Dude this is a great gift from the rents take full advantage of that. Personally I would take 4k and max out an IRA for the year. Get your MEI and instruct. Whatever is left over stick in a high yield savings account and forget about that money. Trust me it's a nice piece of mind knowing I have enough money to get by for about 5 months for those times in between jobs.

One thing I learned from my old man is that your never to young to start putting money away for retirement. Another thing he taught me is always have some backup sitting around just in case your company goes under or some other unforseen event happens. These are things he learned the hard way.

Well my parents will only give the money to go towards flight "to help my career" and to jump on the hiring band wagon. I was leading towards going with the delta guy because I do get the occasional free multi hour but i'm an airport manager for a very small GA airport in Indiana and there is no multi schools that I could instruct at within 3 hours of me. My goal is to get into a decent airline and hopefully commute from indiana. Since my wife has a teaching job here. So I plan on letting her support me a little for the first year. And I already have my CFI and II I wouldn't mind getting the MEI but I have no where to instruct localy and I'm not going to give up this cush job 30K+ running a small airport until i'm flying a CRJ:)
thanks for everyones input. I think i'm going to go with the delta guy we are going to fly about 10hrs a week and i'll just keep updating my resume until I get hired hopefully not spending the full amount.