As you may already know, on our homepage is a number that shows how much money we are spending during our stay in New Zealand. We call it the ‘actual budget’ and it’s basically just a number that sits at the top of our blog jumping up and down as we save and spend.
But that’s the thing... it’s just a number, and whilst clicking on it will take you to a page explaining what it is exactly, you won’t find a breakdown of our spending there. Cue the monthly budget article, where each month, we break down every last cent so you can see exactly what we’re up to and gain understanding of the cost of a working holiday... or at least one in New Zealand. Don’t forget though that this is a budget for two people, so some of our wallet activity (especially food) will be higher than that of a solo traveller.
Above is a screenshot of the summary of our budget on the last day of February. Let us remind you that we arrived on the 20th, meaning that we spent a grand total of $3,739 in just eight days! Note: this doesn’t include the money we paid upfront for eleven nights’ accommodation either. We also had no income in February as we didn’t start working until around mid March, but enough of the stories... let’s take a closer look at our expenses.
Looking at our ‘planned expenses’ compared to the amount we actually spent, it’s easy to tell that we didn’t really indulge too much more than we originally expected. The transportation category accounts for the majority of our spendings, this includes the cost of buying a car and maintaining it. Although it dwarfs the figures from the other categories, we didn’t exceed our panned budget for this category by a huge margin, and we can in fact put a large portion of this spending to the cost of insurance, petrol and also having the transmission oil flushed due to personal preference.
The ‘other’ category. In total we spent $77 on miscellaneous expenses such as printing services, new debit card fees, toiletries and other various small transactions. You may notice that the planned expenses for these are $0... not because we didn’t expect to spend anything in this area, but because trying to put a number on this before moving to a new country would be impossible. We think we did fairly well here though considering.
Saving the best till last... food. Based on our food shopping in the UK we actually only planned for roughly $100 a week in this category. By the time we left the airport however we had already spent $48.80... not pointing any fingers here Liam... but after all, we had spent the last day on a plane and needed to eat some real food, and we all know airports are notoriously expensive places to eat. We also splashed out on coffee as soon as we touched the ground, naturally.
Twice we treated ourselves to eating out, bringing the total up to somewhere in the region of $100, meaning we spent give or take $200 on food shopping. This was basic food consisting of mainly, bread, ham, cheese, and chicken noodles, and a small amount of chicken which we accidentally paid more than the going price for.
Countdown was our supermarket of choice most of the time, as the table shows, which in our opinion is reasonable value for money. They also offer some good deals on their home brand products. The supermarket can be found all across the country so it’s a good idea to pick up a rewards card early on, just grab one in store and register online to start using it.
We also tried food shopping in The Warehouse, which is actually cheaper than countdown but only stocks a very limited range of food. They do have a good range on other items though such as camping equipment, toiletries and other goods. For these items, warehouse is one of the cheapest places to shop, along with Bunnings Warehouse.
So that just about sums up our first month. We spent more than we anticipated but that's what reserve funds are for, and to not have these ready just in case would be a rookie mistake. We suppose the moral of the story is: always plan for the unexpected, because you’ll probably spend more than you intend to... even if you’re not taking a coffee obsessed cookie monster with you...