Bo-Jangles

You do soon learn to live within your means and cut your cloth accordingly, it's a case of having to, or what other choice do you have if you can't increase your income. We live on a very low budget of $140 per week (being just $20 a day for everything including food, toiletries and cleaning ) so you can see why I might baulk at pay $16 for a few bits of salad, whereas to others it's probably not such a big deal.

We sure ain't living the high life but I have become quite adept at stocking up on special offers and eking out things like a joint of meat over two or three days. We usually have mince, in some form, at least once per week at $6 for 500g, or a meal with eggs that are $4.49 per dozen (free range) and we usually make do with home made soup and bread or a sandwich for one dinner per week.

Today in Pak n Save they had a special midweek deal on: 1 Pumpkin, 1.5kg bag of Carrots and 1.5kg of onions for $5 and you do find some really odd things going very cheaply from time to time. It takes a fair bit of effort and planning and you do need to have your frugal radar finely honed to zero in on the real bargains. Today I got 3 x Packets of 4 bars of Knights Castille soap for $5 - so that's me sorted for soap for the next two years.

Having seen already that fairly substantial increases in the cost of postage have been published, I'll not be surprised if we don't see a significant inflationary hike in all goods when the new GST rate starts on the 1st October.

http://www.nzpost.co.nz/Cultures/en-...ber2010Changes

You can be sure that most other businesses will be taking similar advantages and increasing prices or at least rounding up to the next level, so I'm already planning on doing extra shopping and especially stocking up with a buffer of essentials and non-perishables over the next few weeks.

squarepants

Don't be put off by it - just hit the ground running and be prepared from the beginning.

Food is definitely cheaper in UK without a doubt - there are a variety of reasons as to why but TBH - it's all irrelevant because when you're here you just have to change the way you do things - and make it work.

We're on an annual salary of $64000, and though we don't have any debt - there's absolutely no room for sloppy budgeting.

We're also a family of 4 in which the 2 children eat adult portions because they're so active.

We've always eaten a mainly vegetarian diet with lots of pulses, tofu, feta, haloumi and then meat and salmon for the non veggies. It's this stuff that costs the earth out here. Haloumi is $12, I recently purchased a bag of dahl lentils from a local health food store - and it was $7 !!!!! You have to be a millionaire to eat like a peasant over here

However, you can do it but you have to be organised. Leeks have been in season and cheap, so every time I shop I've picked up one extra - blanched and frozen it - same with cauliflower. We arrived in the summer so I know in 3 months I'll be able to buy 3 bunches of asparagus for $5, so I'll be buying and freezing that as well. We've had friends saving us all of their empty jars and we'll go to the pick your own strawberry and loganberry places and make jam. That sort of stuff is cheap in the summer months - and after making jam for the first time in kiwi season, I can't believe how easy and cheap it is.

I also visit the Asian shops and buy ingredients from there, a massive bag of Roti flour was only $11, and it'll last me about 10 months. We eat a lot of rice based dishes and so I can pick up the curry pastes and spices pretty cheaply.

The cheapest way to buy quality meat is homekill, you'll find this through word of mouth.

The last pig we had filled the freezer, the meat was the best we've ever tasted and it was about half the price it would have cost in the supermarket. You can either buy a whole beast or go halves with someone. At the moment, the homekill butcher knows we want 1/4 of a cow - so we're on a list - once he has buyers for the other 3/4 he'll give us a ring.

The pig was $250 all in. It was free range and raised by someone with a lifestyle section, it was fed on veg and hotel left overs and not bulked up on bread - so there was very little fat on it. It went from the field to my freezer in 6 days and arrived in supermarket style packs with joints, chops etc clearly wrapped and labelled.

If you have children and are coming over - it would be worth your while setting aside a box for the container and filling it with tixilix, calpol etc because this is the stuff we hadn't budgeted for and when you need it you need it. To go out and re-stock the medicine cabinet would cost a few hundred dollars. You can do the same for less than £50, so if you bring it - it's just a case of topping up what you've used. $23 to replace a bottle of medicine now and again is fine, but if the whole family comes down with something at the same time (which happens every time we've ever moved to a new country) it's a weeks food budget to go out and buy what you need in one go.

