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After all those lottery ^[3] questions ^[4], this one probably made you think that I won the lottery and $10,000 huh? Well, no, this question was prompted by a question to Gerri and is the focus of her Gerri’s Top Tips ^[5] column for this week. The question itself is:

I am a 26-year-old professional. My parents just generously gave me $10,000. I want to use this money to begin saving for my retirement. I will contribute $4,000 to my Roth IRA. Any advice on what to do with the remaining $6,000?

Gerri recommends:

• Consider a stock fund from one of the big brokerages, T Rowe, Vanguard, Fidelity, etc.
• Emergency fund if you don’t have one

Yeah yeah, that’s pretty vanilla answers… and honestly they’re not that much fun. What would I do with $10,000?

• Put a down-payment on a sweet new ride ^[6] (okay, so it’s sweet only because it’s easy on gas and it’s green), or,
• Two person 12-night Mediterranean-Eastern (Civitavecchia to Venice) cruise from Crystal Cruises ($5860 per person for an Oceanview room), or,
• $10,000 in quarters so I can put it in a big vault and dive into it Scrooge McDuck style, or,
• a ridiculous vacation to Hawaii or somewhere really warm and sunny and nowhere near here, or,
• put it on red, or,
• enter the World Series of Poker.

Any of those ideas sound a lot more fun than a stock fund or an emergency fund… what would you do? (I mean fun things, not the boring/responsible stuff you tell your parents)