Here at Consumerist, we don’t take vaults filled with riches lightly. So when a recent story claimed to have finally calculated how much money it would take to fill Scrooge McDuck’s swimmable vault of gold, our childhood selves were all atwitter. But then, we started talking about it amongst ourselves.

Our stalwart and ever-ready comments moderator heard the story this week, wherein news outlets were all excited about calculations done on The Billfold. They found that Scrooge wannabes would need about $31.2 billion to have enough to swim through. Only the six richest people in the world could pull off such a feat.

Sure, we were excited at first, too — who wouldn’t want to do the backstroke through gold? But we seek the truth, and luckily enough for us, our comments guru has gone ahead and poked more than a few holes in The Billfold blogger’s theory.

First, Scrooge’s vault clearly doesn’t contain only gold — it also contains cash. That’s a variable that wasn’t accounted for.

Second, they figured it based on the size of a normal duck, not a Disney duck (they took Scrooge to be 14″ tall). This is clearly wrong — Disney ducks are about the same size as Disney mice or Disney dogs or whatever, as long as they’re humanoid I feel we have to assume they’re human-sized within a certain level of variation. Scrooge might be smaller than, say Goofy, but Launchpad McQuack is also a duck and is probably closer to Goofy height. Clearly, the Disney universe isn’t based on real-life animal proportions.

Thirdly, even then the estimate is far too low. As you can see on the image on [another] article, the gold is 90 feet deep, far more than was accounted for in the original calculations. Unless Scrooge has a different measuring system that also includes feet, [the blogger is] clearly wrong.

We think this presents enough problems for a little recalculation by the math-inclined people out there. Maybe no one in the world has enough dough to swim in, which is a sobering thought indeed.

How Much Money You Need To Realistically Recreate The Scrooge McDuck ‘Gold Coin Swim’ [The Billfold]

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.