January Financial Challenge – the results.
Hmmm.
Well, I count this as a pretty epic fail.
11 out of 31 days not spending unnecessarily. Leaving 20 days when we spent money that we really didn’t have to.
I am thinking we could do better, so we are going to try again this month, but making a real effort, and see if it makes a difference.
Maybe she should have read some blogs ;)
Lisa Welbourne from Britian is a recent immigrant to New Zealand who is (like many of us) shocked at the price of food.
The problem is that while most sources of information like forums don’t actually hammer on about this (and crap over the people that try and talk about it), there are indeed places that do warn people of the cost of living. This blog is not the only place.
Gobsmacked at the price of basic foods, she has visited a lot of Auckland supermarkets and greengrocers in pursuit of lower prices, in pursuit of food she can afford. She finds it cheaper to buy at smaller fruit and vegetable shops – but that means more fuel costs.
Her friends back home can’t believe it when she tells them the price of food in New Zealand.
“Nice bread is four times the price,” she says. “I told them a loaf of bread was £1 [$1.90] and they said, ‘You’re joking’ … They can’t understand. When I see the average wage in New Zealand I wonder how some people are surviving.”
Lisa and her husband Max moved here with their 2-year-old son just six months ago and they were immediately scandalised by the prices.
“I always compare prices online and you can get things for half the price or a third of the price overseas that you get here.”
Yep, more and money of the money we spend (especially as the exchange rate is in our favour), is being spent abroad via the Internet. Interestingly – last month, Anchor butter was on offer at the supermarket and was the cheapest available. It is the first time in 7 years I have bought the stuff, compared to in the UK where I would never buy anything but Anchor.
But it does depress me that many people are still moving here expecting the costs of the basics to be cheap.
Amazon now charging postage to New Zealand. Boo Hiss.
Argghhhhhhhhhhhh.
The “trial” that they were doing which gave us free postage to New Zealand if we spent over £25 has ended. With bugger all notice. Which is really stupid, because I would have put a bloody great big order if they had given me some notice.
Now though, they will have to wait till I can afford to buy a load of books and the postage.
Or we de-camp to Book Depository, which a lot of people already use because they always have free postage to New Zealand, and similar prices to Amazon.
Funnily enough in the weekend Dom Post there is an article about “The Battle of the High Street”. (Not online I’m afraid). In it the owner of Unity Books in Wellington notes that
customers who buy books from Internet giant Amazon are often only saving the equivalent of a cup of coffee.
To which I can only say that this is utter hogwash. We regularly save half the cost of what it would have if we bought in a shop if not more. When I can buy a Novel for $12 at amazon, or pay $25 in an NZ shop, how exactly does that saving equate to a cup of coffee? Even with the increase in coffee prices.
And the more expensive the book, the bigger the savings. Hubby received a copy of Dilbert 2.0 for Christmas last year. It cost £50 from Amazon (just over $100). It costs over $300 here. That’s a lot of damn coffees.
A recent and topical example would be the Art Of The Hobbit.
- $70 in most New Zealand bookshops.
- $60 if you go to the Bargain Basement Whitcoulls Shop on Featheston St (ooh – let me get me coat!)
- $45 (£23.33 with shipping) at Amazon.
- $37.97 at Book Depository with free shipping (they price in NZD)
- $37.83 at Fishpond (a NZ company, but shipped in from the UK).
The difference between the cheapest and most expensive:
- $32.17.
That’s about 8 coffees worth saved by skipping the high st and buying online.
Either way – even with the postage – it was always cheaper to buy from Amazon than from a New Zealand company. It still is. But we will give Book Depository a go and see how that works out. I still will not pay New Zealand prices for books.
Why does it cost so much to buy tickets to a LOCAL event?
My family were trying to buy tickets to a Local event – the 2012 Wairarapa Wines Harvest Festival. This is an event held in March to allow wineries outside of Martinborough to try and get some of the kudos (and $$$?) of Toast Martinborough which they are not allowed to be part of. Martinborough Wineries are however represented at the Harvest Festival.
It’s been running for a few years now, and is actually quite good. Instead of Toast where you visit several wineries an buses – at the Harvest festival the Wineries come to you – at a site not far from where we live. Set in a beautiful little park near the Ruamahanga River – it does make quite a lovely day.
Now tickets are only $40 – compared t the $70 of toast – but bear in mind you still need to buy your wine (at not exactly cheap prices) and food on site. In fact over the years the staff running the event have got stupidly draconian about not letting you on the bus from the car park to the site until they have checked your bags for water or food.
I don’t bother going now as I refuse to let someone poke their nose in my bag for no good reason!
Now last year – we bought tickets at the Wairarapa Wines shop in Greytown (again an answer it seems to the Martinborough Wine Center), and is run as a collective of the wineries. but this year you can only buy tickets through Ticketec.
