Take a cooling-off period of a few months to relax, and research. During this time, do not buy a home, or any other large purchase (> $4k ?) that you wouldn't h

Take a cooling-off period of a few months to relax, and research. During this time, do not buy a home, or any other large purchase (> $4k ?) that you wouldn't have before your windfall. Stay out of the stock, market, except for GICs. Think about what you would need to be permanently semi-retired. I.e. you don't have to work for anyone else, but you don't upscale your lifestyle. You now have 24/7 sweat equity, independent of your other capital. The problem with this particular time is that we're in some kind of transitional period. I have no confidence in my ability to predict what the Canadian and US economies will look like in 10-20 years. I've been very aggressive in paying down my house and contributing to my RRSP. OTOH, I now wish that some percentage of the funds I put into my RRSP had been devoted to disaster preparation. Nothing too extreme -- just another form of insurance. I.e. an RRSP is preparation that makes sense within our current model of society. I currently have few hedges for scenarios outside that model. I guess the main thing is to take small steps. It's very hard to scale back your lifestyle once you've scaled it up. If you are mostly content now, then be very careful about up-scaling. You may have different goals, but for me the greatest luxury is free time to pursue my ideas wherever they take me.