You have $3,000,000. This is the playbook to keep it.
You have come into $3,000,000.
Maybe it was a business sale. An inheritance. A relationship property settlement. A crypto exit. A lucky property run. Whatever the path, you now have a number that can change the rest of your life.
And that’s the strange part.
Because the biggest risk isn’t “What do I invest in?”
The biggest risk is that you treat this like a finish line, and accidentally turn it into a story you tell people later: “We had $3,000,000 once…”
This post is a simple three-step framework:
The threats you face
The solutions and resources that neutralise them
The exact steps to take from here
No secret strategies. Just the boring stuff that keeps people who found themselves with wealth - wealthy for good.
Step 1: The real threats
Threat 1: High spending (the lifestyle escalator)
The most common way people lose a life-changing sum isn’t a single mistake. It’s a thousand “reasonable” upgrades:
A new luxury car every three years
Regular high-end holidays that become “normal”
Exorbitant membership fees, regular shopping costs, and conveniences
Helping others in ways that become expectations
None of these purchases feel dramatic. Instead they feel like “finally living”.
But there’s a brutal problem in human psychology - referred to as the hedonic treadmill - in other words: spending becomes sticky.
When lifestyle quality goes up, it’s psychologically painful to bring it back down again. So even if markets behave, and even if your investments perform well, your withdrawals quietly become the thing that eats the golden goose.
Threat 2: Improper investment strategy (death by unforced errors)
The good news is that investing is mostly solved.
The bad news is that $3,000,000 attracts complexity - and complexity attracts mistakes.
Here are the classic ways this goes wrong.
Inflation: the invisible thief
If your money is sitting still, inflation is not.
Inflation doesn’t announce itself as a loss. It shows up as “Why does life cost so much now?” ten years after the decision is made to keep money in cash or term deposits.
So if your plan is to keep large amounts in cash or term deposits forever because it feels safe, you may well be quietly choosing a long slow bleed.
Improper administration: panic selling and chaos
A bad admin setup causes expensive behaviour.
The most destructive example is selling during falling or fallen markets.
Selling after a low will kill any high expected return investment strategy. It turns normal volatility into permanent loss with certainty.
Concentration: one bet masquerading as a portfolio
It’s common to end up with concentrated wealth without realising it:
One property market
One business sector
One country
A handful of shares
One outperforming fund manager
Equity remaining in the business you sold
Concentration feels simple and effective when it’s going well. It reveals itself in catastrophe when it doesn’t.
Over-complication: too much work, too many experts, not enough commitment
With $3,000,000, you will be pitched “solutions” that are effectively expensive complexity wrapped in confidence.
Complex portfolios are hard to monitor. Hard to rebalance. Hard to explain. Costly to maintain and emotionally difficult to stay committed to.
That creates two problems:
Overreliance on experts (and their own incentives)
Under-commitment to any clear plan (because there isn’t one)
You and you alone are holding the risk (your experts commonly absolve themselves of legal responsibility)
When strategy is complicated, it becomes easier to procrastinate, ignore it, or outsource it blindly.
Threat 3: No investment governance (no rules, no purpose, no guardrails)
This is the far reaching threat, and it’s the one that matters most.
You can have a decent portfolio and still lose your wealth if you don’t have governance.
Missing investment purpose statement (the why before the how)
Without a clear purpose, every decision becomes emotional.
The market drops? You panic.
The market booms? You chase.
Your family friend pitches an opportunity? You dabble.
Your family asks for a small loan? You guess.
An investment purpose statement is the anchor. It answers:
What is this money for?
What is it not for?
What trade-offs are we accepting?
What risks are we explicitly choosing?
The why comes before the how.
Improper utilisation of the investment (yes, you can “lose” it by never using it)
There’s a strange failure mode where you don’t lose the money - you lose the life it was supposed to buy.
If all your $3,000,000 does is grow until you and your beneficiaries die, you might have built a trophy, not a tool.
Equally, if a sum is meant to support future beneficiaries, keeping it permanently in term deposits can be a significant lost opportunity for materially better outcomes.
Wealth is only wealth if it improves wellbeing. Otherwise it’s effectively a number on a screen you’re proud of.