Which means added fees.
You either have to pay $11.75 or $13.75 depending on where you want the tickets “couriered” to. The extra is for rural delivery – which in our case means it comes via the normal postman anyway. And of course 2%-2.6% for the “credit card fee”.
Plus of course Ticketec will also be taking a commission from Wairarapa Wines for the privilege of having their tickets sold for them.
So on three tickets costing $120, we would have to pay $16.50 in order to buy them. That’s 13.45% of the price of the tickets.
Which is a bloody rip off – when postage actually costs 60c and would be free if we were allowed to buy them form the outlet bloody well organising the damn thing.
When asked about this – the Wairarapa Wines Center in Greytown basically couldn’t give a stuff on the basis that they will sell the tickets. So why should they care? Only this is local event. Why wouldn’t you allow locals to buy tickets locally? Why would you force them to pay over the odds for the tickets – especially when Ticketec is taking a cut from them as well as from us?
Then they got really snotty and proceeded to tell my mum all about how expensive it is to run a stand at the event. This did not go down well – on account of my parents having run stands at several large UK events a year – with fees that would make the eyes of the wineries here water.
They have a snotty attitude – and for the first time – my family is not going to the Harvest Festival.
Instead, they will take the $120, buy some nice wine (which may or may not be Waiararapa Wine, and enjoy it in the garden, where they wont be overcharged for the wine or the food (and wont have to use portaloos). And can rest easy that they arent subsidising some very snooty people. All they will miss really is the entertainment.
Charging for Bonus Fly Buys
Filed under: Avalon's Money Thread, Cost of living, General Budgeting
Fly Buys – the ubiquitous “loyalty” scheme that gives you points for spending money, that you can then in theory swap for flights. You need to spend about $25 in New World to get 1 fly buy – which is worked out generally to be worth 15-20c, depending on what you buy. If you get the new Fly Buys cards you can actually get the points put directly through to Air New Zealand Airpoints.
You get $1 of airpoints for every 6.25 Flybuys. So you need to spend $156.25 at New World to get $1.
Checking how much it costs to buy the flights – on 25th April 2012 you can get a flight only (no check in bags) for 363 Fly Buys (which takes $9075 spend at New World).
Using Airpoints $ it cost $69, or the equivalent of 431 FlyBuys or $10,781.25 spend at new world.
Now I am actually on the scheme that converts directly to Airpoints Dollars – basically because I just cant be bothered with the faff and hassle of FlyBuys. The scheme is actually pretty complicated, and seems to con a whole load of people into paying more for stuff by sending them to retailers who will give them “bonuses”.
Well, last week we spent just short of $300 at New World Oriental Bay on wine. (For clients – not actually for us!)
When we got home, we noticed on the receipt an extra charge of 1c under the heading of NW Wine Bo.
Now no mention of any extra charge was ever made, and I was curious as to what it was. Besides – why is any company charging 1c for anything? I didn’t buy anything for 1c. So why am being charged for something I didn’t buy, don’t want, and didn’t get a choice about?
I emailed New World.
I was ignored.
I was now pissed.
So the next time I went to the store, I went to Customer Services and asked. It seems that among the bottles of wine we bought were 3 bottles from the New Zealand Wine Awards and NW were offering 10 bonus fly buys. Their “system” “can’t” just work out that I bought the three bottles and give me the fly buys, so they have to scan a bar code for it. And the “system” also “can’t” scan a bar code without a charge, so the “have to” charge 1c for the 10 bonus fly buys.
I asked for a refund.
New World also “can’t” refund to my credit card. And there is no longer any legal tender for 1c, or 5c. They ended up refunding me 20c.
Why bother asking for a refund of 1c?
Because they bet on you not doing it. There is no rhyme or reason for charging people for bonus flybuys. Other retailers manage it all ok, and New World having a crap system does not constitute a reason to charge you for something that is supposedly “free”.
However the main reason for doing it is that what New World is doing is blatantly dishonest and I feel they should not be allowed to get away with it.
And if they didn’t know full well they were scamming people – they would tell their customers up front that any bonus fly buys would be charged for. The amount is irrelevant. Just because they aren’t stealing $10 a time doesn’t mean they aren’t stealing – and they should stop. I would start by replacing whoever programs their till systems and finding someone who can get it to automatically give bonus fly buys. After All, if the “system” can work out that I have bought 2 bottles of Coke and automatically knock of $1, I fail to see why it can’t register buying 3 bottles of wine and adding on 10 fly buys.
How far would you go to save money?
While browsing the online Dom Post last week and reading the articles about Occupy Wellington, I saw a comment that talked about the protesters running a workshop on how to make your own Moon Pads.
For those who need to ask – those are Sanitary Towels.
