At last, someone has answered the question on all of our minds: exactly how much money do you need to have to be able to swim around in your own personal ocean of gold coins, just like Scrooge McDuck? Based on the assumed height of Scrooge as being roughly equivalent to that of an actual duck (I would quibble with this interpretation, but whatever) and a little calculus, Matt Powers of The Billfold estimates that you’d need $31.2 to be able to dive around in your mountain of gold like a porpoise (naturally you would need significantly less to be able to toss your coins up and let them hit you on the head; in fact, with $20 worth of Sacajawea dollars you could do this right now, which you totally should, and post a video of it to YouTube*).

My dad loves Carl Barks’ comics, and they were a huge part of my childhood. That image of swimming around in money always stuck with me. I won’t deny that there have been times when I’ve been about to deposit a paycheck in my bank account and I’ve thought to myself “I could totally convert this into dollar coins or quarters or something and put them in a big pile on the living room floor and roll around in it and not one single person could possibly stop me.”

Then I remember that money has germs on it.

But freshly minted gold coins don’t!