Until recently I really didn’t know anything about Bill Farley.

He’s a billionaire and Oprah’s next door neighbor. He used to own Fruit of the Loom and built it into a very powerful brand. He is an advisor to many business owners and people in authority because he is street smart, systematic in his business acumen and he gets results.

Too bad he’s not running the recession “turn around”.  Imagine what a guy like that could do with $1.2 trillion in spending?

Whew…

Farley has a great reputation for treating people well. He actually implemented and internal company program to provide employees access to health information and to learn how to be healthy long before it was fashionable or politically correct – like 25 years ago.

About a year and a half ago he went to the Chopra Center and other Ayurvedic Health Professionals and asked them what he should create that would really help people and have the potential to be a long term home run…

Everybody told him “amalaki” – a fruit grown near the base Himalayas that ayurvedic practitioners have been using for 5000 years. So he got a bunch of really smart doctors and scientists and created a product combining Ayurveda with Technology.

You can hear what Bill Farley says about his company here:

[media:http://healthywealthyboomer.com/zrii/bill_farley_billionaire_talks_about_zrii.mp3]

You get a real sense that this guy is cool people when you hear him talk.

I tend to listen to what billionaire’s have to say about money. Don’t you?

Most the time people in America describe a billion as a thousand million.

But for this example, I would like to describe a billion as:

• one million thousand or
• ten million hundred

So that means you can visualize a stack of a billion dollars on your dining room table in the following different configurations:

Thinking in terms of $100 bills:

• Count out 50,000 stacks of 200 (two hundred) each, $100 bills
• Count out 20,000 stacks of 500 (five hundred) each, $100 bills
• Count out 10,000 stacks of 1000 (one thousand) each, $100 bills

$10K Bundles of $100 Bills

You could count out stacks of 100 each, $100 bills (like this picture of bundled hundreds).

Each bundle is $10,000 each.

You would need to count out 100,000 of these $10,000 stacks to create $1,000,000,000 (one billion dollars).

You’d better have a very large dining room table.

Stacks of $100 Bills

Now it gets even more interesting when we start looking at stacks of $100 bills another way.

Suppose you wanted to make a single $1,000,000,000 (one billion dollar) stack of $100 bills.

It would have to be 10,000,000 bills high.

That is a stack of 10,000,000 – $100 bills…

According to the department of treasury a bill is .0043 inches thick. That means that 10,000,000 thick stack would be 43,000 inches tall or 3,573 feet tall – a little over 2/3 mile high.

Stacks of $1000 Bills

When we think of a $1Billion in terms of stacks of $1000 bills, a single stack would be 1,000,000 bills thick and would reach a height of 4,300 inches tall or 358.88 feet – 1.19 times the length of a football field – high

Remember a Million Thousand Earlier?

Now those stacks of $1000 bills on your dining room table would be could be configured this way:

• Count out 1000 stacks, 1000 high each of $1000 bills
• Count out 500 stacks, 2000 high each of $1000 bills
• Count out 10,000 stacks of 100 each of $1000 bills

That’s 10,000 stacks of $100,000 bundles of $1000 bills. Whoa, that’s a lot of thousands – a million thousand.

Another Way of Looking at $1 Billion (1,000,000,0000) Dollars

• $1 Billion of $100 bills end to end is approximately 55,000,000 inches long.
• $1 Billion of $1 bills end to end is about 86,805.56 miles long, approximately 3.49 times the circumference of the earth

A Billion Is A Huge Number – How About One-Part-Per-Billion…

1. One 4-inch hamburger in a chain of hamburgers circling the earth at the equator 2.5 times.
2. One silver dollar in a roll of silver dollars stretching from Detroit to Salt Lake City.
3. One kernel of corn in a 45-foot high, 16-foot diameter silo.
4. One sheet in a roll of toilet paper stretching from New York to London.
5. One second of time in 31.71 years.

A billion is a difficult number to comprehend, but an advertising agency did a good job of putting that figure into some perspective in one of it’s releases. I added a few of my own here too…

1. A billion seconds ago it was 1976.
2. A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.
3. A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age
4. A billion hours is about 114,155.25 years
5. A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet
6. A billion inches is 15,783 miles, more than halfway around the earth
7. A billion dollars of the US debt – paying it off by one dollar a second – takes 31 years, 259 days, 1 hour, 46 minutes, and 40 seconds
8. A billion dollars ago was only 3 hours, at the rate our government is spending it (based on figures from usgovernmentspending.com ) and we’re talking 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – 365 days a year – Congress will spend a little over 8 times that amount every 24 hours every single day in 2008

The next time you hear a politician use the word ‘billion’ in a casual manner, think about whether you want the ‘politicians’ spending YOUR tax money – to the tune of ~$2,931,200,000,000 (that’s 2931.2 Billion to be spent by Congress in 2008 )

Give or take a billion…

Washington, D. C < HELLO! > Are all your calculators broken ??