer didn't really know what he was doing..." I won't make any assumptions about the source of the money.  Typically however, this can be an emotional time and the most important thing to do is not act rashly. If this is an amount of money you have never seen before, getting advice from a fee only financial adviser would be my second step.  The first step is to breathe and promise yourself you will NOT make any decisions about this money in the short term.  Better to have $100K in the bank earning nearly zero interest than to spend it in the wrong way. If you have to receive the money before you can meet with an adviser, then just open a new savings account at your bank (or credit union) and put the money in there.  It will be safe and sound. Visit http://www.napfa.org/ and interview at least three advisers. With their guidance, think about what your goals are.  Do you want to invest and grow the money?  Pay off debt?  Own a home or new large purchase?  These are personal decisions, but the adviser might help you think of goals you didn't imagine Create a plan and execute it.