[ryandrake]

Really, because $5M seems like an enormous fortune to me. It's an amount you could stick in a savings account yielding only 1% interest and pretty much live the rest of your life with a decent lifestyle somewhere with a low cost of living. OR, you could quit your high-stress job and augment that interest with a more fulfilling career.

I can pretty safely say a single $5M bonus would amount to an instant lifestyle change (namely less pressure to work) for me.

[pjdemers]

5 million before taxes is 3.5 after taxes (probably less). If you want to stay in the bay area, another million goes to a reasonable house (probably more). That leaves 2.5 million. For anyone under 50, a reasonable withdrawal rate is more like 3%, or 75k per year. Taxes and MRO on your house are at least 15k per year. Private health insurance for a family is at least 30k per year. Which leaves at most 30k per year for everything else. Plus, if you have a family, there is still college that needs to come out of the 2.5 million at some point, so the "everything else" budget will go down into the 20s. And last but not least, social security is based on last few years wage earnings, so, by the time you are old enough to collect, you will only get the minimum having not worked for a decade.

I think I would keep working.

[gmarx]

The trick is you don't move someone to that bonus immediately. let them rise to that level incrementally and make them fight for every step. In the mean time they will be upping their lifestyle until $5 million just doesn't seem like that much anymore

[CryoLogic]

Or put it all in the market in highly diversified low-ish risk mutual funds, withdraw 4% per year and live a lavish lifestyle.

[JackFr]

So assume you get a bonus which allows you to maintain your previous salary with just interest income. The problem is the cost of your leisure time (as measured by the cost of foregone wages) just went up dramatically, so the leisure has to be worth that much more to you for you to take it.

Two things to note: 1) this is different than winning a lottery, because with a lottery there is no expectation of a change in wages; 2) your first week of leisure is worth much, much more than your 50th, as is your 1st dollar worth more than your 5 millionth. There is some level at which you stop working. I think it's much higher than you realize.