7 Oct 2020

I read today that the worlds top billionaires between them own something like 14 trillion dollars.

Now, to be fair, that is spread out over the top 2000 billionaires. Some of them are probably doing it quite tough, down to their last couple of billion.

Even in Monopoly money, that’s a stupid amount of money. I did a bit of research to see how much space that amount of money would take up, and to be honest they would need a fairly big house to store it in. Supposedly you could fit one million dollars in a briefcase, so you’d need a big enough room to store at least a thousand briefcases. That’s for each billion, of course. The more billions we need to store, the more rooms we’d need.

And yes of course we could put it in a bank. A really big one.

But back to the trillions of dollars.

A lot of people have schemes in place for what they are going to spend their money on, when they win lotto. I know people who have it all sorted and are just waiting on the actual win.

Big win plans usually involve houses, cars, holidays, never working again, and staff to keep all those houses and cars in tip top condition.

Smaller wins may involve paying off houses, or helping family members to get a head start on their home ownership plans.

But a win is a win!

I remember winning a huge amount with a scratchie ticket when the kids were young. It was $100!!!! In those days it was really a substantial win. I remember buying a bike for one of the kids, and the others remember a car race track that was also purchased with the winnings. There was obviously more than enough money to go around for that sort of frivolous expenditure.

It obviously wasn’t a big enough win to pay off a house, or buy houses for the rest of the family. But it bought happiness and joy for a little while.

How much money would you need to have in your bank account to be happy?

I got into a discussion while dog walking today about our state government’s pledge to gift each home with a $600 credit on their electricity bill. I discussed some of the letters to the editor in the paper, from people saying that quite frankly they didn’t need this extra assistance so maybe they could gift it back to go to people who really really needed the extra help?

My co-walker, obviously thinking I was one of those kind generous people, immediately suggested I could send my electricity bonus his way. After all, he’d just bought a new boat and every little bit of spare cash would be handy. I bet his boat cost more than $600 – just saying 🙂

Do those billionaires, who between them have trillions of dollars, wonder about whether they have enough for their needs? Or just enough for their wants, instead?

Would they offer to give back a $600 electricity bonus, on the theory that someone else might need it more?

Maybe they’d just use it as monopoly money instead.