Moving to New Zealand!

Money: the cost of living in New Zealand

Life in New Zealand is undeniably most pleasant, but the cost of living in New Zealand is high — often quite inexplicably so. I’ve been reminded of this fact once again this week, as I prepare to have a cooker shipped here from the UK. We’re having our kitchen remodeled — it’s part of an extension that was added to our 1920 bungalow in, we believe, the 1960s, and it’s showing its age — and as part of the project, we decided to look at a new cooker. The model we decided we wanted — oh, we really wanted it, when we saw it at Harvey Norman — was a fantastic piece of kitchen technology, but one that, at six and a half thousand dollars, was, well, just a little out of our reach.

When we got home, though, I decided to have a little bit of a shop around on the Internet. I found the very cooker we had been pining for, on offer in various British retail outlets. The price in Britain — about $1,800, or considerably less than one third of the NZ price. [Read More...]