Worth Your Weight In...

May 2, 2008 – 12:15 am

We've all heard someone say some other person was worth his/her weight in gold. If you haven't, you've probably been living in a cave. But if you were worth your weight in gold, how much would you be worth? Well, you can try our new handy dandy calculator below and find out your weight's value in gold, pretzels, Hummers, and more. Then I'll talk about how those values were reached.

Just enter your weight, select an item, and click "Calculate My Value". If you change your weight or your selection, click "Calculate My Value" again to change the result.

First off, we have your weight in money. You might remember the ton of money post, where I calculated the values of tons of various forms of U.S. currency. I just divided those figures by 2,000 and rounded off to the nearest penny to get the per-pound values. And since U.S. paper money basically weighs the same per bill, if you want your weight in "fitties" (slang for "fifties"), get your weight in dollars, pull out your trusty abacus, and start multiplying.

Then there's crude oil. Seeing as its meteoric rise over the past few months has been pinching us all in the wallets, and since it's called "liquid gold," I figured I'd work out its price per pound. According to Wiki Answers the weight of a gallon of light sweet crude ranges between 3.104 and 3.236 kilograms. Split the difference and you've got 3.17 kilos per gallon. And since oil futures sell in 42-gallon barrels, that gives us 293.44 pounds per barrel and $0.41 cents per pound of oil at the recent high of $120 a barrel.

Bologna... well, what's the fun of a calculator like this if you can't calculate the value of your weight in bologna, pretzels, and lard? I was going to use I Cant Believe It's Not Butter, but it would have made the calculator too wide. The per-pound prices on these things were borrowed from Safeway.com and were generally the lowest per-pound, non-sale price I found.

As for gold, that's based on a closing price for June gold futures on Thursday (May 1) of $850.90 per ounce. Now, if you do the math, you'll find that I'm coming up a bit short, or so it seems. I'm calculating at $12,408.96 a pound when 850.90 times 16 is $13,614.40. Thing is that gold is sold in troy ounces which are a bit heavier than the ounces we know and love. At 14.583333 troy ounces per pound, my calculations are correct.

And last, we've got your weight in Hummers... Hummer H2's to be precise. The value is based on an MSRP of $64,000 (before tax and license) and a curb weight of 6614 pounds.

And with that, I invite you to enjoy the calculator, and I'll see ya next week.