As money is tight for a lot of people, I thought it would be nice to share some money saving tips. They may not be applicable to you, but hopefully it’s useful for some.

1. Get a bike / ebike for small distances. I’m originally from The Netherlands and we use a bike very often. NZ is so different, most people tend to take the car for every trip. I’ve seen people take the car for a trip of literally 25 meter… I’ve bought an ebike to do my daily commute to the train station and it’s awesome. No traffic stress, saves money, and good for the environment. I’ve got a $1400 ebike, The Warehouse recently had one for less than $1000.

2. Get an electric car. We replaced our Corolla with a $15k Leaf with 130km range. The prices have gone down, and a similar model can now be found for $11k or so. It saves us about $3.5k / year on petrol & maintenance. We only use it in the Wellington region, and rarely run out of range. On longer trips we use quick chargers, within 15 minutes it’s back to 80% charge. At least every 70km on state highways there’s a quick charger. While I’m against borrowing money for a car, in this case it may be worth it. With BNZ you can get a 1% loan for 3 years.

3. Switch electrical provider. We switched to Octopus Energy. $0 daily charge and cheapest. Also good solar buy back, and cheaper nightly rates to charge an EV. /edit : apparently Octopus no longer has zero daily charge on new connections.