Monthly Archive for January, 2004

I have been curious about how Google’s index has been growing over the past few years. I suggested to the Zeitgeist people that they add this information to their next report, but they don’t seem to have done so yet. So I decided with the help of the Way Back Machine I would do it myself. Google has been posting the size of their index on their front page since mid 2000, so I have data that go back quite far, though not back quite as far as Google’s inception. The result of all of this is a graph of the size of Google’s index (pages indexed, in billions) over the past four years:

Not very interesting really. Except that it’s fairly constant. I was expecting some sort of curve. I wonder if this figure is limited by the size of the internet, the amount of storage they have, or the amount of processing power. Hmm.

I had a wierd dream. I was trying to catch vermin, as is often the goal around here, and I happened to see a rabbit and a squirrel right in front of me. I reached down and grabbed the rabbit by the scruff of its neck in one hand, and then slowly reached down and grabbed the squirrel in the other. They didn’t look very big, but my explanation for their easy capture was that they were fat for winter.

The two little guys were struggling a little bit, so I decided to put them in the cat carrier. I walked out into the driveway of what I now recognized as our old house (52 Charles Lane) and tossed the two animals into the carrier. The promptly started hissing and fighting each other. I didn’t really know what to do, so I just picked up the carrier and started to walk down the street to where I wanted to release them: somewhere far away.

I guess the fighting got to me though, because I decided I would leave the carrier on the side of Charles and Lorraine until the rabbit and the squirrel calmed down. So I left for a bit, but when I got back the carrier was gone. When I got back to my driveway, there were at least thee cars in the driveway: Alex and Mel’s new Golf, and two cars jam-packed full of sun-tanned retirees. I think one of them was driving something like an el camino, because I had the sense that there was tons of stuff in the back of their car, as well as there being tons of old people in the front. I thought I saw a cat carrier in the back of one of the cars, and asked about it. That’s when I saw Alex and Mel’s new car.

The old people assured me they hadn’t taken my cat carrier, but they had in fact hit Alex and Mel’s (empty) car. It was sideways in the driveway, and had been hit on the side, so it was sort of compacted, but it was really tiny to begin with. It really looked like one of those teeny tiny european cars. The smart car?

Anyway, it was either a tiny smart car or a miniaturized Golf. I started thinking about insurance, and whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that the Golf was totalled. Then I realized they might not be able to find such a nice Golf for so cheap again, and I decided it was a bad thing.

Then I woke up and realized my alarm clock was stuck on 11:00 and had been for two hours–stuck on my wake-up time.

I just got an idea for the Best. Screensaver. Ever. It bes thusly:

If your pointer lies motionless for a certain period of time, a little animated troll would sort of poke its head in from offscreen, and then make a b-line for your cursor. It would appear as if it the screen were the ground it scampers on. When it reached the pointer, it would reach up as if the pointer were above it, snatch it down with both hands, and run off with it. It would try to hide from you. If you wiggled the mouse, the cursor would wiggle in his hands, but he’d have a pretty good grip on it, so you’d have to give it a good wiggle to wriggle it loose. He’d then look scared and run off.

Something to tuck away.

Based on my anticipated lifetime salary, if I put away 20% of my post-tax income religiously and invest intelligently, I will have $156,827 on my 40th birthday, and will clear $1,000,000 at the age of 60.

If I put away 50% of my post-tax income every month until I have my first child, around the age of 28, and then scale back to 20%, my nest egg will be $224,776 at 40, and I’ll be a millionaire at 57. Not much of bargain.

And putting money up front–say a down payment of $2,000–doesn’t seem to help much either. I would have put in that much in the first 10 months anyway, so I only really accellerate things by a year or so. An initial outlay of $5000 puts my two years ahead. Hardly seems worthwhile.

But if I drop down to 10%, at 40 I’ll only have $81,786 and I won’t cross the million mark until the ripe old age of 69. We can’t be having that now, can we.

In all seriousness, it seems like the only way to build long-term wealth through investment is to steadily put a percentage of money away every month, religiously. There are no tricks, no kicks you can give the machine at critical moments. Just start today, put away as little as you need to and keeping putting at least that much away for the rest of your life.

Although, interestingly, if I delay this entire process–that is, squander my wealth–for the next ten years, I only set back my millionaire date by six years. Of course when my kids are heading to college I will only have $150,000 instead of $270,000. That might be a problem. Better start saving.