From two sentences I've written below, the first one is positively correct as it's cited from Longman dictionary. The grammatical validity of the second one, however, seems rather dubious knowing the other sentence already proved valid (if I didn't know that the first sentence is correct, I would say that the second one makes more sense to me and so it'd be the only correct version). Please let me know if the second sentence is correct.
She had nothing to do except spend money.
She had nothing to do except spending money.
Best Answer
I guess you would be aware with parallelism. Note the following sentences:
So, your 1st sentence is correct. To make your 2nd sentence correct, we would reframe it like-'She had been doing nothing except spending money.'