How much money is there in the world and how long? (Also, how is that time spent?)

Each of us has 24 hours a day, every day, to spend however we see fit. And, we all spend those minutes and hours differently. We have different goals, and how we spend our time reflects what is important to us as individuals. Multiply the decisions of how we spend time by the eight billion people around the world, and you get an interesting picture of the human race.
How much money is there in the world and how long?
We talk and think a lot about how much money we have. Also, the corollary is time. You probably feel like you have a lot of money with these tools, but what about the world?
How much money is there in the world?
This can be a difficult question to answer, but experts estimate that by the end of 2024, there would be the equivalent of $123 trillion in cash, savings and money market funds around the world.
So, what percentage of the money is yours? Here are a few interesting facts:
- If that $123 trillion was divided among the 8 million people in the world, each person would have only $15,000.
- If you have $1 million dollars, you have about 0.00000081% of $123 trillion. Put another way, $1M approx Ten million ten percent of one of $123t.
- Pundits believe that the world will have its first trillionaires in the next decade.
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How much time is there on earth?
Estimates suggest that we have over eight billion people on Planet Earth now. Those people represent 192 billion hours every day or more than 70 million hours a year.
You have:
- 24 hours a day
- 168 hours a week
- 8,760 hours every year
- 262,800 hours to spend the next 30 years
How do you measure your time?
How is time spent on planet Earth? Observing the International Human Day
Scientists from McGill University recently conducted an unprecedented analysis. They compiled data on time use from 145 different countries.
The researchers put together a complete balance of what people do, achieved over time and for every person, to provide a high-level view of what they contain as a global human day.
The results may seem surprising.
4 stages of human activity
The researchers divided all human activities into 4 categories.
1. We spend 9.1 hours in sleep and in bed
Worldwide and for all people, sleep accounts for 9.1 hours of a 24-hour day. As a genre, this takes up a lot of our time.
This can seem like a lot, especially for those of us who wake up endlessly at night for various reasons. But, the difference is due to the inclusion of children in the rate and time spent in bed without sleeping.
2. Activities with direct human effects take 9.4 hours
The greatest amount of shared time is spent on activities that have a direct impact on people, activities such as eating, grooming, playing, babysitting, recreation, childcare, and religion.
These types of jobs take 9.4 hours a day and include:
- 4.6 hours for recreational activities or social activities
- 1.6 hours on food
- .4 hours in active recreation
- 1.1 hours in cleaning and grooming
- .3 hours in childcare
- .2 in health care
- 1.1 hours of reading or research
- .2 hours in religious practices
3. Activities leading to external outcomes take only 3.4 hours
Only 3.4 hours were collectively spent on activities leading to external outcomes. These are the things that transform the physical world: All food production (including farming, raising livestock and cooking, sealing the things we eat), mining, washing, construction, gas production, and the manufacture of physical goods.
- .9 Hours in food preparation
- .8 hours for food growth and collection
- .1 hours in food processing
- .8 hours for our residential maintenance
- .01 hours in waste management
- .7 Technosphere hours in construction (construction, civil engineering, telecommunications and manufacturing of all physical goods)
- .1 Hours in unreasonable provision (extraction of natural resources)
4. We spend 2.1 hours on organizational activities
The smallest block of society’s time is spent on organizational activities. These efforts include: Travel, Government, Military, Commercial, Real Estate and Financial Industry.
- .9 Traffic hours
- .9 HOURS Allocated (trade, commercial, government, finance, law, etc…)
- .3 Material hours

Fajzel, W., Galbraith, Ed, charms, J., Frie, E., HATON, MILO, K., S. (2023). International human day. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 120(25), E2219564120.
Observation and understanding in the use of collective time
In their report, the researchers had an interesting observation about our use of time. Here are some of their insights:
Material wealth has an adverse effect on other activities
Surprisingly, time spent on activities such as eating, daily commuting, hygiene and exercise, and food preparation do not change with the material wealth of the population.
Also, material wealth has an adverse effect on population growth. Faster cars and access to air travel do not reduce the time we spend getting from place to place.
However, the time spent growing and gathering food varied by wealth, from more than one hour in low-income countries to less than five minutes in high-income countries.
- The decrease of almost 1.2 hours in the growth of food and in the accumulation of rich countries is contradicted, perhaps inexplicably, by the increase in the time spent in physical activities – Entertainment – and in infrastructure, job creation.
Some tasks took less time than you might think
Given how dependent we are on natural resources, globally the time spent directly on building materials and energy in the global system is small, on the order of 5 minutes in the average person’s day.
- Because global delivery and materials are currently provided in a small fraction of the total time (up to 3% of the global economy’s time), the time allocated to these activities can be changed to a greater effect on the time allocated to other activities. This assessment suggests that solutions to climate change, such as shifting resources away from global oil industries and building economic infrastructure around the world, because there is a visible measure of the world’s budget, because there is clearly a distribution of normal time in building a population.
The time you are directly dealing with garbage is on the order of 1 minute per day
- It seems obvious that many waste problems, including the accumulation of plastics in the oceans and water pollution, can be significantly reduced with a small amount of the human budget.
Save your time and money
As the research team behind this study on the collective use of time points, how we spend time determines the effects we have on the environment and how we experience health.
It is very important that you make the most of your time, and that probably includes thinking about how much time you spend doing and allocating money.
The Boldlin Retirement Planner is a tool that empowers people to make better decisions, build wealth, and find their way to a secure and happy future.
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