Miracle Day!

August 3, 2011
Retirement Plans for 1,000-Year-Olds

With the ability to age like Methuselah, a massively longer time horizon for retirement savings might ease some of the concerns for investors.

If a preretiree were to add just an additional $1,000 a year to an initial 10,000 in a 401(k) or IRA (assuming a 5% compounding return), they will amass roughly $4 million over the course of a century. Saving or investing for 150 years would see that total rise to $6.7 million within 150 years and $536 million after 200 years.

The longer they live, the better the news: That mere $1,000 a year would accrue $6.1 billion over 250 years. By the time they reach 800 to 1,000 years old, they will hypothetically have trillions at their disposal.

I should mention that this article was written before today's 5% stock market crash. Your 1,000+ year investment return assumptions may vary.

Let's lower the entire investment to just a penny and lower the investment return assumption to just 1% over inflation. We'll then extrapolate out one million years just for kicks and giggles.

September 25, 2007
Exponential Growth and Immortality!

TIPS (treasury inflation protected securities) are paying roughly 2% over reported inflation. Let's say we'll pay 1% of that as taxes, just to make some nice round numbers. We're not being greedy, right? That allows our money (after taxes) to grow at 1% each year (even after reported inflation takes its bite). Since the growth is based on the amount we currently have, it is definitely exponential growth. In theory, it grows at roughly the same rate as our population does (which perhaps isn't a coincidence).

Now let's assume we buy a penny's worth of TIPS and continually reinvest. Let's also assume we live forever, or at the very least pass this savings down to our grandchildren (and so on and so on). Why not! Let's be optimistic for a change.

So how much money will we have made off of that penny in a million years?

Future Worth = $0.01 x 1.01^1000000 = $2.365 x 10^4319

That's a number with 4,320 digits in it. Mwuhahahahaha! We are going to be so filthy rich we won't know what to do with ourselves!!! That's in inflation adjusted dollars too! Just think of all the canned goods we'll be able to hoard!!

It's a miracle!



Torchwood: Miracle Day

With all the extra people, resources are finite. It’s said that in four month's time, the human race will cease to be viable. But this can’t be a natural event – someone’s got to be behind it. It’s a race against time as C.I.A. agent Rex Matheson investigates a global conspiracy.