A Lifetime to Count

I think that sometimes, due to the high value of the transactions we deal with, I get rather numb to how much money we're really talking about when the sums are bandied about. $30 million for a piece of equipment. $250 million for an investment (and not a very large one at that). Billions worth of assets. They've become really just numbers on a page.

One of the projects I'm currently on has an estimated budget of around $1 billion (Yes, this is public info). While we were talking about precisely this concept of how much money that really is one day, one of my consultants came up with this comparison:

"If you were to count out $1 billion in $1 bills at the rate of $1 per second, how long would it take you to count out $1 billion?"

The Answer: More than 30 YEARS.

Geez. That really is a lot of money isn't it??

And for the record, in my own personal context, $1 billion (and even the earlier $30 million) is completely unthinkable!