Value of money

Yesterday morning I had to go purchase some papers for the companies I own. Sitting there waiting for my turn, I started thinking on the money I was to hand over to the nice lady in order to receive the papers. 

Imagine someone telling you: “Hey! give me $x and I will provide you with some papers“, in my mind that would be quite a lousy exchange, right? Just for papers? You gotta be kidding right?

So this prompted me to think about the value of said papers. They will be needed for transactions later on during this year: either for taxes (yay! hm), for bank institution or even in some cases to prove certain aspects of the companies. Now how does the office which is issuing these papers determine it’s value? Because to me, sitting there, the papers need to provide at least three transactions. I can imagine at the same time, that for other people, these papers are literally worth nothing because they don’t perform the same work that my companies do.

So what is money actually worth: what is it’s value? $5 for me might mean not much, while in another country $5 that would buy me a meal in a fine dining restaurant. What about if we add time to this equation? $5 today might be $1 in 20 years in value – who knows? So then we’re talking about inflation or time value of money (there’s even an acronym for it: TVM)

This topic is so diverse, that it proved quite difficult to write a short something on it, because besides adding time to value, you can also add quality, you can add power and so the list goes on.

What do you think is the value of money? Is it even something that we can determine? Let me know your thoughts!