$1 Billion in Plebeian Terms

Kylie Jenner controversially made the news recently for being crowned the “youngest self-made billionaire” at the age of 21. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of social media giant Facebook, became a billionaire when he was 23. $1 billion is an enormous amount of money, and is at least for me quite difficult to wrap my head around. For my fellow plebeians, I have broken down the buying power of $1 billion (if we pretend that Uncle Sam isn’t taking his cut) in terms that my tiny brain can understand.

-If you had $1,000,000,000 and decided you didn’t want to invest it and just wanted to spend it as recklessly as you possibly could (cue story about the endless amount of financially incompetant lotto winners), you would need to spend $68,493.15 every single day for 40 years to piss it all away.

-A brand new Telsa Model Y Long Range Dual Motor is $68,200. You could buy a brand new Tesla every day for 40 years and still have $293.15 a day left over or $4.3 million left over after 40 years.

-If you decided to go the more savvy route and invest half of your money ($500 million) in a portfolio generating a 7% ROI, you would have an additional $8 billion after 40 years. $8 billion. Just on investments. Meaning you just having your money parked in investments while you sit at home and laze around watching The Inbetweeners on Netflix (btw highly recommend that show).

-So what about the risk-free market? Certificates of Deposit, or CDs, are low risk, low return investments that essentially guarantee that you will only gain money from them (albeit lower amounts than more risky ventures). At my bank, the 1 year CDs have a rate of 2% APY. That means that $1 million would garner $20,000 per year in dividends and $1 billion would garner $20 million per year in basically free money that you are guaranteed to get through just parking your money in a CD and not using it for a year.

Also as a side note I would highly recommend looking into learning how to invest and at the very least putting your savings in either a CD, IMMA, or other high interest savings account. You’ll still be earning money while you sleep, maybe not $20 million, but every little bit helps.

If you’re interested to do some digging on investing check out the websites below

Nerd Wallet

https://www.nerdwallet.com/

Money Under 30