A few months ago, my family was plugging along making steady progress on our goals, but not getting anywhere quickly. We've paid off a ton of debt, bought a house with an affordable monthly payment in a HCOL area, and got our expenses to a place where our lives are rich without spending a lot of money. We were in great shape but not seriously thinking early retirement was in the cards for us based on our ages and starting off our adult lives with lots of student loan debt and medical expenses. We were (and are) happy to have overcome some pretty tough stuff to just live comfortably and without a lot of financial worries. In the past few months, both earners received raises, one of which was totally unexpected. We have about 2.5k more each month than we have planned for in our current budget. Although both raises are well-deserved, we do not feel any need to inflate our day-to-day lifestyle. We have a robust emergency fund and max out retirement accounts. We are saving this unexpected money with the intentions of investing some of it in a Vanguard lifecycle account or Betterment. We have some repairs and updates we could do on our house that could save us money in the long term, but which we've done without while we didn't have cash upfront to responsibly consider these options. One of us may take some time off work next year, so while I don't think it makes sense to keep too much cash around, I also don't want to lock up everything in a way that's too illiquid. Any thoughts? I'm mostly curious if it would be reckless to take this opportunity to do home repairs (~10k worth) that we wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity to do, and what amounts we should invest verses keep around. I don't like keeping the money sitting around without a plan but I don't want to act impulsively, either--please help!