a serious Q: what to do with a million dollars?

Dr. Hess wrote: A quarter bil if the government is directing it. No, maybe not. Probably twenty bil. A quarter bil if MBA's are directing it for corporate America. I think one mil as follows: Fluid/turbine Engineer for one year: $100K gEEk: 50K Harbor Freight: 20K Machinist for prototyping: 40K Prototypes: 100K Double those numbers for "fudge factor." Throw in an extra couple hundred for misc. That should get you the prototype design, Mark 3. The first one never works and is an experiment in construction techniques. The second one always has issues. The third one usually works. At least that's the way I always seem to build stuff. If I can't get an engineer to design a freon based turbine in the 5-7KW range for a hundred large, I've got the wrong engineer working for me. Same with the gEEk. I figure the gEEk needs to do less work because generator design should be pretty off-the-shelf. It just has to integrate with the turbine. Note that "profit" and other corporate overhead like executive pay and car allowances are excluded. That's how MBA's blow 250 mil on a 1 mil project and how the feds would blow 20 bil on it. Changing one line of code in an esoteric report gets billed 100-150 hours today. That's MBA's at work.

You're looking at $100/hr for a turbine engineer good enough to do this (I'm not quite THAT good yet), and remember he has to work from day 1 through the end of the project as you need it to be production-ready at the end. gEEk might also want to be good at drive systems and controls; remember, until we're testing it we don't know what the power characteristics of the turbine are.

You also want a really good machinist as any variance between the calculations based on the design and the prototype parts will give you problems that you won't be able to explain readily. Same goes for needing a manufacturing engineer as soon as you have a "beta" prototype. Your machine tool needs may not be bad through the prototype phase so long as you can contract out the cast/forged blanks at a reasonable price.

Remember that testing also costs money - you will need to measure and control inputs and outputs to every component in the system. Any change must be proven to work under all the anticipated conditions too; changing one line of code may take 20 minutes for the developer to implement, but it will require a couple hours of code inspection, a day or two of developer testing, then a day or two of testing by the other engineers to make sure it doesn't break what they're doing. Toyota makes money; GM has gone bankrupt.

This can be a small-business scale project right up till the MK3 prototype; I'd suggest selling out after that unless we've got good enough economic conditions at that point to go public. Large-scale production is going to require either the resources of a midcap corporation or turning the company into one.

I'd go for the rock solid return. Don't touch the initial amount (principle). Split the money up across several banks (with different owners, very important) up to the FDIC insurance limit. Even at a crappy 2% return per year you'll get $20,000 in interest. Use THAT money to pay down your debts. If you want to get real fancy you can do a CD ladder. But I wouldn't touch the principle, let your money work FOR you.

If you have a few hundred grand left to invest after home ownership, debt repayment, and tuition, you're in for the long term.

DO NOT GO SAFE. Difference between 3% and 8% returns after 15 years on a $200,000 investment is $300,000. There will be good years. There will be bad years. A couple of the twenty-thirty companies you will own stock in will go bankrupt. The rest of them will make you a hell of a lot more money than a bank CD.

slefain wrote: I'd go for the rock solid return. Don't touch the initial amount (principle). Split the money up across several banks (with different owners, very important) up to the FDIC insurance limit. Even at a crappy 2% return per year you'll get $20,000 in interest. Use THAT money to pay down your debts. If you want to get real fancy you can do a CD ladder. But I wouldn't touch the principle, let your money work FOR you.

At 2% a year you'll lose money...

Osterkraut wrote:

slefain wrote: I'd go for the rock solid return. Don't touch the initial amount (principle). Split the money up across several banks (with different owners, very important) up to the FDIC insurance limit. Even at a crappy 2% return per year you'll get $20,000 in interest. Use THAT money to pay down your debts. If you want to get real fancy you can do a CD ladder. But I wouldn't touch the principle, let your money work FOR you.

At 2% a year you'll lose money...

Crap, I didn't factor inflation. Well, spend it all on hookers and blow then.

Bottom line: invest the money in whatever way beats inflation by a few % points, but still don't spend the principle.

Remember TIPS, guys. It pays a return over inflation and is from da Fed, which is about as secure as you can get (be that as it may).

chaparral, you have some good points, but you are still thinking inside the corporate box. As I said, one line of code gets billed 100 hours, even if the whole "Oh, I need to change this" to "there's the change" is 10 minutes. Everything else is as you describe, and MBA's will stand there and yell "SOX" if you ask them why a 10 minute job takes 100 hours.

Next, the whole project has to be approached from a viewpoint of "I'm not gonna make any money on this." If you try to do otherwise, it will be squashed. Making money, while certainly a business goal, is used to squash true innovation and has been historically. If you want to change the world, there is a huge colletion of very powerful people who have a strong interest in maintaining the status quo. Some of those will try to use patents and other legal and illegal means to squash you, the innovator. The solution will have to be a grass roots approach. Once the design has been knocked out and production has started, not only should rip-offs be tolerated, they should be encouraged.

See, my goal is not "I'm gonna get rich from this energy idea I have," but "I'm gonna totally free people from the chains of energy slavery." 10^6 dollars, give or take an order of magnitude, is all it would need, which is 10^6 more than I have to blow on it, so the world can continue to kill each other for drops of black hydrocarbon chains.

If the goal is to end up with a grassroots prototype that actually works, 10^6 is the right order of magnitude, then sell out or give it away afterwards.

If it works it was certainly worth doing even if you lose every penny. Charles Goodyear lost all his money and every dime anyone ever put up for him but we still have vulcanized rubber.

I'd build my dream garage and FILL it. Okay, that would take more than a mil.