It Pays to Read: Reading is worth $960 an hour!

There's a story about a miser during the Victorian era who either kept a bond certificate or cash sitting in the bank for his entire life. When he withdrew his money, the buying power of his asset shrunk due to inflation. He ended up being poor at the end of his life.

What if you never read this story and lived this scenario? 43% of workers have less than $10000 for retire. Imagine how many more have no investment plan and are just shoving money into a savings account?

Reading allows you to relive the thought process of another human being. A good chapter book (no pictures) represents roughly a year to a thousands of years of human experience. If you read at a modest pace of 20 pages an hour, you could finish a 300 page book in 15 hours. Let's be modest and some author wrote a book in a year. Assuming that this writer was working 40 hours a week, for every one hour you read, you exchange 133 hours of the author's work!  If you assume that author is working at federal minimum wage, reading is worth $960/hr!

Let's say instead you read about ancient Rome. Let's exclude the author and count the total living hours of each Roman. On average there was roughly 50 million people living every year, and the Roman Empire was roughly 2000 years old. Let's say a book on the Roman Empire was 3000 pages. Assuming your 20 page reading rate, for every one hour of reading about Rome, you exchange roughly 76,000 man-YEARS of human experience! Instead of living and dying 1000 times, you can read for an hour!  If we assume the federal minimum wage again, that's $4.8 billion dollars an hour!  Take that quantitative easing!

I hope this is one reason to motivate you to read.

[caption id="attachment_389" align="aligncenter" width="300"] (My favorite book.  $15 USD) 

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