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Netflix is about to experiment with streaming movies over computers. It’s about to replace the current business model, whereby people receive movies in the mail and send them back after they watch them. What will eventually happen is people will get the movie through the computer and then somehow play it on the television. Clark wonders if people will learn this easily or resist it. Ease of use will help decide how well it works. Either way, technology is always changing. The need to be in front of the TV when a show starts is going away. With DVRs and other technologies, people will decide what they want to watch and when. Exciting stuff!

When you visit a retail store these days, you probably didn’t notice the war going on behind the scenes. Banks and retailers are going at it over debit cards, and we – the customers – are the pawns in the game. Basically, banks are trying to get people to use their debit card like a credit card because they make more money when you do it that way. Banks are offering all kinds of rewards and trips if you’ll sign for a charge instead of entering your pin when you make a purchase. Banks get just pennies when people enter their pin number. In turn, retailers are livid and are doing all kinds of things to get you to punch in your PIN. According to the Wall Street Journal, retailers are reprogramming their registers so the code option automatically pops up and customers are more inclined to do it that way. So, what’s it all mean to you? Eventually, banks will get more of your money if you swipe your card like a credit card. Merchants will start charging more money for items to make up for their cost, and customers will suffer for it. If you use a debit card and you’re being asked to punch in a code, it will help you in the long run. You can ask to use your card as a credit card; that is your option. But it may end up hurting you more in the system. Clark hopes the whole system breaks up and debit cards become a thing of the past. We’ll keep you posted.

Money Magazine has a way for you to save $400,000! You probably didn’t know you had that much money, but you do. Money says the No. 1 thing you can do is avoid buying fancy cars. Over a lifetime, buying average cars instead of fancy cars would save you $180,000. An average car would be a Honda Accord LS as opposed to an Acura TSX, for example. And buying used will always save you more dough down the road than buying new. What else? Sending you child to a state school rather than a private school will free up an extra $160,000 for your retirement. If you’re like Clark and have three kids, that’s half a million dollars right there. The average tuition at a state school is $12,000, whereas private schools cost an average of $30,000 a year. Another idea is to suggest that your child helps pay for his or her school. That may not be possible for your child, but students do much better when they have an investment in something. The third tenet from Money is to stop taking so many vacations. That one is hard for Clark to swallow because he loves traveling. But the magazine says that if you take $1,000 a year you’d normally spend on a vacation and put it in a Roth IRA instead, you’ll have an extra $120,000 at the time of retirement. So, try those things and see how much you save!

Did you know that you can get HDTV for free? That’s right. There is an assumption that when something is free that others are paying for, it’s either being stolen or it can’t really be a deal. But this deal is for real. In fact, Clark is proof. At his vacation home in Florida, Clark has a high-def television but he didn’t pay for program because he gets it for free. How? The modern equivalent of rabbit ears makes it possible. Here’s how it works. Clark signed up for the poverty cable package with the local provider. It’s called “Broadcast Basic” or something similar, and it costs about $10 a month. The package includes the broadcast channels, Bravo, Home & Garden and a few more specialty channels that are in standard definition. Then, Clark purchased a high-definition antenna and the picture on those channels is amazing. It’s possible through something called digital compression, which Clark doesn’t really understand. But the free picture on the HDTV set at his vacation home is much better than the picture at his regular home, where he pays the cable company for high-def programming. In the old days, you got kind of a snowy, grainy picture with rabbit ears. But now, if you have high def and the antenna, the picture is great. Your TV must have a high def tuner, and about three-quarters do. You can figure out if you get the good signal by checking antennaweb.org.

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In other TV news, HDTV prices will go up around Superbowl time. You don’t want to buy one now. Wait until about two weeks after to buy. Also, standard-sized models continue to drop in price. Those include 42-inch plasma models (under $1,000), 37-inch and 32-inch LCDs ($under $500) and 50-inch DLPs (under $1,000). Salespeople are going to try and steer you into much larger models, but don’t feed into the hype. The smaller models are the sweet spots in the market, so look for them.