What can you do with $100?

How much is $100?

Just the other day, my friend told me that even if she cut $100 in her budget, she wouldn’t be able to cover the deficit in her budget (around $1500), because her husband isn’t working at the moment.

I told her that it’s true, $100 may not seem like a lot, but if you do it 15 times, you’re covered, and if her husband picked up a minimum wage job at $8 an hour, he could bring in $16,000 gross a year, with maybe an extra $1000 a month.

She wasn’t convinced, but it got me thinking about how people see amounts of money. If she had given me a chance, I could’ve gone through her budget and done some pretty harsh chopping.

$10 here, $5 there, $90 there and I would have reached that $1500 deficit (perhaps without even the extra job), or at least had been able to tell her how much at a minimum she would need to make extra in overtime to make her budget balance, and to save money aside to start clearing the debt as well.

It all adds up, but it’s painful to imagine living lif without what you are used to.

It seems like a lot of money to someone (like me!) but so little to another — like my friend who sees the $1500 deficit and gives up without trying.

So what can you buy with $100?

For me, $100 CAD can pay for:

• 20 x $5 lattes
• 1 week of groceries for two to three persons (currently spending $150 for 4!)
• A full course meal in a mid-priced restaurant for two
• 1 month’s worth of gas
• 18 dozen packs of organic eggs
• A pair of tickets to a hockey game
• A bus pass for a month
• 100 packets of ramen, although I don’t eat them!
• 3 trips to the movie theatre for two people at $15/ticket
• 3 subscriptions to three magazines a year
• 2 tops at Banana Republic

A $100 in and of itself might not be a lot of money to some, but when it’s translated into purchasing power terms (like everything I’ve listed above), the realization of how far $100 can go becomes a lot more apparent.

What can YOU buy with $100?