Months ago I ran across an interesting trick for quantifying the purchasing power of a wealthy person vs an average person, by scaling down their net worth (or salary IDK I’m not a money-ologist) then compare the thought process you’d undertake when purchasing an item of equivalent value.

So to get in the mind of a billionaire, lets say you have a net worth of $60K, so divide 60,000/1,000,000,000 to get 0.00006. Now how much does a jet cost, let’s say 1.5 million, just pulling a number out of thin air. Scale that down using the 0.00006 multiplier we get just $90. So a billionaire puts about as much thought into buying a jet as you might purchasing an OK pair of shoes or a water flosser. Not quite trivial but also not something you’re likely to mull over for weeks.

But let’s reverse that. What’s something you wouldn’t think twice about bying? Maybe a $2 candy bar from a vending machine? Divide that $2 dollars by .00006 to get over $33 thousand dollars. That’s a pretty common yearly gross salary for a lot of skilled workers, and a billionaire treats it with the same care you’d treat with a $2 vending machine purchase.

I’m into ham radio, which can be a deceptively expensive hobby. Some of the other guys in my local club have a significant amount of money, or at least a lot more money than I do, and that really does effect how they think and act. They’re all perfectly nice and helpful people, but sometimes they give advice that simply isn’t useful for a guy in my tax bracket. “Just get a resonant antenna” or “just put up a tower” they say, as though I have the land for a massive HF antenna with ground radials or a 40 ft tall mast. Bruh I live in a single-family home in an HOA.