I struggle with this. I'm used to using numbers less than 1000. How does one visualize just how much a million is? One way I do is to say if I give one dollar away each second 24/7, it would last over 11.5 days. Or a million days ago was 727 BC. That helps, but still when you get into millions and billions, it's hard for me to grasp.
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Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: Northern IL
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MichaelB
One way to visualize $1M: if my annual budget is $40k, it would pay my way for 25 years.
Quote:
Originally Posted by teejayevans
I don't see how any of that helps...try this:
1,000,000/your_yearly_expenses
Still look big?
TJ
Right, the 25 years expenses gives some meaningful perspective. The other things are just other intangibly large numbers, no real help, IMO.
Quote:
Originally Posted by KingB
I read long time ago that you can not count to a million in your lifetime.
Because you would lose count and have to start over again? Or get bored and give up?
At one count per second, that is 1 million seconds, or 278 hours, which would be 35 days at 8 hours a day. It might slow down with the larger numbers, but a lifetime?
1,000,000 sec
16,667 min
278 hours
35 Days, 8 hours/day
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I can't remember the name of the book and can't find it, but I do recall reading some book about a million dollars to my kid many years ago. It talked about what a million dollars is in various terms, and then covered other topics like interest.
Anyway, are you talking about $1M, or a million of something else? If its $, the above answers basing it on your annual budget or income should be all you need. If it helps, drop the last 3 digits and think of it as 1000 K, where you spend 40K or 50K or whatever per year.
If it's a million of something else, I can't help without knowing what it is. If it's just a general thing, maybe you need to find something else to occupy your mind!
I don't understand why you have to visualize it in a physical way? Just think of it as a means to buy something(an expensive house) or generate income of say $30,000/year. Money isn't really physical at all even though the currency is.
The jpeg below is 5000 dots. Print out 200 copies of it and put them up on the walls of your room (like teachers commonly do in a classroom to teach students how large a million is). Voila! Now you will have a better grasp on how big 1,000,000 is.
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I read long time ago that you can not count to a million in your lifetime.
Not true. If you smoke 20 cigarettes a day for 50 years, that's 365,000 cigarettes. So you only have to count 3 numbers in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette.
The VAX/VMS computer operating system claimed to measure one of its system parameters in "micro-fortnights". That was the engineers' little joke; there are about a million seconds in two weeks. (I gather that a lot of Americans are not familiar with the word "fortnight", which is interesting because AFAIK it's a very old English word, not something coined in the UK since 1776.)
I can't remember the name of the book and can't find it, but I do recall reading some book about a million dollars to my kid many years ago. It talked about what a million dollars is in various terms, and then covered other topics like interest.
The adult version of the "If You Made A Million" book...
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Quote:
Because you would lose count and have to start over again? Or get bored and give up?
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