"Your account credited with Rs. 1,00,00,00,000 on 5th May, 2013.", A bizarre habit of checking emails on smart phone when sleep gets thin made me look at my newly received text message which gave me shock of my life. Wanted to see the source of the money hence immediately started laptop to log-in to my bank account. It showed a check number and from the comment it looked like a transfer from outside country. I thought it might be by mistake somebody has put a wrong account number so not to bother. Controlled my extreme emotions and kept on watching my account status for next 3 days but no change.
After 4 days, I received a call from the branch manager while I was driving to office. I stopped the car and received the call. He proposed me some investment options. This guy never spoke to me decently till date but today he was extremely kind. I asked me why he is telling me all these high value investments. He said, "Sir I know you received a Jackpot from UK and I am the one who cleared the fund when the check came to us." Now it made me believe that this is truly my money.
In these 3 days I had stopped eating properly due to nervousness, anxiety and handling entire pressure myself. Today I went and spoke to my wife. She just went to same physical and mental state as I was. I did not still believe that I am worth that money so wanted to wait for few days before I can believe that it's mine and that can only be proven when there will be some kind of documentation proving it.
But I had started doing calculations. The money that will be left post tax deduction and all, was very handy for me. With a precondition that 'If it is true', me and my wife started discussing how best we will upgrade our life with this money.
The question came about the criteria of a quality life which we both would enjoy endlessly. Then after lot of research we came with below points.
3. Good education for kids which can prepare them with necessary life (hard and soft) skills to fight the challenges of life as well as knowledge of past innovations and events so that they can make the world a better place to live.
4. Good and comfortable clothing.
5. Time to connect with near and dear ones and spend quality time with them.
6. Easy commute to distant places.
I agreed. Now we revisited the list to see how to achieve it.
"Healthy and pure environment to live and fresh raw material for food can be found if we live in our ancestral village. If we try to achieve that in city then we have to protect our house by various air filters, water purifiers, air-conditioners and buy organic food but there is no guaranty that the end result will be as pure as we want it to be. And by doing this we may spent our entire money in few years. But if we stay in village, we can grow our own food and build on the existing tree boundary. We can keep our well and pond clean so that we get pure, natural drinking water." I said.
"Good education for kids can happen in a good environment where teachers are knowledgeable and not biased by only modern innovations. I am not sure if we have such school here but as you are knowledgeable we can really fill the gap which school can't do. But regarding life skills like swimming, climbing on trees, martial arts, oratory, written, debating, presentation, etiquette etc can be taught by our parents and some friends in our village. ", I said.
"Time for near and dear ones can be achieved by organizing our day. We will not feel happy if we don't have enough work to do in a day. So it's better to stay busy but organize the day so that we are able to connect to all. It's only good when you come home early.", and looked at me. "For comfortable commute we may upgrade our car.", my wife said.
While we were in thought mode about a quality life suddenly we realized that we forgot about the money we have. We realized that there is hardly any extra money required to upgrade our life. It just needs to choose the right things and organize ourselves.
So we decided to stay in our ancestral home and due to traffic we started taking the public transport to come to work and return. We rather saved more money than we were spending earlier and this including a big car for family outings.
We started living a much better life and extremely happy, when we received a letter from bank for apologizing the incorrect transfer of money to my account and my consent to take it back. As joint account holders, I and my wife happily signed the consent form and bank took away the money. We had more than we have when we got this money.