Excellent answer. One way to look at it is... how much can you spend in a year? If you reasonably could never spend the annual stipend then take it that way. Remember you will get almost twice as much that way. If ya wanna live like Paris Hilton for a few years then ya gotta take it all at once. With my lifestyle I would have trouble spending even one million dollars in a year no matter what I did. Now all I have to do is pick the winning numbers.