The phrase "respectable sum" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to describe a significant amount of money. For example, "The winning bidder will pay a respectable sum for the rare collectible."
Within days they agreed upon an advance in the high five figures, a respectable sum for fiction these days.
They are worth 50 pesos, or about $5 apiece, a respectable sum in this poverty-stricken rural area.
Together, the four candidates won about 1.6 million votes: a respectable sum, but a confusing statement, and a deflating end for Paul's campaign.
And he pocketed a respectable sum, at least $40,000, from a new business: leasing out the horses he keeps on his estate in Wellington, Fla.
He was offered a contract of £5,000 for the entire sequence, a respectable sum, payable in installments of £500 per book.
For Tate's point of view, it gets a respectable sum to recycle into its bigger (and much more successful) food ingredients operations.
And luxury brands like Bentley pay them respectable sums to appear in promotional videos.
Jimmy Carter's folkloric watercolors of home-town scenes sell for respectable sums to benefit the Carter Center.
They often invest respectable sums in computers and information technology but do not seem to reap the same productivity gains from it as many American firms, according to John van Reenen and Nick Bloom of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics.In a study with John Dowdy of McKinsey, a consultancy, Mr van Reenen concluded that British managers are partly at fault.
They possess respectable amount of latent heat.
Their work hangs in museums and sells, at auction, for respectable six-figure sums, with the odd spike into the low millions.
