The Red Sox have plenty of money, roughly $50 million, to spend this offseason.

Before spending the next 2-3 months tackling the million-dollar question of who’s going to be seeing chunks of that money in their paychecks, let’s acknowledge that the Sox are in an enviable state of payroll flexibility for any baseball franchise, never mind a large-market one coming off a last-place season.

The mulligan that was the August 2012 quarter-billion payroll-shedding blockbuster trade with the Los Angeles Dodgers continues to pay dividends today. Of the 10 players who have a guaranteed deal (worth a combined $111.3 million) for 2015, only four players — Dustin Pedroia, Rusney Castillo, Koji Uehara and Allen Craig — possess guaranteed contracts beyond the season, and that’s for only about $42 million.

These days, those kinds of minimal fixed costs represent a lot of chicken feed.

Compared to big-market teams such as the New York Yankees and Dodgers, who each have albatross-like contracts chained around their necks — Alex Rodriguez, Masahiro Tanaka and Jacoby Ellsbury for the Yankees and Adrian Gonzalez, Matt Kemp and Carl Crawford for the Dodgers quickly come to mind — the Sox find themselves in a unique position.

The Red Sox do not want to exceed the $189 million luxury-tax threshold, although if they had to, they would, and their current payroll commitments, including some deferred payments to the Dodgers, insurance costs and salaries due to arbitration-eligible and young players add up to approximately $140 million. That leaves the Sox with the $50 million or so to play with, if they want.

It’s hard to see the Red Sox leaving much, if any, of their funds unused.

Last offseason, fresh off a title and emboldened to stick with their new and cautious approach to long-term contracts, the club kept its cash stockpile somewhat intact.

The Opening Day payroll for 2014 was $156.4 million, just $2 million more than the year before but $19 million less than their record $175.3 million to start 2012.

When the deal with the Dodgers was struck, that’s when the Red Sox diet began.

It can’t continue forever. The Sox understand they need to strike some short- and long-term deals that are going to be costly. They just want to be ultra-judicious about how they dole out those deals.

“We’re just in the process of communicating with agents and other teams to assess what’s out there, what the interest is in the Red Sox, and we’ll take that information going into (this) week, going into the GM meetings, and start to try to execute the bulk of our offseason,” general manager Ben Cherington said recently. “I’m sure it’ll be competitive. Guys who are the very best performers are always going to be in demand, whatever the position is, and of course the market is different at different positions, but I’m sure there’ll be strong competition for the best performers no matter what the position is, whether it’s a relief pitcher or starter or position player or whatever.

“Every team is trying to improve in ways that they can, and that will drive the market, and some guys fit better in some places than others, but the best performers, the ones that are free agents, usually have good choices for themselves, and I’m sure that’ll be no different this winter.”

The money’s there for the Red Sox.

Who’s getting it?

We’re close to finding out.