Kimberly Palmer at U.S. News & World Report is asking the question of what you'd do with a $1,000 windfall. I don't think my answer is going to bring in a lot of votes for most creative, but here goes anyway.

If I got a $1,000 windfall, I'd put it in my checking account and treat it like any other money I get.

Exciting, huh?

Although the idea of pushing 40 has never appealed to me, the upside of being in your late 30s is that often you've got enough work history/income under your belt that you're not worrying about your next dollar, or even your next thousand dollars. My family doesn't carry debt other than mortgage debt, so that's not a worry. Therefore, about 5 or 6 years ago, we established a general framework for where "extra" money goes. We don't keep a budget, but we keep an eye on our checking account, and when it reaches a certain upper limit, we skim off the top and take that "extra" and put it in our pre-arranged money buckets - retirement savings, 529 plan money for our kids, investments outside of retirement, and extra mortgage payments if we're really on a good money roll. I should make clear that this is if we have "extra" money - we already pay into retirement accounts and 529 plans as part of our normal savings/investment routine.

So no "windfall" ever gets spent or saved in a chunk. We wouldn't put $1000 to pay off debt (although we would if we had credit card debt) and we wouldn't take $1,000 and go on vacation and blow it. We'd boringly deposit it into our checking account and when it helped us get our account up to our healthy limit, we'd skim it away and throw it in the buckets. If our account wasn't so high to begin with, we might forget we ever even got the $1,000 windfall. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, because $1,000 windfalls are not something to be counted on, and so maybe not something to be fussed over.

Now give me a $100,000 or $1,000,000 windfall, and we'd have more of a discussion.