CarolineSwan

We get bottles of paracetamol for kids free of the doctors (18 bux in the chemist) and its the exact same as calpol, so i wouldnt bother with that. My friend used to send meit over fromthe uk but once i discovered it was same i ask for a bottle everytime i visit the docs so i always have a stock of it in the cupboard, i have 3 in there at the moment. you can get throat meds for around 10/11 bux here but again im in NP
Hey another thing is i suffer from migraines extreme migraines andhave been using up the stuff i brought over from britain (which actually make me sick but was scared the tabletswould be a fortune here) well last week i bit the bullet and saw doc , took in what i was getting b4 andhegave me a new kind some wafer thing that melts on the tonugue anyway best things i have ever had, they work in 10-15minutes of a severe migraine, and dont makeme more sick at the same time, should of been $183 but only cost me $3 cos the government subsidized the rest wish i had went sooner

squarepants

Oh wow, that's worth knowing - thank you! I think with the doctors fee being $35 a trip - if it's for coughs & colds we just bite the bullet and self medicate.

Next time we go for anything else though - I'll ask them to write me the script so we can stock up.

I miss the pink tixilix - the one that sends them to sleep and makes me a mother of questionable character (apparently)

sue1234

Hi Squarepants, "The people centre trust" based Auckland and Mangere, $150 for the year for all the family, or pay monthly, $12.50, + 40% off dental care sue

bunnyphobia

Ok, how do you grow spinach?

And, more generally can you grow veggies (sorry, refuse to spell it NZ way) in flower pots? We've got limited outside space but it does get very good sun for most of the day - when there is any, that is. I'd be good for a spring veg-growing project, if anyone can point me in the right direction?

Like many people, I live off fruit and veg, don't eat meat, and would quite like to have money to do stuff at weekend too

simonsi

We seems to have settled at $1200 per month for a family of 5 but that seems about the same as Tesco in the UK TBH...

squarepants

Thank you! I kept asking my husband how other low income families weren't all dropping dead with flu and bronchitis - it worked it's way through our family for the first time ever - and with the loss of wages must have cost us about $800 all in.

It wasn't something we were worried about because before we came here - we never got ill lol!

squarepants

You don't need a lot of space, if you go to Bunnings or Mitre 10 - the people who work in the garden centres are brilliant and will point you in the right direction with regard to preparing your soil.

We already had a veggie garden, but the previous occupants had been using it as a dog run (nice) So it took me a week to clean it up and weed it. Where we are, the soil is really sandy, has no nutrients and doesn't hold the moisture.

The following is what I did, but I admitted to the lady in the garden centre that I needed an idiot's guide because I'd only ever grown cress and a been shoot in primary school - these were the instructions she gave me.

1. Weed completely (I sprayed it with an organic weed killer, left it for 10 days to make sure it killed everything off down to the root)

If you don't get all the weeds out, they'll get you with a vengeance once the growing season starts.

2. Once the area is clear, buy some bags of compost and dig it in - I dug in 4 massive bags and it was $20.

3. Then sprinkled with blood and bone powder and lime, dug that in as well.

4. You can buy trays of seedlings for about $2.99 - that gave us 8 plants and they fed us all summer (Spinach).

5. We were cropping the spinach about 6 weeks after planting.

Silver beet grew like wild fire, but it was too bitter for my lot and they didn't like it, runner beans were brilliant, apple cucumbers were lovely and grew well, but they need space.

Aubergines were a huge disappointment - failed with that one.Tomatoes didn't do so well, but I think our soil wasn't good enough. Beetroot was good, but was no cheaper to grow than it was to buy tbh.

We put bean poles around the patch with netting right over the top. It kept the birds and the cats off, but the bees etc could still get through.

You can buy a bug spray that is organic and safe to use on food you don't cook.

I watered everything well every evening and fed it once a week.

Courgettes were really easy to grow and one plant also gave us courgettes and marrows right up until the frost. It takes up a lot of space though.



This summer we've got 2 half barrels which we've put some decent soil into - one will be the salad garden with lettuce/toms/cucumbers etc and the other I filled with herbs because I use them in everything.

I've also asked for citrus trees in tubs for my birthday and a capsicum plant - so we can take it all with us when we move into our own place.

charlcote

Our bill averages $70 per person per week, including cleaning stuff, toiletries and wine.

I recently got back from the UK and reckon that we pay around double here for many items (depends on exchange rate of course). Milk was about a dollar a litre (compare $5 for 2 litres here). Are we short of cows or something? And yes, if you look up the median wage in each country it's around 500 pounds pw in Uk and 500 dollars pw here.

However, I have noticed that cheaper food encourages much more wastage - or maybe I'm just getting old!