Set Your Money On Fire: 3 Great Ideas

1) On the way home yesterday I stopped at a Caltex to buy some water, and lo and behold, there it is. VOSS bottled water, sparkling and still, imported from Norway, for the bargain basement price of R25.00. Not for 1 litre, for a small bottle. Comparable local products cost R6.00. Now let me ask you, do we need to import water all the way from Norway just to get 'pure' water?

I'm also an advocate of not drinking bottled water, but we face a bit of conundrum. The water at home tastes a bit funny; when I did the shoot with Roxanne, she and her mom both took a single sip and then asked for juice instead. Now I'm less inclined to drink it too. I mean...there are rumors now of radioactive contamination, sewage leaking into our water system, and of course, recently in Bloem they found dead bodies floating in a large water tank. That's enough to wean people off tap water for a long time.

It's de rigeur in countries like Britain and Korea to not drink water straight from the taps. In Korea even bathing in the stuff really dries out the skin. The water in Korea is said to be contaminated with heavy metals. They also discourage boiling veggies with tap water. So what other option is there except buying big barrels of water. There are filter systems of course, but millions of bachelors like me are going to take a while to adopt these new behaviours. Here's more background on why drinking bottled water is dumb, and we need to graduate fast to a more efficient (but clean and healthy) system to hydrate ourselves at home.

Drink Bottled Water, Help Wreck the Planet

2). Buy a house in Bantry Bay for R25 000 000. Seeff is advertising a property right now. Here's what you get for R25 000 000: A sea view. It's a summary, obviously I'm not going into details like automatic garage doors and other gob smacking luxuries. The point is, you can find a habitat for a fraction of that price and live happily ever after. Are bricks and mortar and a balcony over looking sparkling water worth 50 Mercedes Benz motor cars? Some inner city apartments in Jeppe Street Johannesburg are going for less than R300 000 today. If you really want a beautiful sea view, and you're far more 'on the beach' than you can even hope to be at Bantry Bay (and even there the sea is cold), you can buy an island or a cottage in the Philippines for less than a brightly colored cave in Jeppe Street, and enjoy unsurpassed peace and tranquility from here to eternity.

3) Head swivelling styling like Chrysler's HEMI may have made sense (still not a lot though) once upon a time, for about half an hour when a small flock of pretty girls emerged out of a nightclub as you drove by on a random Saturday night...by mid morning the latest Merc had been unveiled, and that was the car to watch: the Mercedes SLR McLaren.

Expect to fork out R3.5 million ($450 000). The SLR has a supercharged 5.5 (5439cc) litre dry sumped 90 degree V8. It produces 466.8 kW at 6500rpm (626 hp) and 780 N·m (575 ft·lbf) torque at 3250 - 5000 rpm. That's a little bit like being an attractive eleven year old girl with the most beautiful breasts in the world. It's nice to have that power but in a sick kind of way - you can't use it and even if you could, you shouldn't be using it.
For a list of the world's most expensive cars, go here.

So if you had the cash, you could by this car, or you could buy 12 apartments in JeppeStreet (maybe a quarter of the whole building).
Alternatively you could buy a small second-hand Yaris - a brilliant, wonderful car to drive, and with your change you could resurrect Zimbabwe's economy.