That would be the typical American thing to do :(.. Spend whatever money we have left over.
Anyway, my advice is that it's basically $20k. Put it into a index fund. Anything less won't keep up with inflation, and if you have only $20k to invest freely, it's probably not enough to buy a basket of individual stocks. If you just bought 1 stock, you'd be assuming a lot of risk unless you don't mind potentially losing a chunk of it. If you have less than $100k working cash, you really shouldn't be buying individual stocks imho.