Which got me thinking – as much as I love saving money – I do think there comes a point when you can go too far. Dealing with periods is bad enough- without having to go back to medieval personal hygiene methods and making my own supplies.
I take my hat off to anyone who goes to those lengths – either for monetary or environmental reasons. I am definitely in the camp that money saving shouldn’t be that hard and that there are indeed some benefits to having some money in the bank!
The joy of a $5 bookshop
Filed under: Cost of living, Hubby's Views, Life in New Zealand
Along with hideous (for us) quantities of money being spent on stuff in Melbourne, I also spent some time hunting down cheap books.
As you’ll be aware, this is one of our pet peeves with NZ – a ‘cheap’ book is only $30 for a normal fiction paperback. ’only’ $50 for a fiction hardback. When compared to the whole 3for2 at Waterstones, reading becomes an expensive dalliance. It’s also no wonder that Borders & Whitcoulls in NZ have gone bankrupt. Try selling over priced stuff, just because you think people will pay for it? Nope – that’s the magic of internet shopping.
Even second hand books are pretty pricey, which probably reflects the retail price of new books. Arty Bees in Wellington – an emporium for booklovers and stockist of impressive quantities of Sci-Fi and Fantasy will charge $15 – $20 for a second hand novel. Up a bit from the 50p we would be paying at a UK Car Boot Sale.
So it was with some pleasure that in Melbourne I spotted a $5 bookshop.
Now its set against Minotaur, where I spent the best part of an afternoon just oggling books. And that was before I looked through all the other merchandise; or Of Science & Swords, with too many cool t-shirts too! I wasn’t expecting much in the way of Sci-Fi at the $5 shop. So I wasn’t disappointed on that score. They did have a large selection of general fiction though. So it was nice to browse around and wander through a bookshop that had more books than we do at home.
My bargain for the day – Jonathan Stroud’s Ring of Solomon. UKP5 at Amazon, NZD30 in the shops here. AUD5 over in Melbourne. So that’s one thing off my Amazon wish list.
Why DVD’s are so expensive on Trade Me.
Filed under: Cost of living, Interest Rates, Credit Cards & Mortgages in NZ, Life in New Zealand
{Rant on} Because only DVD’s that have be bought and paid for in New Zealand (at hugely overinflated retail prices) and thus have a New Zealand Classification sticker on them are legally allowed to be sold on Trade Me.
So if you buy a cheap DVD from the UK or US, and them resell it on Amazon at an equally cheap price -
you are breaking the law.
The Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993 states that a film, video, DVD, or restricted game must not be offered for supply to the public unless it has a New Zealand label affixed to it. The words “supply to the public” include sales, hires, exchanges and loans. A seller who breaches this obligation is liable to a fine of up to $3,000 (or up to $10,000 if the seller is a company).
We found this out after some Arsehole reported my brother – who sells a lot of Dr Who DVD’s on Trade me. So now – thanks to said areshole – Dr Who Fans can join everyone else in New Zealand in being right royally screwed by being forced to pay 2-3 times the correct price for the DVD. Because one of the really big issues is that here in New Zealand – you cannot use an EftPos card to buy over the internet. So an awful lot of people who do not have access to credit cards or the “new fangled” debit cards which are just being rolled out here, have to buy in-country and pay over the odds.
And people wonder why downloading is so popular here. Even with that I continue to be amazed at how willing people are in New Zealand to be ripped off and overcharged. It’s kinda like it’s something to be patriotic about.
So what do you have to do is you want to sell a UK dvd on Trade Me?
Pay. Lots.
$27 + Gst to the Film and Video Labelling Body for each title you want to list. Then you have to pay 7c for each lable. So if you want to sell 100 copies of Dr Who and The Daleks (which for some truly perverse reason is not yet classified in New Zealand) it might make it worth it. But if you are selling the one copy you have – forget it unless you want to charge $50 for it on Trade me.
Sometimes I dispare of the utter futilty. This is not about DVD regions, its not about trying to prevent Pirating – its just another excuse to gouge more money off people for absolutley no reason.
Congratulations Arsehole whoever you are – line up to get screwed. You deserve it.
{Rant off}
Pharmacy Savings (Updated)
Filed under: Cost of living, Exchannge Rate & Currency Transfers, General Budgeting
So after the debacle trying to buy some Ibuprofen without having to take out another mortgage, we finally put together an order at on online UK Pharmacy. It took us a while because we had some concerns about ordering from OneClickPharmacy as they get a lot of bad reviews (and the good reviews are classic sock-puppet reviews like the crap that Woburn International wanted to paste on here.) Most of the problem seems to be in the length of time it takes for people to get their orders (which lets face it isn’t so much a worry – its gonna take a few weeks anyway), and crap service (when compared to getting ripped off here and getting bad service – ill take bad service and not getting ripped off as an improvement.
