They’re offering $1 per day? That’s $1 for every 24 hours you go back, which is around $0.04 per hour, which can be broken down even further to around $0.0007 per minute.
I’d give them 1 penny to go back 15 minutes in time, find a penny on the ground, then find them again to go back the same 15 minutes in time over and over until I can figure out how to kidnap them in 15 minutes.
After I successfully kidnap them, I will go on a bank heist and keep the time person near me so I can keep trying to rob a bank until I do so successfully. Then because they’re an accessory to the crime, I can blackmail them to let me rewind time for free at any time I wish so I can become a crime lord, otherwise I’ll give them to the police and let them know he can time-travel.
EDIT: Just saw OP’s one-time offer clause, so I am assuming this means the time person retains their memory.
I won’t immediately take them up on their offer - instead, I would take them out on a date or five first. Get to know them a bit better; where they lived growing up, how they grew up, how old they are - that kind of stuff.
Then I would figure out how much money I can use to go back in time to my youngest point of life that also meets their youngest point in my same lifetime, and I’ll track them down from all the details they gave me while they were pegging me. I’ll become best friends with them, and convince them that we could be using their powers to become the dopest crime lords in history.
It's always tempting to say things like, "Go back to being 20 and relive young adulthood again, avoiding all the stupid mistakes I made the first time around." But I know I would make a whole new set of different stupid mistakes the second time.
Knowing that, I would do what others have said: only go back enough days to play a winning lottery number or make some ridiculous stock options bet and become filthy rich.
Depends on how this works. Do I wake up in my younger body, in my previous situation? Do I still remember everything I know and remember now?
Or do I just appear as I am right now, in the past?
Because we've gone back, the money is kinda irrelevant in some cases. I would whoop out $3,650 or more out of my savings to go back a decade or more. I would give the rest to my family in case that timeline carries on, whatever is left is irrelevant to me since in the past I had $0. I'll have to make it again.
I'd say this is incredibly cheap. That's $3,650 per decade. So if you're say 70 and you want to go back to your first day of high school (15yo for the sake of argument), that's a hair over $20k to basically live your entire life over.
Of course the question is, do you de-age as you go back? Or does the 70yo stay a 70yo just 55 years ago? If you don't de-age, then the whole thing is much less useful- it's basically an opportunity to undo one or two mistakes.
I'd go back to around the time my daughter started sleeping through the night. Don't want to risk a reality where my kids don't exist. I'd tell my friend the cancer is coming back, when it's still early enough to do something.
Don't really know what else I'd do. Don't really care. Be nice to live through those years again without changing much else to be totally honest
January 2015. I would do my best to put paychecks away for a few months coupled with what I already had, and invest it all in Bitcoin in August/September when it was $200. Even if I just let it ride until November 2021 rather than playing the ups and downs I'm looking at a 340x return. If I emptied out my savings and 401k, even if I couldn't convince family members, I'd have tens of millions of dollars.
If I stay mentally the same I would start over from age 8 I think, just old enough to skip the awkward part of having your parents helping you bath or wipe etc but still young enough were all of my life is ahead of me.
With good investments I can never worry about money and I would have all the time in the world to educate myself further and develop a career in a field that I love and not worry about money.
The only issue would be hunting down my best friend and befriending her again.
If someone actually said that, I would assume they are crazy and ignore them. However, in the scenario that I know they are telling the truth, I would go back to the age of 4 and change a lot of things. Even though a 4 year old doesn't have a lot of agency over their lives, they can still influence things for the better.
I would tell my parents that I travelled from the future, and prove it by telling them of some future events that aren't that bad, waiting for it to happen. I would tell my parents what stocks to buy to get rich.
I would be sure to become a good sibling, because as a kid I was completely self absorbed in my own misery and ignored everyone else.
Also, I would spend more time with my grandmother. I never appreciated visiting her, because we lived in different cities and I always hated car travel, but she was such a wonderful human being, so I really wish to have had the chance to spend more time with her before her passing.
Do I de-age, or am I just moving to a previous point in my timeline as I am today? If I do de-age, do I at least keep all my knowledge and experience intact?
If so, I would love to go back to my pre-schooling childhood, power through the "child genius" phase at record speed, and get some good investments started early (Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc.) so I can speed-run my retirement and live better than I currently am. Heck, since my young spongy brain absorbs knowledge much easier than my current adult brain, I could work to earn a few doctorates in STEM fields while I'm young and then try to improve the world once I reach adulthood.
I retired last year at only 38 years old (military pension, plus disability pay), but it's basically kept me in the same place I started out. I moved back into my childhood house and I have enough passive income to just relax and enjoy my life. So I'm essentially back to my childhood life, where I'm just doing whatever I want every day without worrying about monetary cost.
But it'd be nice to have the money to build my childhood dream home (Modern castle/fortress with hidden rooms and passages, completely self-sustaining and off the grid, on 100+ acres of private land). And I would like to pay off all debts of my closest friends and family. (REAL friends - the ones who were good to me before they knew I was wealthy)
I'd also like to be rich enough to be a philanthropist who can just throw millions at fixing major injustices in the world. Like, Elon Musk could literally end world hunger if he wanted and he'd hardly notice the impact to his finances. But he doesn't give a shit, so the world continues to suffer under megalomaniacs like him.
Less than a month ago when I hadn't yet accidentally deleted several days of vacation photos. Other than that, my life tended to get better over time, no way am I travelling back to a time when it was worse.
Pretty difficult to imagine doing this honestly. Do I retain the memories of what I'm reversing? Or is it just a rewind? Because if I don't retain the memories then it's a bit pointless, but if I do I think I'd have a hard time reliving things. For instance I would never go back far enough to erase my children, but my youngest was born 2 weeks before COVID. Regardless of any get rich quick scheme I could think of, I am really not certain I'd want to knowingly live through that again.
I wouldn't go further back than the birth of my daughter, because there's no way I'd take the chance to not have her in my life, no matter what I might wish to change from before that. That said, I'd like to change a few things since, so I'd probably do that.
I'd go back to the beginning of 2019. I don't want to backtrack too far, but this would give me enough time to sell the house, move, and get situated before covid and the price of everything going crazy.
But it's not just about that, it's about repairing a relationship with a loved one while I still can.
I have more than enough to get to 2010, which is as far back as I can go (so I don't erase my son). I have a LOT of things to do differently in that time...
All these people spending years living in reverse time. I don't know.
There is a lot that I don't think I'd enjoy backwards. But maybe if it's a whole perspective shift I wouldn't notice the difference. Just watching my life events with an "oh yeah, that happened too"
Maybe give the person like a dime after I break a few things just to wig out on reverse entropy, if I can.