If you won lottery... What would your set up look like?

Id keep it simple..

State of the art container home, off the grid, solar, water tanks etc on a BIG property..

Haha @ausprep I'd go the complete opposite, buy an island with a sweet yacht or some isolated land somewhere and build something beautiful, like this self sustainable floating home:



www.kraaijvanger.nl/en/projects/348/self-sufficient-floating-house/

Or like one of these: www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/houses-to-survive-a-zombie-apocalypse-in

It'd be eco friendly, low impact and self sufficient. I'd have a a hobby farm (inc. chickens and goats etc) and full permaculture garden. Mulitple power sources (solar, hydro, wind, geothermal if it's in the right area) and water sources (damn, tanks, bore, creek/river if possible). I'd have a root cellar big enough to store all my garden surplus, and hubby would probably make me have secret passage ways

I'd have an enormous library room... think floor to ceiling books on all sorts of useful topics as well as all the fiction stuff, so if the S did HTF I'd be able to educate myself and my kids.



I'd have some state of the art security as well as trying to locate it so it was naturally defendable.... and I'm not a fan of living underground but with that sort of money I'd put in a very comfy bunker.

I'd probably do more or less what I'm already doing, just bigger, better and get it done faster. I'd also maybe add more shipping containers and have some fun with the house design.

Actually the problem may be how to get rid of that much money because if you still have $15m left when SHTF it will probably be worthless.

So I suppose get everything in place, double most of the stuff you have, then buy a truck load of gold and silver with whatever is left.

Yes, I forgot that. I would fill containers with hand tools, shovels/picks/mattocks/forks, bolts, screws, sawn planks, you name it. Anything that we take for granted now. For example apparently when moving location homesteaders used to burn down the old house to just recover the nails. How much would a $20 box of nails from Bunnings be worth under those conditions?

Yeah, don't forget your friends, of course with $20M your are going to have a lot of new friends as well

Good point though, with that sort of money you could provide for several other families, even if that cost an extra $1M (which it wouldn't), dozen madder.

I would buy a large property near a good water source but was a long way from major urban centres. Set up the orchards and vegetable gardens first as well as chickens and then maybe move on to bigger livestock. I would then build the main house with all the off grid capabilities needed and then build smaller cabins to accommodate all those I would want to have with me, whom I  care about, but would not want to live with for long periods of time.  And like Stepford I would want a huge library. A good food storage system would be great as well. 

But you know I have no idea how to do any of this so would have to pay someone to design and build it all which would not be good for Opsec! Oh dear a tent for me it is then, filled with my winnings, I guess I could use it as loo paper!!

Looks loike I'm going to be the party pooper here.

These are all good suggestions but I am assuming we WILL have some event/crisis that will turn us into hermits and reject the outside world currently full of unprepared leeches.
I see many going for isolation and independence with stock and growing foodstuffs. But unless you have a large family of 15 + capable people you will fall on your face.

To maintain a property and be self sufficient is not as simple as it sounds I have a place down south that was as close to this as possible - and the 'hidden workload' can be huge, and list of things that can give you a very bad day is almost endless. I will list a few things I dealt with and to be perfectly honest without modern gear and technology and with just the few people with me, it would have failed in a real situation of self reliance.

Water - pumps/windmills tank watering systems, stock and domestic supplies need maintenance regularly.
Stock - Cattle/Poultry - a continuous myriad of pests/diseases this is everything from ticks to liver fluke and pink eye, bloat, mastitis, inoculations and castrating males - (just to name a few), afflictions and droughts and floods and feral animals (foxes/wild dogs) threatened the poultry I had (Geese are excellent but low hatching rate and need for water and polluting water supply and literally being equal to a whipper snipper/wood chipper on webbed feet will destroy every bit of green around the place .
Goats are great - except they eat everything they shouldn't, and are masters of escape and can jump very high ences also suffer from stock maladies.
Dogs - you will need them for working with stock, hunting, security and because they are just good to have around - will fight, so you will need to be able to patch them up or separate them once fighting (been bitten doing this as well - but they were my best two dogs and didn't want them to damage each other to badly and I copped a bite by mistake).
Rats & Mice love to come inside at the first sign of cold weather - usually in plague proportions. Both also attract brown snakes who often come to farms in summer time for water - over the 10 years I had my small orchard I averaged 16 a year so I was constantly aware of them being around - and they were the brown variety and not known for playfulness.
Grasses - either too much or too little. it can be down to almost bare dirt or up to your knees - in both instances this can occur quickly.
Maintenance - ongoing for dwellings, fencing sheds, equipment, plant and other things also cuts into time.
Garden for veg etc. - another high volume time issue - needs constant attention - garden bed preparation, weeds, water, 100's of pests and diseases - millipedes, thrips, green veg bug, harlequin bug, earwigs - funguses, blight, rot - and the list goes on and you will run out of chemical to fight all these problems.
Sickness - even if you are healthy now - you or others WILL get SICK or INJURED - the workload does not stop because of this. So others need work harder - tempers shorten this is when groups are challenged most.
Or some other part of your enterprise will suffer and production possibly lessen greatly or fail totally.
Kill and dress your meats - game or home kill stock - If you kill a sheep/goat/bullock - you need to dress it and prepare it for storage so it wont go off - all very time consuming and time must be managed to cope with this additional work.

Now this is merely just a snippet of what you could expect - I always expected the unexpected and still managed to get a bullock near crush my foot - had ribs raked by bullocks horns - near bit 3 times by snakes - bit several times by spiders - had a few misses with chainsaws and felling/cutting trees for fuel and heat, and this list can also be one that goes on - most people on farms-farm lets don't even associate these as being risks - just everyday living.
This could go on and on - but I hope now you get the idea. Sorry if I burst some bubbles but I never seen anyone refer to the downside and would hate to think others reading these posts did get the wrong idea and go into something without some reality thrown in.
Much of this post was done with a major collapse of society occurring so you would not have a regular supply of food, fuel, chemical or spare parts to call on, but would be basically forced to fend for yourself.

{By all means - follow your ideas - but keep your eyes wide open}.

You are quite right Sentinel, I grew up on a farm and even though it was not self-sufficient the list of chores was endless and there were two families living there to do them. Throw in being fully self-sufficient and you will need 10 families probably.

Many of the above posts have ideas for building a community, in WROL that's probably the only way you will make it, even then maybe not, depends on the calibre of the people (and the firearms) involved.

Although I am aiming for "self-sufficiency" I never really think I will obtain it, so I'm really assuming (and hoping) that I will never have to, in other words we won't get an apocalypse, just that things will get tougher and tougher (if not for everyone then at least for me) so I need to isolate myself from dependencies as much as is possible. But full 100% never-go-into-town-again ability is a bridge too far almost certainly.

The good news is that you don't need $20M to get to a reasonable level of independence away from population centres, just $100-200k is probably enough and most people have that in equity in their house, of course there is the minor detail of leaving the city and finding another job if you need one