How Much Is A Lot Of Money?

I recall as a kid finding a penny was a windfall. Of course, nobody had even created the word windfall back then. I grew up in the country and a penny in the pocket most assuredly meant a trip on my bicycle to Maggie Newton’s Store down the road a piece - about 4 miles. I could buy two mint juleps for a penny or maybe some shoestring licorice or candy dots on paper.

I recall a time in my life when I discovered my father got a raise at work (telephone company). His weekly salary was bumped all the way to $40 per week. Gasoline was in the ballpark of around $.25 per gallon. A bottle of Coke was 5 cents and you got 2 cents refunded when you returned the bottle.

There was a brief moment in my life when I fell asleep at the wheel and found myself involved in Amway. Oh, don’t tell me you don’t know about Amway? Don’t get me wrong. I believe Amway is a great company and an opportunity for the right person, of which I was not.

For those who have some assorted memories of Amway, might recall the infamous drawing of circles? That’s when you had to learn to make a presentation to friends and family and eventually to strangers about the benefits of selling soap. That’s how you really made money. I’m making this story long.

I believe it was my first time sitting through a “circles” presentation and the moron drawing the circles, who is probably a multi-millionaire now, told all of us there that by the time we got into the 1990s the average price of an automobile was going to be around $15,000.00. This guy was insane. You could buy a brand new Ford Pinto for $1995.00! I decided then and there not to have anything to do with someone that stupid.

I remember easily when the Stock Market Dow Jones Industrials went over the 1,000 mark for the first time. Millionaires were a rare breed and it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to feast your eyes on a one-hundred dollar bill. (We still valued a penny.)

Our federal government used to talk in total budget figures of millions of dollars and programs were funded with thousands of dollars. It didn’t take long before millions became billions. How much it that anyway?

The word definition that told us where the decimal point would go and how many zeroes on either side of it, became just another word. Most people in the country will never earn one million dollars before they die, so what does billion mean?

A billion here. A billion there and now you have several billion. So what.

We bounded into the 21st century and within a matter of days it seemed we had already established that a trillion dollars was just a few more billion, which means nothing.

Sometimes it takes a certain something to make reality sink in. My heart told me a trillion dollars was obscene. My mind toiled with trying to fathom. Today, I read an article I found in the Wall Street Journal - “Feel Like a Trillion Bucks”. Here’s what I found that really helped me put 1 trillion in perspective.

The human mind is not well equipped to fathom a number that large. A check for $1 trillion — a million million dollars — would have 12 zeros to the left of the decimal point. Homo sapiens hadn’t evolved a trillion seconds ago: 31,546 years in the past, Neanderthals were still trying to make fire.

Are you kidding me?

Tom Remington

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