Money buys you time but you can accidentally buy yourself another job
Even if you do everything “right”, you can still lose in a different way:
If you spend your nights maintaining the system, monitoring managers, reading reports, juggling tax structures, and stress-testing decisions, you may have purchased an unpaid job called “being wealthy”.
This is why governance matters, and why you may want an independent wealth manager - not to “beat the market”, but to keep the machine running you built together oiled well while you live your life.
Step 2: The solutions and resources
Here’s the boring truth: your job is not to find the perfect investment.
Your job is to build a simple, understandable system that:
prevents overspending
prevents panic decisions
prevents concentration risk
prevents complexity creep
ensures the money is used for its intended purpose
runs without consuming your life
That system has three pillars.
Pillar 1: Spending rules that protect the capital base
A visualisation in consensus of your ideal life and lifestyle so your investments serve that ideal rather than in search of an undefinable ‘more’.
This typically results in a clear boundary for resources earmarked each year between:
lifestyle spending and holidays
one-off luxury spending
long-term capital
If you don’t define this early, lifestyle will typically expand until some limit is reached such as having a liquidity issue.
Remember, the point is not to live like a monk. The point is to avoid building a life that requires perfect markets to survive.
Pillar 2: A simple investment strategy you can stick to
A good strategy is one you understand.
It should be:
diversified over thousands of shares and hundreds of bonds
low maintenance
resistant to your worst instincts
designed around real-world behaviour
The biggest upgrade you can make is simplicity + discipline.
Pillar 3: Investment governance (a written operating system)
This is the part most people skip, and it’s the part that stops you doing dumb things later.
A governance setup includes:
an investment purpose statement (example template)
clear decision rules (when you rebalance, when you change anything, when you do nothing)
a plan for cash needs
a plan for how money gets used (you now, family, future, giving)
a plan for who is responsible for what (you, partner, adviser, executor)
Governance turns “wealth” into a machine that works without drama.
Step 3: Exact steps to take from here
Here is your checklist. Do it in order.
1) Park the money safely while you plan
This is the “don’t touch anything yet” phase.
You’re trying to avoid irreversible mistakes. Return is not a consideration in this phase.
The purpose of this step is psychological safety and admin clarity.
2) Decide what this money is for
Write 1-2 pages that answer:
What does this money need to do for my life?
What does “enough” look like?
What future obligations do I want it to cover?
What risks am I willing to take - and why?
What decisions am I not allowed to make in a panic?
If you can’t explain your plan to a smart friend in five minutes, it’s not ready.
3) Set spending boundaries before lifestyle sets them for you
Create three buckets:
Lifestyle: sustainable ongoing spending
Joy: planned one-off spending (travel, car, gifts)
Capital: the base you protect like a golden goose
This is where you stop $3,000,000 turning into “we upgraded everything”.
4) Build a simple diversified portfolio (and write the rules)
Decide:
your long-term mix (the big picture risk level)
your rebalancing rules
your “do nothing” rules (what you ignore, what you never react to)
Then automate the boring parts.
5) Remove concentration risk
List your exposures:
property
business/industry
NZ vs global
single positions
illiquid assets
Then reduce the ones that could wreck your life if they go wrong.
6) Design the admin so you can’t sabotage yourself
This step is underrated.
You want a structure that makes good behaviour easy and bad behaviour hard:
clear accounts
clear reporting
simple holdings
minimal moving parts
a process for decisions (cooling-off periods, second opinions)
7) Make sure you actually use the money for what it’s for
Plan the utilisation.
If the purpose is security and freedom, use it to buy time.
If the purpose is future family support, invest it appropriately and document it.
If the purpose is giving, set a giving policy so it doesn’t become guilt-driven chaos.
Wealth should improve wellbeing - not just grow.
8) Decide whether you need an independent wealth manager
If the system is going to consume you, outsource parts of it.
Not to chase returns - to protect your time and reduce errors.
A good adviser is a behavioural guardrail and a governance partner.
The point
You don’t keep $3,000,000 by being clever.
You keep it by being disciplined, boring, and intentional.
The threats are predictable. The solutions are known. The steps are straightforward.
The goal is simple:
Turn $3,000,000 from a fragile number into a calm, well-run machine that funds a good life - without becoming your new full-time job.