But wait... there's less!

Some books provide a wealth of advice. The $1000 project has basically one idea - but it's good. Why don't we have more money? It's not like we don't earn money. At the average Australian salary of $75k, we'd earn a million dollars by 35. According to author (and financial advisor) Canna Campbell, people who find this out wonder "where has all my money gone?" . Well, it's not about salary. It's what you do with it. Pretend savings So often we 'save' money - a bargain at the grocery store, taking a packed lunch to work, or getting a lower rate on our mortgage . Other times we get a bit of extra money - some over-time at work, a tax refund, selling something online . So where does all this money go? Often we spend it on something else. "I saved $50 on X, so I can afford to blow $50 on Y" is often the way we rationalise it. Clearly that's no actual saving at all. What's the answer? Step 1 - Canna sets up an extra ...

For a sci-fi movie set in 2169, "In Time" is remarkably similar to the choices we face today. The premise Future humans are genetically engineered to stop physically aging at 25. Then their life-clock (built into their forearm) starts counting down from 1 year. They'll die at 26 unless they add more time to their clock. As Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) describes it, Time is now the currency. We earn it. We spend it. While the wealthy have all the time they need, Will lives in the ghetto, where people "just want to wake up with more time than there are hours in the day" because when the clock reaches zero, that's it. Spending Time Characters earn extra time by getting paid or by passing it between people. They lose time as their clock ticks down or when they buy things. So is a purchase worth the time lost? With less than a day on their life-clock is it worth giving up 4 minutes of life to pay for a coffee? Is it worth losing years of life to have ...

Cola wars? Not really. Both companies win. Perhaps it's the people who lose. Australian viewers can see it on SBS On-Demand until 26 April. It's retitled "Drink Wars" to sound less American. I'm fairly cynical about most advertising. This documentary, showing how cola advertising makes these companies 11-figure sums of money, just by selling brown sugary water, reinforced my view. Here's what I learnt: Big money Coke spends $6 billion a year on marketing. Pepsi is almost identical at $5.8 billion. At first we might think that their efforts cancel each other out, but it's more likely that the combined effect makes us buy even more of the stuff. The "Pepsi generation" In the 60s , Pepsi targeted the youth market with the phrase "Pepsi generation". Your parents drink Coke but the next generation is cool and drink Pepsi. They did it again in 1983 with Michael Jackson , and in the late 90's with the Spice Girls . It seems...