With all the current fever about gold, I was thinking, what if I bought a gold bar (those gold bars used in reserve banks that we see either on the news or in movies where thieves try to steal the chest at a federal bank) when gold used to trade at $200/troy ounce (troy ounce is different than an ounce, as it weighs slightly less, about 31.10 grams. When you see that gold is trading at, for example, $1,800/ounce, they mean troy ounce, not the ounce you use in the kitchen measurements) a decade ago. I thought the gold bar weighs one kilogram (or 2.2 pounds), and I did have more than $6,600 at that time (1 kg has about 32.15 troy ounces). However, I used to always think that the gold bar seems to be a bit large, and that the density of gold is 19.3, almost 20 times that of water. Which means what might look like 1 kg for water in gold, really weighs about 20 kilograms.

So, how much does a gold bar weigh? Well, according to all the resources I could find, the gold bar weighs 400 troy ounce, or 12.44 kg or 27.42 pounds. Now that we know how much it weighs, how much does a gold bar cost in this day and age. Well, at this very second, it costs (if you want to buy one) only $754,800 (Obviously I wasn’t able to afford it even a decade ago, as it used to cost $80,000, and not $7,000 as I thought!).

If you really want to know, the dimensions of the standard gold bar that is used as a reserve in the banks are: 17.78 cm x 9.21 cm x 4.45 cm or 7 inches x 3.625 inches x 1.75 inches.

In case you’re wondering, yes these movies where you see thieves having a big bag full of gold bars carrying it easily over their back are totally fake. These bags always seem to contain around 50 gold bars, which weigh slightly over 600 kg. I don’t think there exists, at least on this planet, someone who can carry 600 kg of gold over his back while running!