Pimp Your Finances

Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.

- Douglas Adams, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”

In some ways, space is a lot like money. Some of the numbers we’ve been hearing in the news are too mindbogglingly big to comprehend.

When you throw around figures like $75 billion (mortgage rescue), $130 billion (auto bailout), $700 billion (financial bailout), and $787 billion (economic stimulus plan), a lot gets lost in the details.

How can we understand how much money that is, when there’s nothing to compare it to? I’m going to explain just how much $787 billion is, by breaking it down into some figures we can wrap our heads around.

If you had $787 billion in cash

The largest US bill still in production is the $100, although there are larger bills that are still recognized as legal tender – $500, $1000, $5000, and $10,000. For the sake of this discussion, I’ll assume that you have $787 billion worth of $10,000 bills that are just waiting to be spent.

That means you would have 78.7 million bills burning a hole in your pocket.

Printing $787 billion

According to the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, it costs the government 6.4 cents to produce a single bill. I know that the government won’t literally print up $787 billion, but if they did, it would cost them $5,036,800 (and that assumes they put the $10,000 bill back into circulation).

Making $787 billion – individuals

According to the latest US Census figures, the median household income in the US in $50,233. That means it would take the average family more than 15,666,991 years to make $787 billion.

(note – I totally screwed up the math there originally. I accidentally used $78.7 million – instead of $787 billion – for my baseline at first. Many thanks to BradleyJohnson on Tip’d, as well as Alan in the comments below for pointing out my mistake. Lesson learned – double check your math!)

Making $787 billion – states

What if instead of an individual, you happen to be a state?

Only three states have an annual gross domestic production of more than $787 billion – California, Texas, and New York. But how long would it take the others to make that much money?

If you’re Florida, sitting pretty at the top of the remaining states, it would only take you a little more than 1.7 years.

But if you’re one of the 17 states with a GDP of less than $100 billion, it would take a bit longer. For Arkansas (GDP $95.37 billion), it’ll take 8.25 years. But if you’re Vermont, sitting at the bottom of the list with a GDP of $24.54 billion, it would take more than 32 years.

Spending $787 billion

Here’s how long it would take you to burn through $787 billion if you spent $10,000…

• every second: 2.49 years
• every minute: 149.7 years
• every hour: 8984 years

What else could you do with the money?

Let’s say you want to just play with your money instead of spend it. Here are a few other things you could do with it:

• Lay it end to end, and make a trail more than 7625 miles long
• Stack it, and make a tower 5.34 miles tall
• Make a paperweight that weighs more than 86 tons

This is based off of measurements provided by this site, and assumes that you have $10,000 bills.

Conclusion

$787 billion is a lot of money, regardless of how effectively it is (or isn’t) spent. I just hope that the people making the decisions are smarter than I am.  I also hope that the bailouts/rescue plans/stimuli do more good than harm, and don’t cause a worse recession down the road.

Since I can’t do anything to change how much money is spent, or what it’s used for, I’m just going to worry about myself.