Often, when people ask me if I need anything my canned response is “A pound of Fifties”.

Up until about 10 minutes ago, I never was asked how much money was in a lb of 50s.  Leave it to my boss to ask.

So, I quickly did the math.

Apparently, a dollar bill weighs 1 gram. (I am going to assume this site is correct, even though it looks less than reputable…it is the internets). Going with this math, I calculated that 1 pound equals about 453.59 grams, approximate to 454 (because this is money I hope to get some day, I rounded up).

This means that if you calculate grams times $50, you get $22,700.

So, if I ask for a pound of fifties, you now know that I am looking for $22,700.

Except, that if you know currency rules/regulations, you know that a dollar bill does not have to be whole in order to be considered legal tender.  It actually just has to have the denomination visible and both serial numbers in tact.

So, lets consider that if you ripped the corners off all the bills and assume that the corners constituted about  1/6 of the total weight of a bill.  This was done by borrowing a bill from a friend, folding the corner over, then folding the bill across that line to get about 6 sections.  I assumed that the two corners from one side plus the two corners from the other side constituted about 1/6 the total surface area and therefore the total weight.  I am not accounting for the metallic strip that is in the bill.

This means that I could fit 1/6 of  the 454 more bills into the pound.  Which adds up to 75.666 more bills (76, because we are talking about money I want to receive).  This adds up to $3,800 more.

Which means, that if I had an ideal no corners pound of fifties, I would have $22,700 + $3,800 = $26,500

Yes please, and thank you.

Now, to go along with one of the conversations that happened in the original thread where I got my most trustworthy information about how much a dollar bill weighs, they discussed Ocean’s Eleven.  Where the characters stole $150million.

Using $100 bills, this is 1,500,000 bills.  At 1 gram per, that equates to 3,303.9 pounds.  There were eleven of them. That means ~300 pounds per person.  Or, if you remember how they each carried out 2 bags, 150lbs per bag.  That is a lot of weight, especially for the smaller and older of the group.  However, if you factor in the adrenaline of stealing money from 3 casinos in Las Vegas, underneath their own noses, I believe they could have easily managed this weight.

Our national deficit is $11,615,800,451,825, according to the US National debt clock, which equates to 255,854,636 pounds of $100 bills.  That’s a lot.  The average weight of an American male is 191 pounds. This means that our deficit weighs as much as 1,339,553 American males.  That is more than the entire population of Jacksonville, Florida’s Greater Metro Area.

So, the next time you ask me if I “need anything”, and I reply with “a pound of fifties”, I sure hope you have a spare $26,500 laying around.