The Building Wealth Blog
How Much is a Trillion?
January 30, 2009 by Mark T. Rafter · Leave a Comment
How much is a trillion anyway? Pretty tough to get your head around just how big a number that is. I heard a great visual analogy the other day (someone had attributed it to Ronald Reagan).
If you have $1M in the form of a stack of $1000 bills, it reaches about 4.3 inches high.
How high is a stack of $1000 bills enough to make up a TRILLION dollars?
Over 66 MILES high. And since last September/October we have added nearly TWO TRILLION dollars to the national debt, that stack is 132 MILES HIGH
Holy deep guano batman!
The Reality of Inauguration Costs
January 21, 2009 by Mark T. Rafter · Leave a Comment
There was a lot of chatter yesterday - and a recurring subtitle on network TV - about the costs of the Obama inauguration being estimated at $150M to 170M. Of course in this time of economic challenge this is looked upon as unsavory and gives the Obama naysayers something to complain about.
Get real.
If you add the $850B cost of the proposed stimulus package to the $1.2T already allocated to bailing our ass out of this mess, you come up with a bump to the national debt of another 2 TRILLION DOLLARS. Well boys and girls, those of you that sit at the front of the class know that we as a country have to pay interest on that debt as we sell off Treasury bills to foreign governments and others.
Even at a 3% annual rate of return, that $170M is just over 1/30 (0.034) of what we have to pay EVERY MONTH to finance the debt we are taking on to bail out the mess we call our economy.
If you want to get mad about something, get mad about that.
Commodities Today
January 3, 2009 by Mark T. Rafter · Leave a Comment
I just read a great blog entry at Moolanomy about commodities. Commodities have been creamed liked everything else in this latest stock market cliff jumping exercise and everyone should have a) some education about what they are b) a bit of them in their investment portfolio.
As you no doubt know by reading my blog, I am partial to precious metals which are a different sort of a bird when it comes to the more basic commodities such as oil, wheat, lead, etc. due to their significant inherent value (in small quantities). Read more
Stomp This! A Business Model with Style
January 2, 2009 by Mark T. Rafter · Leave a Comment
I went to see Stomp! with my family in Sacramento a couple of nights ago. One of those ‘we are not having enough fun in our lives’ moments where we went online and got 5th row seat 6 hours before show time.
Fantastic show (if you dont know what Stomp! is, here is a link to the official Stomp! website)
What I found to be even more interesting is the business model of a show like this. It’s the same as others like it (e.g., Blue Man Group, Cirque du Soleil) but it was the first time I really thought about it.
Sort of like a franchise except without all the FTC BS. It’s pretty simple and I suspect amazingly profitable:
Come up with an idea for a performance, make it happen, perfect it, do it many many times until it is viral or popular enough to expand, replicate.
Once the guys who started Stomp did the above and had a core group that performed and constantly sold out shows, they trained another cast so 2 performances could be ongoing at the same time. And then another, and another. Dont want to do too many or the market gets saturated. Pretty soon, they have trained the trainers and they just do whatever part of this business they want to.
Like branch out into the creation of a DVD. Or an IMAX special film. Etc. They get royalties from everything since it was their intellectual capital that started it all. All passive income sources. Scalable, expandable, etc.
Very entrepreneurial. Very nice.
