Well, a more intuitive way to think about it would be to simply disregard the decimal portion entirely. What I mean by this is, when you have something like 24.61*3.14, you should just multiply 2461*314. Decimals are pretty abstract starting on, and actually understanding where the decimal place comes from helps build intuititon.
In our example, we've moved the decimal place of 24.61 2 units to the right, and same with 3.14. That means we have 4 extra decimal places to think about at the end of the problem. So, just multiplying 2461 and 314 gives us: 772754. Now, we start at the right most position (just before the 4), and we count 4 spaces tot he left. That means we place our new decimal point at in between the 2nd seven from the left and the two to give us 77.2754 as our answer.
Decimals are really just place holders. If we take away the decimal and remember our place, we never really have to work with them with things that don't repeat ad infinitum (things like pi).
