If you haven’t already heard, New Zealand is an extremely expensive country to travel and live in. I will be honest and say that I’m not the best budget person, as I have a “money comes and goes” mentality. However, I decided to try something new here, and this is my first month budget breakdown on New Zealand Working Holiday.
Watch my video where I cover cost breakdown of accommodation, transportation, food, and other costs of living in New Zealand:
We arrived in Auckland on June 21, 2018. As you may suspect, living in a city means eating out more and pricier accommodations. After setting up our phone, bank and IRD number we immediately hopped on an 8 hour bus ride and headed to Wellington.
Other Useful New Zealand Working Holiday Guides:
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* This cost breakdown is for 2 people. I organized everything by amount from highest to lowest. *
Accommodation : $1,277 NZD
We spent our lodging mostly in Airbnb and just about a week or less in a hostel. As you can imagine lodging will be the most expensive part of your travel. We opted for staying in a room instead of having an entire place to ourselves, which helped cut down the cost.
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Restaurants : $523 NZD
Ok, upon arriving in Auckland I was surprised and delighted to see all the Asian food options. This is definitely an area that you could save in. Dining out is pretty pricy in NZ. However, because we were staying in various air bnbs, it wasn’t always convenient to cook at ‘home’.
Grocery : $360 NZD
On our 15th day in NZ, we secured jobs working in Martinborough pruning grapevines. From here on, we began to eat almost entirely home cooked meals, thus the grocery spending went up and restaurant costs went down.
Transportation : $315 NZD
This category included Uber rides, buses and trains. Because it was our first month and we still haven’t purchased a car, we took too many Uber rides but saved money on fuel. The public transit in major cities are pretty reliable and cross country buses and trains are are readily available.
Vices : $109 NZD
I debated adding this category but decided to keep it real. If you’ve got your vices, let me just say tobacco(around 25NZD per pack of cigarettes) and alcohol are pretty expensive here just like everything else. If you’re a beautiful saint baby angel that doesn’t have any bad habits, more power (and savings) to you!
Coffee Shops : $68 NZD
To be quite fair, a few meals were also spent in coffee shops, so this whopping amount isn’t all coffee! Could that be cut down? Most definitely!
Misc : $59 NZD
This included little snacks from convenience stores, printing papers for resumes, some random clothing items, etc…
Phone : $30 NZD
Okay, I ended up having to ‘top up’ my phone data, but it’s approximately 30NZD per month.
TOTAL: $2741 NZD/2 persons (June-July)
Take into consideration that you may spend more or less than our budget. If you travel and do the fun stuff right away, or if you find a job and go to a remote area. Whatever your own story and situation may be, I hope this breakdown helped you get some ideas and insights to how much you will be spending for your first month in New Zealand!
I have created a budget for our second month here (yay for adulting!). I will probably make a second follow up post to show how much you will be spending in NZ once you’ve found a place to get settled in. I have a feeling it’ll be less than your first month.
➣ Make sure you set up TransferWise to get your hard-earned New Zealand money in your own bank account without a ridiculously amount of fees.
The reason for this is when you do a bank to bank transfer, the sending AND receiving banks take a chunk of fees. For example if I were to send money from my New Zealand bank account into my American Chase account, I would’ve incurred 15-30$ of fees, but with TransferWise, it was only 4.88$ It’s free to sign up and you can download the app onto your phone!
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