If I Had $100

If I had a million dollars, I’d buy you a green dress
And if I had a million dollars, I’d buy you some art
If I had a million dollars, I’d buy you a monkey
If I had a million dollars
I’d buy your love…

So sang popular music group The Barenaked Ladies. Well, it’s alright for them, isn’t it? With their luxury jets, platinum records and gold-plated bongs, it’s easy for rock stars to imagine such fabulous wealth. But in the current financial climate we are all going to have to lower our sights somewhat.

What if I had a hundred dollars? Could I still live a jet-set lifestyle?

Travel
Taking an exotic vacation is an everyday task for the rich and famous. I was planning to slip onto a flight to Bermuda disguised as an oversized golf bag. Then I realized it would cost me $60 for a taxi to the airport. And $60 to get back home. That’s $120, dammit!

Forget air travel then. What about the bus? Not very glamorous, but if I pretended it was a rock ‘n’ roll tour bus I might just cope. I could pretend the old people were roadies and the lanky students were drug dealers.

Unfortunately, for $100 return I can only get as far as… Moncton, New Brunswick. Bermuda it ain’t. But they do have a magical magnetic hill! I can spend my luxury vacation on a foggy mountain watching cars roll backwards up a slope. Oh good.

Shelter
Forget a penthouse apartment. Forget a basement bed-sit. Forget a tent – they’re $200! But for $100 you can buy a lot of bin bags and a roll of duct tape. Simply stick them together to create a fabulous tent! You can even add an extension by taping grocery bags together. All the stars will be living in them soon! I’m going to take it on my Moncton camping trip.
I wonder… are bin bags bear-proof? At $3 a roll, I bloody hope so!

Food
Jet-setters never set foot in the kitchen – cooking is for poor people! So how can you eat out every day for months, on just $100? Easy. The cheapest food is found in the school canteen. I’m sure we all have fond childhood memories of school dinners and that plate of succulent meat thing, mashed stuff and grease sauce. Yum!

Invest $50 in a pile of textbooks, a bundle of papers and an unfashionable sweater. Roam the corridors of your local school pretending to be the supply Physics teacher. When the lunchtime bell rings, join the queue for your hearty subsidized feast!

If your disguise is too convincing, you may find yourself in front of a class full of bored teenagers. Simply tell them to open their textbooks at page 132 and read to themselves for an hour, while you hide in the janitor’s shed until home time. That’s what my teachers did!

Stuff
$100 isn’t going to buy much stuff. I went to the dollar store to splash out on $1 trinkets and shiny things, but to my horror I discovered everything cost $2! Bastards.

Fortunately, I’ve found the perfect store to load up on bargain gems. Murder Mo’s House Of Bling & Key Cutting While-U-Wait offers glittering collection of stunning jewelry that looks a million bucks, but only costs a few New Brunswick Dollars! Now I can ‘jewel up’ and hang with the beautiful people in the hippest clubs in Moncton, without looking like a cheap idiot! Phew.

So in conclusion, is it possible to live like a jet-setting rock star on $100? Well, unless you live in a bin bag tent in Moncton and spend your days hiding in school sheds wearing plastic diamonds… No.