I recently read a non-fiction account titled “The Emerald Mile,” by Kevin Fedarko. Within the pages, I came across a passage about dam building in the United States. The passage was related to the Grand Canyon and the taming of waters draining the Colorado River basin. I’ll paraphrase: By 1980, 75,000 dams had been built in the United States, amounting to 1 for every 48 hours since the Spanish explorer Cardenas first saw the Grand Canyon in 1540. Contemplating the math got me to thinking about money and its value.

Most people are familiar with the comparison of a million to a billion when expressed as seconds on a clock. If you were to count dollar bills without stopping, one for every second on the clock, it would take you approximately 11.5 days to reach 1 million and approximately 31.5 years to reach 1 billion. That is a pretty huge difference and a fun exercise using a calculator to drive home that point. However, the numbers don’t carry a weight or familiarity for most people, maybe even rich people who possess the amounts in question. This got me thinking about some more practical examples of describing wealth.

A dollar bill is 6.14 inches. Approximately 2 of them in a foot.  There are 63,360 inches in a mile – It takes 10,319 dollar bills lined up end to end to reach a mile. Earth’s circumference at the equator=24,901 miles – so if you lined up dollar bills end to end, it would take 256,958,853 of them to tie a ribbon around the planet. What if they were $20s instead of singles? Well, you’d have to be a billionaire because you’d need approximately $5.2B to stretch a ribbon of 20s around good old Earth.

We won’t get to the moon by stacking billions of one dollar bills, but it will get us pretty high. A million of them stack up to about 333 feet (more than a football field) and a billion amount to 63 miles, which is technically beyond the 50 mile boundary demarcating the end of all remnants of Earth’s atmosphere where space begins. It takes 10 crates of $100 bills to make up a billion dollars.

Are rich people just ignorant or are they so used to being rich that they don’t think the same way that ordinary mortals think about money? There are nearly 15 million millionaires in the United States. Among them, are approximately 36,000 households who’s wealth exceeds $100 Million. At 60 years old, I’ve been contemplating a few things, though I don’t dream about winning the lottery. I don’t even waste money on such things as the lottery, but it does cause one to contemplate. What if…?

Say I was one of those 36,000 people with assets to burn – and I mean literally! I might live to be 90 years old, so if I could spend $10,000/Day for the next 30 years, I would  burn through approximately $110M. That is a bunch of consumer spending – enough to stimulate an economy of a small country. Richard Branson, where are you dude?

Can you imagine having the resources to spend $10K/Day? You’d need a day off once and awhile. Maybe you only spend $5k one day and come down with a cold for a week or so. After forking out for your household staff, the butler, chauffeur, cook, and private jet pilot on standby etc, you’d still be holding on to many thousands per day (yep, I know, I left out the part about property tax, but I’m sure my accountant would have a loop hole for it, so I’ll pay him his due).

At the end of the day, as Brits often remark, there are a heck of a lot of folks right here in the United States of America with way too much money. I suspect that most of them haven’t a clue what to do with it. I’d bet quite a number of them have never graduated from college or even high school for that matter.  Are they smarter than the rest of us because they are wealthy? Maybe you will leave a comment. I have my own opinions.