About two weeks ago, Bill Gates announced a long-term gift for funding childhood vaccines. Some people make headlines giving a hundred thousand dollars– a considerable sum– or on rare occasions by presenting a full million dollars. Far more impressive, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave what might be the largest philanthropic donation in history: ten billion.

That’s hard for us to comprehend. Even in digits, it staggers the mind: $10,000,000,000.00 (I added the cents, though somewhat meaningless at those rarified levels of finance). This will be over the next decade, and follows on the $4.5 billion they have already given over past years.

How much money do the Gates have? No one really knows, probably not even Bill. Probably enough to get a better haircut than he usually sports, but that’s not our focus. You and I might quickly calculate our “net worth” (or net debt) by adding what we currently have in the bank (including overdraft), adding on the value of a house, a car or two, subtracting off what we owe and hoping for a plus at the end of it. It gets a bit more complex at the Gates level. It would take a team of accountants a month to add and subtract what they are invested in, and the best they could do would be arrive at a moving figure that would be changing by the market minute. Someone once said Bill earned $800 a minute– I don’t know. I’ll call and ask.

In the 1990’s there was an estimate that their net worth was about a $100 billion. That has apparently fallen with recessionary times and the willingness of the Gates Foundation to give billions away (kudos to them!), to an estimated $40 billion at the moment. In spite of that fall, I haven’t found them on my doorstep looking to bum a cup of sugar.

There is an old expression that the rich get rich and the poor get poorer, and economists will tell us that this continues to be the situation. We would consider a great many people in the world to be poor, followed by a “middle class” that really only occupies a small percentage of the world population. Far, far less than ten percent of us have most of the money, while a very small percentage are what we would think to be truly rich. We might envy the salaries of, for example, doctors, but they work hard for their money, and are far outstripped by people whose salary depends on their ability to hurl a baseball, knock a puck into a net, pretend to be someone else in a movie, or sing a song. At the real top of things, there are the people who created business empires, like Bill Gates did with his Microsoft.

Perhaps it’s one of those urban myths that winning the lottery brings only unhappiness and marital breakup– a rumor started and desperately supported by those of us who don’t win or don’t even buy. Someone once added that while money certainly can’t buy happiness, it can buy a big boat and sail up really close. Possibly it’s true. In any event something like that ushers in a lifestyle that few of us can fully comprehend or be prepared for. I can only chuckle at the older couple being presented a huge check for twenty or thirty million in lottery winnings, professing that it will not change their lives, and the husband will likely keep his job as night watchman.

Of course a one-time payment of twenty million is not quite the same as bringing that in every year, year after year. It will bring some understanding if we take a look at how it feels to have the really big bucks. How does everyday life play out for people with their wallets that stuffed?

Most of us have lines drawn where we start doing serious thinking about spending money. Perhaps five and ten dollar bills can come and go during the day, and we pay less attention than we should– at least until we look in the wallet that evening and wonder where it all went. How would we feel operating at a much higher level? Where are the lines drawn on spending?

Take the figure of $25 million a year. Not a rarified figure for many of the rich of the world. Tiger Woods was rolling in six or seven times that each year before his fall from grace. It’s a fairly common figure for many movie stars who are doing well, at the top of their game. Let’s look at the feeling when we stroll off to Walmart on that budget, in comparison to the Joe who makes $30,000 a year at the night watchman job.

A really nice house at $275,000 feels like it costs $330 to the chap rolling in the $25 million. That’s how much it hurts his bottom line.

A moderately nice car at $40,000 hurts about the same as $50. I could handle that. A hotel room at $200, that most of us would avoid unless really stuck– we’d hope for half of that– feels like 25 cents. A nice meal at $40, again more than many of us would want to pay, rings in their exalted till at– 5 cents! That’s what this spending feels like (or less) for Will Smith, for Sandra Bullock, and perhaps 10 cents for Sid the Kid.

Hard to grasp, isn’t it? Roll that up to the Gates couple— if we did the math on their ’90’s fortune of 100 billion, buying that $275,000 home (for their gardener?) would feel like spending– get ready– eight cents!

There is an interesting website called globalrichlist.com (“global rich list”), which allows you to plug in an annual income and see just how many of the people in the world are in front or behind you in the ranking. It puts a perspective on just how many make the really big bucks, and also brings us down to earth in how many people don’t even approach what we think are our meagre earnings.

If I plug in an imaginary $50,000 a year, for example, I find that, were that my salary, I would be in the top 1.78% of the people in the world! One of the rich! But that group would include about 107 million “rich” people with me, most of whom presumably make more. Somewhere in our exalted group are Bill and Melinda, Oprah, Warren Buffett– rubbing shoulders with me. Inviting me to their yachts. Sandra Bullock. I digress.

The sobering fact is that over 98% of the people in world live on far less. If we plug in a meagre $1000 a year, we would finding that over half of the world population is still behind us! Over half of the world population lives on less than $1000 a year. In fact 80% of the world’s population lives on less than $2000 a year– that’s about 5 billion people!

Figuring that most of the population of the world falls well below the rich, the globalrichlist website developers didn’t take their data into the stratospheric levels, and even above $200,000 a year the calculation falls off to a constant. Their intent was to show us how privileged we are, even in our middle class, and push us into giving more to help others.

So watch the snow fall outside your window, and dream of buying the gardener a dream house for eight cents of your money, but also realize… you’re already in the privileged few. Think, if you must, how to become a registered Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation benefactor, but realize that it won’t be by forwarding emails to your friends. They really don’t pay for that!
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