In 2024, award-winning picture book author Mo Willems came out with two books for the preschool set: Are You Big? and Are You Small? These books are great at teaching toddlers that the words "big" and "small" are relative. There is no set answer to the question of what is big and what is small, it's all in what it's talking about and what it's referencing as comparison.
Being able to grasp this about amounts of money is vital. If something is "a lot" or "a little" money is entirely in what you are talking about, where you are, and who "you" are. Is a million dollars a lot of money? Not to a government. Not if you're talking about your life savings in a location where a million dollars will not buy you a one-bedroom apartment.
Numbers mean nothing without context. Remember how your math teacher would mark you down if you didn't put the units? The units are important. Is a number big or small? That depends on what it's describing.
Let's say you've been carefully saving and investing and you have $10,000. Is that a lot of money? Is that enough money? The answer to that depends entirely on what it's for. If your purpose is to have a couple months rent and expenses saved up, so you have a cushion, then depending on where you live, this could be enough! This could be achieving your goal! Yay!
If this is meant to be a down payment or retirement, then no, it's not.
Now let's start adding zeros. $100,000? Could be a down payment, depending on where you live. Could be college tuition. Could cover medical bills (USA). $1,000,000, maybe you're just buying that house outright. (But not in the most expensive areas, remember that one bedroom apartment that costs more than a million dollars). Retirement? Well, it'll help.
$10,000,000? Now we're getting to the level of organization level money, but not much if you're running a medium sized business, though. If this is your personal savings, depending on your investments and depending on your expenses, you may be generating enough income to live on comfortably. With this much money in hand, you can pay college tuition without debt, buy new cars whenever you like, go on nice vacations, have great houses. And as long as you're not trying to keep up with the Joneses who have 100x your net worth, yeah, that sounds like a good number for a person not to have to worry about money -- but keep an eye out, still, for context! If this money is entirely created through wages, then it is subject to a massive downshift in networth when the high wage earner no longer is getting that wage.
Now let's take off some zeros.
Saving $1? It's better than saving nothing. Saving $10? Good start! Saving $100, now you have some padding. Saving $1,000, now you have even more.
There's no amount of money that is bad to have in savings. But understanding orders of magnitude and context is a vital part of living your life and understanding, not only your own savings, but things like organizational and government budgets, because an amount of money that's big for one person, is a rounding error for a government.