According to the newest data from the Federal Reserve, as of December last year revolving consumer credit card debt stood at 943 billion dollars. Revolving debt is set to reach one trillion dollars later this year. That’s *trillion* with a “tr”.

$1,000,000,000,000.00. One with twelve zeroes after it or – if you want to make it sound really massive - a thousand thousand thousand thousand.

That clears it up, right? Perhaps not. Most human beings have a difficult time comprehending just how large that figure is or how much money it actually represents.

First, let’s make sure that we have all of our zeroes and decimal points in all the right places:

  • Million: 1,000,000.00
  • Billion: 1,000,000,000.00
  • Trillion: 1,000,000,000,000.00

One trillion dollars – that’s enough money to buy Microsoft, Citibank, AT&T and Wal-Mart and still have enough left over to buy every man woman and child in the United States an IPod Shuffle. It’s more than the annual GDP of Pakistan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Ukraine, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Libya, Venezuela and Thailand combined (that’s around 800 million people, by the way).

Let’s take a look at a few concrete, real world examples to help demonstrate just how much we owe the credit card companies:

  1. America’s housing stock – the cost of every single house, condominium, apartment, trailer and shanty in the entire United States – is valued at ten trillion dollars. Consumer debt will reach one-tenth of that value this year. Of every. Single. Home.
  2. Scientists estimate that there are as many as 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. And the entire population of earth is 6.3 billion people. (via NPR)
  3. At our current rate of consumption, 1 trillion barrels of oil would fuel the entire world’s energy needs for another 33 years. (via NPR)
  4. With roughly 100 million households in the United States, one trillion dollars averages out to about $10,000 per household.
  5. One million seconds is approximately 11.5 days. One billion seconds is 32 years. One trillion seconds is 32,000 years. That means, if you were to earn one dollar per second or $3,600/hour, you would need to work for 31,500 years to earn one trillion dollars. That’s the entire time period from the existence of the wooly mammoth up until the present day.
  6. … or put another way: a person working 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year, for 40 years until retirement, would need to earn $200,000 per minute to earn one trillion dollars.
  7. Since NASA’s inception nearly 50 years ago, they’ve only spent a total of $600 billion. (via Wikipedia)
  8. In 2006, military expenditure from every single country on earth totaled just $1.158 trillion. (via Wikipedia)
  9. Total combined sales revenue from the three largest American corporations – WalMart, ExxonMobil, and General Motors – was a paltry $900 billion in 2007. (via CNN)
  10. With one trillion dollars, you could afford to buy 1,000 QM2’s – one of the largest cruise ships on earth – and still have enough left over to pay the crews for each one for a year. (via Cunard)
  11. If you stacked $1,000 bills flat, you’d need a nearly 80 mile high pile to represent $1 trillion. (via HiddenMysteries.org)
  12. The United States proposed federal budget for 2009 – that means every last penny the government spends of your hard earned tax dollars – totals $3.1 trillion.
  13. A ladder of four foot high children standing on each other’s shoulders would stretch from earth all to way to Saturn’s rings.
  14. 1 millimeter (1mm) is pretty darn small - about the size of this period. 1 million mm is a short drive down your street. 1 billion mm is roughly 600 miles – partway across the United States. 1 trillion mm would take you 25 times around the world.
  15. 1 trillion dollar bills would stretch end to end from the earth to the moon and back again … over 200 times.
  16. You could fill more than half of New York’s Empire State Building with 1 trillion pennies.

Imagine taking that bucket of change to the CoinStar machine!