A Million Dollar Dream

What can you buy for a million dollars these days? It used to be a fortune. It used to be pie in the sky for anyone. To be a millionaire was to be “rich” – akin to being able to have anything and anyone you wanted. But it isn’t now. A million dollars isn’t all that much money and it never was. There was always a way to spend it and only so much it could buy. I’d like to present a few ideas of how to spend a million dollars to make it clearer just what a million dollars is.

Starting at the cheapest end of the spectrum I’ll try to put this million dollars into some everyday terms. The cheapest thing I can buy at the grocery store is a package of top ramen for $0.10. That means I could buy 10,000,000 packages of ramen. I could feed(not well) a 30^th of the US for one meal. Conversely I could feed about 1000 people(again not well) for a year.

A more moderate way to spend it is to send out DVDs…which can be mass produced for about $1 a piece to a million people. I can send them all about 2 hours of great quality video with whatever I want…I’d even bet that if I made it a good or mysterious title, a lot of people would watch it.

Putting a million dollars in labor terms, lets talk minimum wage. In California, the least you can pay someone is $6.75 per hour. With overhead per employee costing about 60% I could employ about 44 people for a year doing whatever it is that I want as long as it’s not illegal or too silly.

If I talk about engineers that make an average of $60,000 per year and I include overhead I’d be able to hold onto 10 of them for that year. I wonder what 10 engineers can do in a year. Quite a bit I’d imagine…if they’re software engineers they could make an application that does some cool stuff as long as it’s fairly focused.

So there’s a few ways to spend a million dollars. But you’ve got to have it before you spend it so some other time I’ll have to write about how to make a million dollars. How many widgets, software packages or houses would you have to sell to make a million dollars?