I'm pretty skeptical of how much good a month of martial arts will do you once you're off the mat. Most of the value of martial arts is in conditioning (both physical and mental, e.g. making you more comfortable around people acting aggressively towards you), not technique, and a month of classes isn't nearly enough to build a strong foundation there. Even on the technique side, that much time will give you a few neat tricks but won't allow you to systematize them or to generalize them to unfamiliar situations.
On the other hand, a month is just about enough time to get you past the boring introductory lessons (how to stand, how to fall, how to throw a punch that doesn't completely suck) and into the meat of the art, so that kind of time might be a good sample if you're on the fence about a longer-term commitment.
I did not much more than a month and it made me feel much more comfortable with my body. Am I going to win any fights? No. But I feel a lot more stable (I basically never fall over now), and more conscious of what I can and can't do. I even feel like I'm a better dancer/skater because of it.
What can I purchase with $100 that will be the best thing I can buy to make my life better?
I've decided to budget some regular money to improving my life each month. I'd like to start with low hanging fruit for obvious reasons - but when I sat down to think of improvements, I found myself thinking of the same old things I'd already been planning to do anyway... and I'd like out of that rut.
Constraints/more info:
Background:
This is a question I recently posed to my local Less Wrong group and we came up with a few good ideas, so I thought I'd share the discussion with the wider community and see what we can come up with. I'll add the list we came up with later on in the comments...
It'd be great to have a repository of low-hanging fruit for things that can be solved with (relatively affordable) amounts of money. I'd personally like to go through the list - look at candidates that sound like they'd be really useful to me and then make a prioritised list of what to work on first.