a thought exercise

Imagine, that on the day you were born you received a trust fund, and that you lived for exactly 100 years. Every day of your life, you could spend some of that trust fund such that on the last day of your life you would spend the last penny.1

How much would that daily amount be, and what you feel like you were spending relative to a person who worked a job and earned $250,000 a year?

lifetime amountamount every day for 36,524 daysbuying power over $6.85
$1 million$27.384x
$10 million$273.7940x
$100 million$2,737.93400x
$1 billion$27,379.264000x
$10 billion$273,792.5740,000x
$100 billion$2.738 Million400,000x
$250 billion$6.845 Million1,000,000x

Every single day, no matter how much money you started out with in your trust fund, every day you would feel like you are spending an amount that feels to the person who is working a job and getting paid $250,000 per year, like $6.85.

The consequence to you of spending that money is the same as if someone earning $250,000 buys a drink at Starbucks, but the power that money ranges from four times as much to one million times as much.

Or, to put it another way, if you earn $250,000 a year at your job, someone who is worth a billion dollars is four-thousand times more powerful than you are.

  1. Obviously this ignores any investment gains or other financial management that would be going on with this kind of scenario, and it ignores taxes – this is just a simple thought experiment, not a model of finances. ↩︎


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