[ChuckMcM]

I think it is a great visualization and it helps to illustrate why saving and investing should be part of everyone's strategy to have something set aside when they are older.

And I think it illustrates that it doesn't have to be a "lot" of money to make a big difference over time.

It's also rather misleading, as you point out, because you can't invest $1 (or often even $31 a month). I assume you have seen the mr. money mustache (MMM) web site. His approach to communicate the value was to discuss mutual funds which reflected broad diversity in the market. Many of them have quite long histories as well. Of course with mutual funds you have to factor in taxes (which is really hard to do in a general way) since funds transact sales and that results in the realizing of short and long term gains and losses.

Aside from the difficulty of actually investing $1 a month I found the visualizations excellent and the floating bubbles pretty cool too.