The bike you should get depends a lot on your use case. A used one is a decent choice if you're doing short commuting and random city errands. If you want to do long or fast rides, invest more (though beware there's no real ceiling on bike cost and accessories have strong allure).
Whatever bike you get, make sure it's in decent shape and is sized correctly for you. Also put a bit of effort into maintenance (lube the chain and inflate the tires and you're fine for casual riding). AND GET SAFETY LIGHTS.
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.