We looked at using Chemist4U – but they don’t list NZ as one of the countries they ship to. I emailed them to ask and got the annoyingly unhelpful reply “It depends on what you want”. So in the end we went with One Click.
I have had a questionnaire come through about one of the items – they Syndol Tablets – which I’ve answered and they have confirmed that it’s all ok, and the order is now being processed.
I will let you know if it all gets to me ok.
In the meantime – I thought it would be worth posting just what I bought and how much it cost.
(And yes – I’m a fake redhead – and yes I really do use different hair dyes depending on which particular shade of red I fancy being at the time.)
I’ve used the exchange rate as it was on the day I placed the order – but also thought it was worth looking at how much the order would have cost if the exchange rate had been at $3 to the £1. Even then – its still cheaper to buy abroad and ship it.
Let’s see if the order goes smoothly.
RESULTS:
Order Placed 9th October
Pharmacist questions recieved 12th October
Responded to 13th October
Email to say order shipped 15th October
Credit to CC – email sent to ask why 17th October
Responce that splenda out of stock (with apology for not letting us know) 17th October.
Order arrived 20th October.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that’s a fantastic result!
Rip offs and lies from NZ Pharmacies.
I tried to buy some painkillers today. And failed. I went into the Radius Pharmacy on Lambton Quay to buy some generic Ibuprofen 400mg tablets. Now you have to ask for these as here in New Zealand pharmacists do not want to sell you generics – they want to sell you expensive brands. Well screw that – I don’t want to buy Nurofen – I want to but the cheap version.
I was asked if I needed any help, and asked the young girl for Generic Ibuprofen. I was told they only have Nurofen. This is bollocks – no pharmacist would dispense a brand – its too expensive – so they will have buckets of the stuff in the dispensary. I was offered Maxigesic instead – which isn’t Ibuprofen – as I pointed out to the staffer – its Ibuprofen and Paracetamol combined. It’s also expensive. Having got past that piece of crap – I then explained that I wanted 400mg tablets. Apparently that’s not sold in New Zealand. Which is also bollocks.
Having been told now 3 outright lies in about a minute – I stormed out in professional disgust before I got all uppity and started coming out with the line about me being a pharmacist and could we please dispense (pun intended with all the crap. (I used to hate being told when I was working “I am a nurse, doctor, vet, dentist, whatever – I know what I’m talking about” and swore never to utter such a phrase in my life.
This isn’t new. I have yet to find a pharmacy that doesn’t try and spin this line. UK Pharmacists tend to try and put people off buying brands – here they force you to pay over the odds – and woe betide of you know they are lying. I have been able to buy generic Ibuprofen 400mg tablets here before though - so it’s definitely not true that you can’t do it. Its just more effort as they pharmacist has to be involved – but that is only because they refuse to sell it over the counter. It’s not a prescription medicine and there is no (legitimate) need not to have it on the shelf.
In fact when we first moved here there was a news item in which this was discussed. A representative of the Guild Of Pharmacists came on TV and outright lied, saying that the reason pharmacists did this was because Generics were not as good as branded medicines. Now IF that were true (it’s not) that means that pharmacists all over New Zealand are dispensing substandard medicines on prescription – which I highly doubt.
It’s all about the money.
I have flicked the Guild an email about this – as I am curious as to their take on pharmacy staff lying to customers to try and convince us to pay more for medicines than we should.
In the meantime – some searching shows that online pharmacies here in New Zealand suffer the same issue – only allowing you to buy Nurofen. However – after some digging around - One Click Pharmacy in the UK will ship here with a shipping fee of £13.99 (which is a flat fee). Now that’s a lot of money – but then they are only charging £1.35 for 48 Ibuprofen 400mg tablets – which is equivalent to 96 200mg Nurofens. So because of the postage you need to bulk buy – you can buy a maximum of 3 packets.
- 3 x 48 Ibuprofen 400mg £4.08 (That’s equivalent to 288 Nurofen 200mg Tablets)
- Postage £13.99
- Total £18.07
- Total NZ$ (2:1) $36.14
- Cost of 96 Nurofen 200mg $20.99 (Cheapest price I have found in NZ)
- Cost of 288 Nurofen 200mg $62.97
- Saved $26.83
Now since its a flat fee postage – I thought I would look at other items I want. Paracetamol ( you can buy a maximum of 32 tablets at a time – that’s UK law) – 35p or 70c. The cheapest you can find here is $2.99 for 20. Syndol – which I use for really bad headaches is £4.50 or $9.00 whereas here it’s $16.99 (I would also recommend buying heayfever tablets from here as well if you need them and know what you want).
That takes our total savings on one order to a whopping $37.11.
May as well make the most of the exchange rate and refuse to be ripped off.
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