Hello again all! Another two weeks have gone by, and it's hard to believe that we have already been here for almost 2 months. For those of you who haven't already heard, Kayleigh found a job! She is working as a waitress in a busy Irish pub kicking ass and taking names. (Still trying to convince her to blog about it, but she's apparently built quite a tolerance to my undeniable charm)
If you couldn't tell from the title, today I'm going to be talking to you about money, so if numbers aren't your thing then consider yourself warned. Now that we've gotten into a day to day rhythem, we've been able to get a feel for the true cost of living here in Auckland and it turns out things are not as they seem. It is quite easy to get sticker shock when coming to Auckland for the first time, what with gas at about $2.15* per liter (1 gallon ~ 4 liters), milk at $2.50 per liter, and a couple of burgers with a soda from a local joint coming in at $25. That's not even considering the absolutely outrageous prices on clothing and consumer electronics. Compared with the low, low prices in America I thought we'd blow through our cash in no time. Then something unusual happened. While Kayleigh was still looking for a job, I was able to cover all of our daily living expenses as well as put away a few hundred dollars a week on my income alone!** That was something that would have been totally impossible for us while living back home (Just imagine, a couple being able to live on one income. What is this, the 1950's!?)
Now me being me, I had to figure out why this was. Last Friday night I was invited to a friend's house where I met a guy hailing from good ol' Danville, CA. Would you believe, he also turned out to be an economist? He has been working in New Zealand for the last 5 years and confessed that he was similarly confused when his girlfriend had been out of work for a short time. Needless to say, we got right to work trying to sort this problem out, and what we (mostly he I admit) worked out was this: The pricing structure in New Zealand is very transparent, whereas in the US it isn't. For example: In the US when you walk into a restaurant to buy a meal, the sticker price is very low which leads you to believe that the food is cheaper than it truly turns out to be. When you go to pay your bill you need to pay an additional (8-10%) tax on what was advertised AND a (10-20%) tip to your server making the total cost about 20-30% more than the advertised price. This would put prices more in line with what you'd pay in New Zealand (if not higher), only in New Zealand there is no tip and tax is included in the advertised price, thus, more transparency.
Now I don't mean to say that nothing in New Zealand is more expensive than it is back home (you still can't explain the ludicrous price on name brand clothing and electronics this way) and a restaurant is a rather special example because of the tip, but there are a few other factors that come into play here:
-While the things you have to deal with on a daily basis are pricey, monthly costs like cell phone service are surprisingly affordable. For unlimited calling, texting, and 200MB of data on our iPhones we were paying $70USD per month per phone back home, where here for roughly the same deal we pay only $20 per phone per month. Another example is car insurance, which is roughly $20/mo for basic liability for people under 25.
-Minimum wage is higher, at $13.75/hour
-Sporadic costs like bank fees or parking tickets (yes…we've gotten one) are astronomically lower ($15 as opposed to >$60USD)
-Rents are cheaper. We live in the biggest city in the country within a 30 minute walk to downtown and pay $1000/mo for a bedroom in a two bedroom house with a yard. (Compare this to say, San Francisco or New York)
It can be a bit hard to pinpoint exactly where, but there is no doubt that at some point the balance DOES get tipped in New Zealand's favor, and that's no problem for me at all.
Kiwisms:
poncy = stuck up, snobbish
twink = white out
eraser = rubber
to erase something = to rub it out (I laughed uncontrollably for several minutes the first time I heard this)
*All prices in New Zealand Dollars unless otherwise specified. Current exchange rate at about $1 NZ = $0.77 US
**With the caveat that I was making marginally more money here than I was back home (something to the tune of about $0.50USD/hr more).
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